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The first erotic film images came from the serious work of English photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), who took a series of still photographs of nude women carrying out everyday acts in the period from 1884 to 1887. The subjects' nudity permitted the viewer to see how the body moved. Erotic cinema is as old as the film industry itself. Thomas Edison (1847-1931), who began to produce short films in the late 1890s, made some provocative entries, such as What Happened in the Tunnel and Aunt Sallie's Wonderful Bustle. Early film pioneer Georges Melies (1861-1938) produced an 1897 film called After the Ball-The Tub depicting a naked young woman in a bathtub attended by her maid. In 1896 a short film screened in Ottawa, Canada, showed the first on-screen kiss, and some viewers called the police. In the early twentieth century, the nickelodeon, a type of theater invented by Edison, showed very short films, including What the Butler Saw and How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed.

This auspicious beginning for unregulated cinematic erotica ended in 1915 when the Supreme Court of the United States held that films were a business endeavor and not entitled to First Amendment protection. This finding led the film industry to adopt the Hays Code, a set of self-regulatory guidelines, in 1930. The Hays Code prohibited excessive kissing, fondling, complete nudity, licentiousness, or anything that was contrary to the moral standards of the time. The code was a response, in part, to the popularity of stag films--short films depicting overt sexual activity usually between young women and convenient passersby. These films were promoted by itinerant entrepreneurs called stag masters.

Except for the underground stag cinema, the Hays Code effectively eliminated sex and nudity from American mainstream cinema, even though plots and circumstances were often sexually suggestive. Joan Crawford played a high-class call girl in The Women (1938); however, the film contained no sex scenes. Adultery was the pretext of other mainstream offerings, such as Indiscreet (1958), in which Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant carry on an adulterous love affair. Screen beauties such as Betty Grable were sought-after pinup girls, their photographs adorning soldiers' barracks during World War II.

After Hefner began Playboy in 1953, photographers became more adept at imaging seductive female nudity. The skills of photographers such as Russ Meyers and Bunny Yeager crossed over to filmmaking, producing nudie cutie films such as The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959). The 1950s hosted a fairly modest pornographic film industry, which featured nudie films made of people frolicking in nudist camps. The convention that governed these films and made them barely legal was a prohibition on any images of pubic hair or pickles and beaver--male and female genitals. These and other more illegal loops, or short films of sex acts, played at burlesque theaters and other illicit venues. Burlesque theaters were the precursors of modern-day strip clubs in which women in various stages of undress would dance and remove clothing for patrons, though in theory full nudity was prohibited.

By the late 1960 and early 1970s the pornographic film industry was booming, aided by the demise of the Hays Code and adoption of a rating system that identified film content by a series of letters. An X rating, indicating appropriateness for mature audiences, quickly became a code for pornography. Pornography was divided into two categories: hard core for graphically explicit sexual scenes, and soft core that showed very little male frontal nudity, no erections, and only simulated sex scenes. The pornographic film industry had its greatest success in the late 1960s and 1970s, producing the famous Deep Throat, starring Linda Lovelace, and Behind the Green Door, starring Marilyn Chambers, both released in 1972. Porn films included, from 1968, full frontal nudity and pubic hair. Films depicted oral and anal penetration, fellatio and cunnilingus, various forms of bondage and discipline, group sex, bestiality, masturbation, and the famous money shot footage of male ejaculation. Ruben Sturman invented the peep show booth that provided a means for the private screening of pornographic films in adult theaters and adult bookstores. In 1973 the Supreme Court ruled, in Miller v. California, that each state could develop its own definition of obscenity. As a result pornographic films such as The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) became financially successful, and a profitable gay male pornography industry was born.

The pornographic film industry was gradually altered by the invention of video formats and the availability in the 1980s of consumer camcorders. Although changes in format made production of film pornography cheaper and easier (even if of lower quality), the industry struggled against crackdowns by the Meese Commission, public disapproval spurred by the AIDS crisis, and confiscation of all films made by porn star Traci Lords, who made the films when an underage actress. Cheaper video equipment enabled a greater number of amateur filmmakers to begin production of pornography. The availability of home video players began to cut into the business of burlesque theaters--the major outlets for the production of the film pornography industry. Competition with amateurs lowered the already bare-bones standards of porn films, though it also enabled pornography to infiltrate to a larger number of consumers. Pornography finally became a choice among cable television offerings, and mainstream films became increasingly more explicit, showing full frontal nudity and explicit sexual scenes (still shot tastefully).

In the early twenty-first century, pornography is widely available in both video and DVD formats. Vendors sell on the Internet, which also hosts X-rated sex sites with pictures, videos, and live Webcam performances. Attempts to control children's access to Internet porn sites have been stymied by successful constitutional challenges to federal legislation. However, authorities have had success in suppressing web sites offering pornography involving children and have apprehended and prosecuted predators who seek child sex partners online.

References:

Graham-Smith, Seth. 2005. The Big Book of Porn: A Penetrating Look at the World of Dirty Movies. Philadelphia: Quirk Books.

McNeil, Legs, and Jennifer Osborne. 2005. The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry. New York: Regan Books.

Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973).

Petkovich, Anthony. 1997. The X Factory: Inside the American Hardcore Film Industry. Manchester, UK: Headpress/Critical Vision.

Strossen, Nadine. 2000. Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights. New York: New York University Press.

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