by Simon Richelieu

Created on: December 08, 2008   Last Updated: January 23, 2009

Roughly a hundred years before Woody Allen described masturbation as "sex with someone you really love" Dr P Austin Nuttall, in his Standard Dictionary of the English Language, defined pornography as "licentious or obscene writing; literature treating of harlots and harlotry". He traced the first part of the word to the Greek porne, a harlot, although if you asked a modern day harlot for Greek you might be surprised at what was offered.

Pornography and masturbation go, if you will pardon the expression, hand in hand. The user is generally seeking to relieve his or her sexual frustration, the provider is almost certainly trying to make a financial gain. He is exploring the wilder shores of human sexual activity in the hope of finding something to display that will turn a fast buck.

Dr Nuttall defined pornography as written, he would be amazed by the progress of modern technology, and the cast of hundreds of thousands of participants, many of them pornes, captured in hundred of millions of pictels on the Internet. We recall the old joke about the schoolboy, being severely quizzed by his teacher as to whether he possessed pornographic materials, who protested: "Gee sir, I don't even have a pornograph." Today the Internet has become the ultimate pornograph.

There are also other uses of pornography. "Top shelf magazines" have long been made available in sperm donor establishments to assist the young men, many of whom have undertaken the task in order to earn money to help pay their way through college. One could argue that they have forfeited their amateur status by wanking professionally, so perhaps they are the porn stars of the future.

Pornography may be good thing in that it assists in the relief of sexual tension. There is a fine line between what is pornographic and what is called erotica, with the latter having a much more up-market image of elderly gentlemen in smoking jackets viewing explicit lithographs in a detached manner. It cannot be denied that there may be a danger of the extremes of pornographic material extending beyond what is allowable into what is most certainly out of order. There is also a blurring between what could be described as professional or commercial porn and the material shown on the more overtly sex orientated dating sites.

Without going into graphic detail, much of what is on offer is pretty distasteful. Viewing the contents of youporn.com for instance there would seem to be endless and boring couplings of flesh, very little dialogue

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>