What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century

by Kathleen Lubey

What Pornography Knows offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is--a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining speculative philosophy and feminist theory to sexual description. Lubey's readings show that pornography always had a social consciousness--that it knew, long before anti-pornography feminists said it, that women and nonbinary people are disadvantaged by a society that grants sexual privilege to men. Rather than glorify this inequity, Lubey argues, the genre's central task has historically been to expose its artifice and envision social reform. Centering women's bodies, pornography refuses to divert its focus from genital action, forcing readers to connect sex with its social outcomes. Lubey offers a surprising take on a deeply misunderstood cultural pornography transforms sexual description into feminist commentary, revealing the genre's deep knowledge of how social inequities are perpetuated as well as its plans for how to rectify them.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

286 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 13, 2022

Reviews

[Julia Smart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant writing, radical ideas, and a genuinely serious and scholarly tackling of this subject. Trans-inclusive, undeniably feminist, and a welcome addition to the literary history of sexuality.

[Dee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lubey presents a meticulously researched defense (and re-definition) of pornography as a genre that, next to staging genital relations, questions the social repercussions of such relations--and remains very attentive to how genitality produces the social in the first place (especially gender, though queer and racial aspects are also considered). Using The History of the Human Heart (1749) and The Progress of Nature (1744) for her case studies (next to oodles of other primary source materials), she finds that in its eighteenth-century instantiation, pornography was full of moments in which sociosexual subjections of women through genitality (including "seduction" and rape) were addressed, debated, and even ameliorated. In short, eighteenth-century pornography was very aware that heterosexuality posed enormous costs and social risks for women--an awareness that, for Lubey, makes it porn. Later, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century bowdlerizations of these texts, content that Lubey calls "feminist" (the ahistorical use of the term is the greatest methodological gripe I have with her book) is systematically excised, flattened, or reduced to create fantasies of masculine sexual dominance and to establish men's sexual right--just when these assumptions are challenged by the companionate marriage and second-wave activism. As a result, Victorian and twentieth-century porn begin to look a lot like rape, endlessly serialized, although there are important exceptions that Lubey addresses at length.

Overall, I wish Lubey had ventured a bit further to speculate how the nineteenth-century intensification of male pornotopia, to use Marcus's classic term (which, as she shows, is his own, unexplained, fantasy), is directly tied to mainstream cultural circulations of feminist activism. How do pornographic works function as compensatory fictions for men (Radway's term for how romance helps women cope with patriarchy)? Is porn men's way to deal with feminism's impact on cultural norms shaping sexuality? If so, is there anything to learn about how social relations shape desire? Anyways, wonderful read! (Also, the book is meticulously edited for which I'm grateful, as usual.)