Pornography and Research

The Greek linguistic roots of the English word pornography essentially refer to the written reportage (grahpy) of prostitutes (porno) on their work. If the scholarly investigation of pornography and related cultural phenomena is to have any value today, the absolutely crucial issues clustered here must be appropriately remembered.

Today’s English word and concept “pornography” seem essentially to have come into being in tandem with modern print technologies for the dissemination of writing, and the modern industrial period more generally, which produced print as a harbinger of today’s mass media. Given its historical connections to reportage on acts of prostitution in one medium or another, pornography is, at root, a technological concept. It has to do with the potential publicization, in mass-mediated form, of otherwise fundamentally private ...