![Sample our Law journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5942/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Law.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Inventories of commercial imagery considered obscene or pornographic were first seen in the latter half of the 1900s, in the form of grass-roots initiatives by European public morality protectors Ludwig Kemmer, Louis Comte, and Comte’s disciple Émile Pourésy. Research became a coordinated exercise in Germany in the 1920s, led by Berlin detective superintendent Detloff von Behr. These hostile inventories speak to the practical historical interrelation between demarcations of the obscene and the perverse. Despite perennial allusions to its corrupting nature, neither producers nor consumers of explicit photography acquired a robust profile in early twentieth-century sexual psychopathology and sexology more generally. Beyond the perennial appropriation of medical epithets by moral hygienists, pornography was long denied the status of a forensic psychological problem. It was the early trailblazers of the anti-obscenity movement who mobilized the nineteenth-century diagnostic parlance of sexual derailment (sadism, satyrism, perversion, erotomania); in response, polemicists diagnosed prudes as cases of erotophobia and pornolagny. The German contributors highlighted the existence of a diversified ‘perverted’ content and Von Behr showed the greatest aspiration to thus extend the subject’s salience for forensic psychiatry, although he ultimately earned little recognition in ensuing discussions, whether of public decency or sexual psychology.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 ‘United States by Information v. One Case Stereoscopic Slides’, The Monthly Law Reporter [Boston] 22 (2) (1860): 79–82; ‘Importation of Indecent Stereoscopes: Testimony of Experts – Immense Sale of Pictures in the United States – Argument of Counsel – Charge of the Judge – Curious Verdict of the Jury’, The New York Herald (October 17, 1859): 1; ‘More Obscene Stereoscopes’, The New York Herald (October 19, 1859): 2; ‘Another Stereoscopic Case […]’, The New York Herald (October 20, 1859): 10; Revue photographique [Paris] 5 (1860): 219–220; and Le Droit (October 2, 1861), reprinted in Chronique du Journal général de l’imprimerie et de la librarie (Ser. 2), 50 (1861): 194–195.
2 ‘Among obscene pictures and photographs, there are not few where sexual acts with children are depicted, and it is not doubtful that these are sometimes original recordings of children being used in obscene positions. The main source of this seems to be the Romansh countries’ (Moll Citation1908, 204). Paedophiles would also use erotica to entice children (Citation1908, 206). Stoll (Citation1908, 915–916) briefly mentions stumbling upon a Spanish lesbian-themed collection entitled Mujeres solas.
3 Most pictures available to youth were likely of the French postcard variety. G. Stanley Hall (1846–1924) briefly recalled obscene ‘French cards’ being ‘surreptitiously circulated’ during his boyhood (Hall Citation1923, 133–134). In 24% of a sample of Moscow students reported in 1909, the ‘early’ appearance of the sex drive, noted in 92% (!), was considered caused by ‘pornographic books and pictures’ (порнографические книги и картины) (Chlenov Citation1909, 37). This remains unspecified but may have included popular books about spermatorrhoea and illustrations for Cornelius Nepos’ Life of Hannibal.
4 This refers to the purported ‘pathogenic effect of the primal scene [parental coitus as observed] and the alteration in sexual development that its resurrection produced’ – as originally inferred from one patient in 1914/15. A durable idée fixe, Freud speculated about the nosology of ‘sex scenes’ (Sexualszenen) in his Fliess letters (Esman Citation1973), especially those of 30 May and 22 December 1896. The plural term Urszenen makes its first appearance in a letter to Fliess dated 2 May 1897, but here seemingly denotes the afterimage of ‘seduction’ rather than that of parental, or adult, coitus. This latter denotation is first attested in Freud’s discussion of the Wolf Man at the 17 March 1915 meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, which was formally published in 1918 (Freud Citation1918).
5 Indicative of shifting viewpoints, by the early 1970s (on the eve of the American Psychiatric Association’s declassification of homosexuality) John Money opined with reference to a growing child that ‘pornographic representations of the paraphilias can be capitalized on as the best way to steer him [sic] in the direction of heterosexual normalcy’ (Citation1971–1972, 346).
6 The legal counsellor of the Medico-Legal Society and member of the New York Bar, Theodore Schroeder (1864–1953) was a hardliner who met with opposition from contemporaneous American sexologists. Robinson objected that:
Within less than three months I have seen three patients whose miserable condition, they told me, was caused directly by obscene leaflets and vile pictures. One, a strong, beautiful boy of fifteen, contracted a filthy, debilitating habit through the contemplation of a photograph picturing that habit in all its vulgarity. (Citation1907, 281)
7 Substantive photographic material appeared in Magnus Hirschfeld’s Geschlechtsübergänge (Citation1906), an Illustrierter Teil to Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten (with Max Tilke: Der erotische Verkleidungstrieb, Citation1912), a Bilderteil to Hirschfeld’s Geschlechtskunde (Vol. 4, Citation1930), Hirschfeld’s Sexualgeschichte der Menschheit: mit zahlreichen Abbildungen (with Berndt Götz, Citation1929), and works published from the mid-1920s onwards by the Institut für Sexualforschung, Vienna, founded in 1928 by Leo Schidrowitz (1894–1956), its curator. In 1931, the institute claimed ethnographic objects, 10,000 photographs, and a ‘collection of graphic representations, that is, original graphic works, not yet reproduced, of erotic content of artistic significance and expressive drawings of persons with sexual pathology’ (Scheuer Citation1931, 727). This institute had its own press, Verlag für Kulturforschung (publishing from 1925 onwards, but formally active between 1928 and 1935). Notable titles include Schidrowitz’s Sittengeschichte des Lasters (Citation1927), the invaluable four-volume Bilder-Lexikon (1928–1931), and Erich Wulffen and Felix Abraham’s study Fritz Ulbrichs lebender Marmor (Citation1931), incidentally a most valuable source on the interwar urban porn industry (copies of which were confiscated by the Vienna criminal investigation department during the Second World War). The Bilder-Lexikon was re-issued in eight volumes (1961–1963) by the Institut für Sexualforschung, re-founded in 1949 by Hans Giese at the University of Hamburg (initially off-campus; the latter, too, had a ‘Verlag für Kulturforschung’). A two-volume updated version was edited by Mergen (Citation1963), also containing unique post-Second World War forensic, private-collection, and patient-derived graphic material.
8 The traffic was definitely considerable. In 1959 Hearings, Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield stated that:
Since World War II, commercialized pornography has reached an alarming intensity within the confines of certain geographical areas of this country. It is estimated that $500 million is realized annually in mail-order pornography and obscenity. […] Within the past 10 days, three simultaneous raids made by U.S. marshals and postal inspectors upon the New York headquarters of three of the reputed largest eastern dealers in obscenity and pornography resulted in the seizure of approximately 15 tons of films, slides, photographs, and trashy literature, and the arrest of the operators. One mailing list alone contained 100,000 names. (Citation1959, 4, 5)
9 I note in passing an article exploring ‘pornography’ production (i.e. obscene drawings and texts) by school children, which the author (a teacher at a German educational institution) designated as ‘morbid debauchery of the childish imagination’ (Bartz Citation1915, 324). For a less pathologizing take on juvenile obscene ‘graffiti’, see Luquet (Citation1910, including 36 drawings).
10 Pornophilie (mostly undefined) had been used occasionally in both German (at least as early as 1898 but also in Von Erlbach Citation1908, 539) and French (as early as 1903). In medical dictionaries, pornolagnia occasionally shows up as referring to ‘perverted lustful attraction for [sic] prostitutes’ but few if any cases were ever reported. Kiernan tried hard to promote the latter term: no less than 52 inflections of the term are found in sexology columns in the 1923 (27th) volume of The Urologic and Cutaneous Review, mostly in reference to novels.
11 Although in 1840s Anglophone philology the term already referred to obscene paintings, in later medical dictionaries, pornography meant ‘a description of prostitutes or of prostitution, as a matter of public hygiene’ (Dunglison Citation1857, 745). Crawford (Citation1880) had pornografia refer to the Spanish idea of ‘the registry and licensing of prostitutes’. Well into the twentieth century, one encounters denotations restricted to ‘a treatise on prostitution’ (Gould, A Pocket Medical Dictionary, 8th ed., 1920, n.p.) and ‘the literature or bibliography of prostitution’ (Dorland, The American Illustrated Medical Dictionary, 11th ed., 1922, 832); the 14th edition of the latter adds ‘obscene writing’ as a second definition. Comparably, pornotherapy meant ‘the medical supervision of prostitutes as related to public hygiene’ (Gould, A Dictionary of New Medical Terms, 1905, 428).
12 This contrasts the (possibly sanitized) claim that in Denmark, ‘Without exception, the visual pornography of the late 1960s depicted adult models’ rather than underage ones (Kutchinsky Citation1973, 178).
13 Not all of these mentioned photography. For instance, Secretary of the Committee of the Central Society of Protest against License of the Streets (in Tourcoing, near the Belgian border) Adolphe Sevin concentrated on the ubiquitous genre of pornogravures (Sevin Citation1905; excerpted in La chronique de la bonne presse [Paris], no. 315 [August 2, 1906]: 457–459 + no. 318 [August 23, 1906]: 513).
14 Both articles (Von Behr Citation1923b, Citation1924) were discussed in the Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft; see Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft vol. 10, no. 9 (1923): 224–225 and vol. 11, no. 6 (1924): 168, respectively. Von Behr (Citation1922a) is discussed in Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft vol. 9, no. 10 (1923): 292; Von Behr (Citation1923a) in vol. 10, no. 6 (1923): 157; and Von Behr (Citation1925a) in vol. 12, no. 8 (1925): 262.
15 Nudes fell within the scope of Pornographie, although this seems not to have had implications for work on the beauty of the nude body published widely from circa 1900, such as that by Carl Heinrich Stratz (1858–1924). Stratz’s work contained nudes by Wilhelm von Gloeden and Wilhelm von (Guglielmo) Plüschow as well as lesser known German photographers, and was still published in the late 1920s with Stuttgart science publisher Ferdinand Enke.
16 This may be an underestimation. In the well-known case of Henry Hayler in London in 1874, ‘no less than 130,248 obscene photographs, and 5,000 slides’ were seized and destroyed. ‘There were six cart-loads of the things’ (The Photographic News [London] vol. 18, no. 816 [April 24, 1874]: 203). The more objectionable element here lay in Hayler’s own wife and two sons being among the depicted. This was reported as an error, however, insofar as the wife is concerned: police would have mistaken her for the ‘numerous professional models’ Hayler employed (The British Journal of Photography vol. 21, no. 730 [May 1, 1874]: 208).
17 For a wartime note on ‘sotadische Films’, see Ulitzsch (Citation1917). Authors of the late-1920s Bilder-Lexikon mention ‘projection pictures, mutoscope pictures, films, even gramophone records, which contain “Sauglocken” or mimic voluptuous sounds, finally, all sorts of “jocular item” trivia (pendants, figurines, Dragantwaren [?], etc.)’ (Institut für Sexualforschung Citation1928, 682). Sauglocken läuten is a bit of local slang (attested already in the sixteenth century) meaning ‘leading shaggy, indecent conversations’.
18 Alibert (Citation1804, 615–618) described a case of homosexuality in the form of an art student’s ‘vague and bizarre passion’ for erotically admiring male, and not female, physical forms. Alibert called this a ‘perversion of the venereal appetite’ and suggested drawing female figures, which reportedly cured the man: he was ultimately able to ‘renounce the Apollo Belvedere, for the Venus de Medici. […] After making an imaginary model, he looked for it in the physical world. It took time, perseverance; but he is recovering entirely’.
19 Of obvious and overriding import to the present discussion is the ever-shifting definition of both the legally obscene and the medically perverse. One illustrative later study, published in 1963, looked at ‘perversions’ (‘paraphilias’) in 159 verbatim transcriptions of ‘graffito’ collected over two years from 23 public lavatories, for the most part in the Greater London area, in an effort to estimate the prevalence of male ‘paraphiliac fantasies’ (Housden Citation1963). Content analysis found fellatio, oralism (undefined), and analism (‘anal intercourse with a female partner’) next to (among other rubrics) homosexuality, lesbianism, transvestitism, and paedophilia. Much overlap was seen and, predictably, ‘no firm conclusions can be made from this material’ (Citation1963, 292).