The pre-digital in the digital: Private’s online back catalogue

ABSTRACT

This article addresses what happens to pornographic material during the transition from analogue to digital form. Started in Sweden in 1965, Private magazine is one of the oldest, still existing pornography companies, challenging the existing obscenity law in Sweden at the time of its first issue. Here, Private magazine and privateclassics.com function as a case study and point of departure for a discussion of materiality, nostalgia, and cultural memory, but more poignantly a changing legal context for pornography which, although called for, might also be an obstacle to research. Drawing on Whitney Strub’s idea of a ‘sanitation’ of the 1970s, a comparison of the physical issues of Private magazine and the scanned issues available (for a fee) on privateclassics.com shows that age indications in image captions in the magazine have been altered in order to concur with the legal situation of pornography today.

KEYWORDS:

• Pornography history
• historiography
• Private
• child pornography
• archives

Introduction

The introduction of the internet, and in particular Web 2.0 and the video aggregator sites, the YouTube-like sites for porn films, has had profound consequences for the availability of pornographic material. Although the most obvious and significant of these have concerned production, distribution, and consumption, resulting in large shifts of finances, power, and business practices, another smaller but not unimportant consequence has been the digital availability of ‘vintage’ or ‘retro’ pornography. On sites such as Pornhub or XVideo, it is possible to search for and find material from super8 or 8-mm films and from the ‘classics’ of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, but there are also sites that specialize in ‘vintage’ or ‘retro’ material. One of these is privateclassics.com, where Private’s back catalogue of vintage material can be found, neatly scanned and easily searchable.

Using Private magazine and privateclassics.com as a case study and point of departure, this article addresses the implications – or at least some of them – of studying the pre-digital in the digital era, focusing in particular on how pornography has, in historian Whitney Strub’s words, ‘edited its own history’ (2019, 19). In the case of privateclassics.com, a small but inevitable purge has taken place with regards to age: Private has cleaned out its closet and erased the digital memory of its flirtations with what today definitely is deemed child pornography. This is, of course, unsurprising. Putting the issues online as they were, without any edits, would unquestionably be a crime.

Accordingly, this article aligns itself with historiographic observations made by, among others, David Church (2016) in Disposable Passions, Whitney Strub (2019) in ‘Sanitizing the Seventies’, and Linda Williams (2005) in ‘“White Slavery” Versus the Ethnography of “Sex Workers”’: that in the contemporary handling of vintage pornographic material, transgressive, misogynist, or illegal elements may very well be eliminated through self-censorship or simple curating.

As one of the oldest adult companies in the world, Private encapsulates more than 50 years of pornography history, which makes it a highly relevant and interesting case study for pornography from the pre-digital era to the digital. The commercial digitization of old, analogue material speaks to the nostalgia of consumers as well as to the practicality of pornographers who can re-monetize their own material for the benefit of the ‘long tail’ (Anderson 2006). Although the main bulk of pornography consumers might not be looking for old material, there is enough of an interest to make it worthwhile. As David Church (2016) has observed, there is quite an interest in sexually explicit material from bygone ages. Both privateclassics.com and that other Scandinavian ‘oldie’ in the porn business, colorclimax.com, emphasize their own history on their respective websites – privateclassics.com explicitly urging the potential customer to ‘embrace your nostalgia with our explicit content’. This can be compared to Color Climax, which marketed itself online in 2019 as ‘the first, the biggest, the most pornographic’ and had a brief history of Color Climax listing significant years (colorclimax.com). Both companies have a year of origin in their logos: ‘since 1965’ in Private’s and ‘since 1966’ in Color Climax.

By alluding to a bygone era when porn was not found on your nearest computer or cell phone, privateclassics.com and Color Climax conjure up a nostalgic aura of a time Paasonen, Kyrölä, Nikunen, and Saarenmaa call the ‘age of scarcity’, when porn was hard to come by. In contrast, the ‘age of plenty’, the digital age, has made not only contemporary but vintage pornography available and accessible in unforeseen ways (Paasonen et al. 2015, 403–405). If the Finnish informants of Paasonen et al.’s study on pornography and memory often ‘evoked nearby woods as semi-public spaces where porn magazines were discovered, hidden, and consumed’ (2015, 405), Swedes of a similar generation also seem to find the woods a place for pornographic discovery and consumption. The Swedish Facebook group ‘Rädda skogsporren!’ [‘Save the forest porn!’] playfully fetishizes memories from the 1970s and 1980s by hiding pornography in the woods for others to find. In a way, the nostalgia for previous decades of pornography, for retro or vintage porn, encompasses this notion of scarcity and discovery. When the same material can be found available, for a fee, on the internet, it somehow diminishes the value of the pornographic artefact since the very rarity of actual vintage material increases its worth to the owner (see Church 2016, 62).

In his study of the historiography of vintage pornography, Church (2016, 63) observes that the pornographic text is ephemeral and promiscuous, ‘originally intended to be cast away by a sexually satiated (hetero-male) viewer’, and rarely preserved by non-profit organizations and serious archives. Instead, nostalgia-driven fans collect artefacts from the pornographic past, and for-profit companies capitalize on nostalgic sentiment by re-issuing and re-releasing material (2016, 63). Privateclassics.com can be understood as such a capitalization, although in this case it is matched by a supposedly systematic collection effort at a national level due to the Swedish printing laws. This provides the unique possibility of close comparison between original and commercial re-issue.

Private – more than 50 years of porn

As the second country in the world, after Denmark in 1969, Sweden legalized pornography in 1971, when the obscenity clause was removed from the Freedom of the Press Act and the penal code. Although the proposal to remove the obscenity clause suggested an ‘outer limit’ as to which sexual depictions would be legal, the final proposition decided by the parliament had no such restrictions (Arnberg 2010). Accordingly, during the years between 1971 and 1980, distributing, selling, and owning child pornography was legal. The production of it, however, was regulated by the age of consent, which in Sweden was (and still is) 15 years for heterosexual sex. Although 1971 was the year of legalization, already from the mid-1960s and onwards, a semi-clandestine sex business had begun to develop, with sex shops selling books and magazines both over and under the counter and sex clubs providing sexual entertainment in the form of strip shows and film screenings. As Swedish scholar Klara Arnberg has demonstrated, the porn magazine business actually peaked right before legislation, in the late 1960s (Arnberg 2010), with many new magazines starting from 1965 and in the following years. One such magazine was Private.

Looking at the trajectory of Private from its original inception in Stockholm, Sweden in 1965 to its situation today, it is quite clear that it, in many ways, follows the general development of the porn industries: beginning with an entrepreneurial pornographer working outside or at the edges of the law, continuing with multinational businessmen, and eventually encountering serious problems with the emerging competition from the free porn sites. Private was started as a magazine in 1965 by Berth Milton Sr (born in 1926). Milton Sr set his eyes on the international market from the beginning, publishing his magazine in three languages – Swedish, English, and German – and marketing it with the national tagline ‘Svenska flickor, Swedish girls, Schwedische Mädchen’. Private’s competitive edge, at a time when porn magazines were cheaply produced, was Milton’s ‘obsession with quality’ (Hebditch and Anning 1988, 123). As Arnberg has observed, Private can be regarded as formative for its genre as it set a ‘standard for content, photography, lay-out, reproduction and size for the new generation of porn magazines’ (Arnberg 2010, 140; my translation). More than 30 years later, as Private Media Group, it would also become the first hardcore pornography company to trade publicly, listed on NASDAQ by Berth Milton’s son Berth Milton Jr in 1999. Since then, however, Private Media Group has struggled financially, being delisted from NASDAQ in 2011, and continued on the over-the-counter market with a plummeting stock value. In 2012, Berth Milton Jr was ousted from Private Media Group, and in 2016 it was delisted as a publicly traded company (Larsson 2020).

Private magazine was one of the most audacious in challenging both obscenity law in Sweden by publishing hardcore images as early as 1967 and its competition by printing in high-quality colour. Reputedly, Milton tried to ensure that his venture would be safe from legal intervention by asking the Minister of Justice for approval of his photographs in advance (Hebditch and Anning 1988, 45). This anecdote from Milton’s biography, however, seems to indicate a somewhat misguided sense of how the freedom of the press act worked (and works), since neither advance approval nor advance prohibition can be granted within the parameters of the law for print publications. Nevertheless, Milton evaded prosecution for his magazine, although he pushed the limits of the obscenity law constantly until the legalization in 1971.

Even before the legislation change, several different porn magazines had appeared on the market in Sweden. These were distributed outside mainstream distribution channels and navigated the rapidly changing norms regarding sexually explicit material (see Arnberg 2010). Among these, Private held a particular position. In addition to publishing hardcore images in high-quality colour, Berth Milton Sr targeted the international market from the start, as Arnberg has demonstrated. Capitalizing on notions about Sweden as a sexually licentious nation and Swedish women as blonde, buxom, and sexually willing, he marketed Private as ‘Swedish’ while having text material in three different languages (Arnberg 2009). Inspired by Hugh Hefner’s musings on the ‘Playboy philosophy’ in his American softcore counterpart, Milton also included in each issue an editorial called ‘Morals by Milton’. In these, he attacked censorship and obscenity law, as well as elaborating various ideas about the pleasures of sex. Like many of the other entrepreneurial pornographers in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. Lasse Braun, the Theander Brothers in Denmark, Larry Flynt in the USA), Milton presented himself as a challenger of obscenity law and a champion of freedom of speech.

As a porn magazine, Private was commercially successful not only in Sweden but also – and foremost – abroad. Its distinguishing competitive feature was that it was comparatively well produced and had photographic features, often photographed by Milton himself, in exotic locations. Distributed by mail order and through individual and often-times informal agreements with tobacco salesmen, sailors, and so on, Private was lucrative from the beginning (Hebditch and Anning 1988; Arnberg 2010). Still, economic problems would continue to haunt the company, due to the mixture of formal and informal book-keeping typical of the porn business at the time. Milton’s move to Spain in the 1970s did not make the company’s or its owner’s finances clearer to Swedish and Spanish tax authorities. Having avoided charges of obscenity in the 1960s, Milton was later accused of tax evasion and subjected to discretionary assessment in Sweden (Sjöberg 2002; Larsson 2020).

In the 1980s, Private was on the decline. Increasing competition from other companies and media, such as video, made the magazine seem dated and progressively out of touch. With economic difficulties and the ageing Milton’s mounting paranoia and control issues, the management became cumbersome and erratic. In 1990, Berth Milton Sr’s son Berth Milton Jr (born in 1955) took over the business. Under his leadership, the company again flourished, venturing into adult film production and negotiations with Bob Guccione of Penthouse for collaborations in distribution. Re-establishing the trademark ‘high quality’ of early Private magazine, films were shot in exotic locations with large crews and were awarded at the Adult Video News annual gala in Las Vegas. New media, such as DVD and the internet, were explored during this time as well. The high point for Milton Jr was when Private Media Group was listed on NASDAQ in 1999. From then onwards, things seem mainly to have gone downhill for Private Media Group as well as for Milton Jr (Larsson 2020). At the same time, Milton Jr has become something of a semi-celebrity in Sweden, partly because he has been sought after by the Swedish tax authorities for debts of, at one point, around 904 million SEK (around €900 million). As the notorious son of a notorious man, he has appeared on Swedish television in the in-depth interview show Min sanning [‘My truth’] in 2012 and in the documentary Porrkungens tårar [‘The porn king’s tears’] (Fredrik von Krusenstjerna, 2013). In 2015, he was paparazzi-photographed while out partying with one centrally placed member of the Sweden Democrats, Sweden’s xenophobic and nationalist-populist party.

Accessibility and materiality

One of the well-known problems for historians of sexually explicit material is the lack of systematic or, indeed, any kind of official or formal archives. Pornography historians often have to piece together evidence from disparate sources, study advertisements, censorship records, court cases, official inquiries, catalogues, posters, maps, permission applications, licences, and interviews with more or less reliable and more or less reluctant informants. Nevertheless, according to the law, published material in Sweden has to be sent to a number of research libraries. Two of these are, according to the same law, obliged to preserve all publications. The Royal Library in Stockholm holds what is called ‘the national sample’ and Lund University Library holds ‘the national spare sample’. This law applies indiscriminately to all material, adult as well as non-adult. However, even though publications are systematically archived in this manner, adult material has its own kind of inherent resistance to being systematized. Some magazine publishers simply did not send in their issues, other issues may have been pilfered, and, in some cases, images have been cut out of the libraries’ copies. For instance, the collection of Private magazines at Lund University Library lacked 13 issues, among them the very first one from 1965. The catalogue marks the collection as ‘incomplete’, consisting as it does of 24 out of 37 issues.

The loss of 13 issues of Private magazine may or may not be the result of pilfering researchers or librarians or Milton’s carelessness in sending in ‘duty copies’. It may also not seem as such a big deal, especially as all of them can be found online (for a fee) at privateclassics.com. They are available and accessible and preserved in digital form.

However, there are several problems with this enterprise, connected both to the digital form the magazine issues are preserved in and to the private and commercial motives behind making them accessible online. First and most obvious, is the striking difference in the physical sense of magazines and pdf files on the computer screen. The physical materiality of the analogue archive carries its own stories with it – the films of the Kinsey Institute’s Stag Film Collection, for instance, some of which have been taken through a projector so many times that the image is rendered nearly incomprehensible. Or the copies of Swedish men’s magazine FIB/Aktuellt at the same Lund University Library from which someone (a fan?) had cut out almost all photographs of famous nude model Christina Lindberg. Both of these different kinds of destruction speak of a very special value attached to the artefacts, and therefore bear witness to something beyond the films or magazines in themselves. But even without such testimonies left in the wear and tear of the archived material, the handling of chunky video cassettes or the turning of once glossy pages calls to mind how it really was to consume these moving or still images.

Capitalizing on the past

By opening privateclassics.com in 2015, Private tapped into the audience’s nostalgia for vintage adult material. Although it may have been a move originating in the declining financial situation of Private Media Group, privateclassics.com emphasizes nostalgia on its site, similarly to the other Scandinavian ‘oldie’ in the porn business, Color Climax. Both companies highlight their age with their respective years of origin in the logos.

Although the audience for vintage material may be relatively small, there is no production cost and no permission cost, only the cost of scanning and digitizing the material. According to Alexa (31 August 2020), private.com – that is, Private’s ‘regular’ site with new material – has an estimated ranking, globally, of 48,691, while Private Classics is estimated at 144,826. These rankings can be compared with Pornhub at 56, Hustler at 278,032, and the New York Times at 88. Color Climax does not seem to as successful with a ranking at 4,202,561 (https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo). As a pornography company more than 50 years old, Private owns a large corpus of material, consisting of still images, texts, and, from the 1990s onwards, films. By making its back catalogue available online, Private thus tries to capitalize on its ‘long tail’.

Labelling itself ‘the best pornographic archive in the world’, Private Classics actually seems to live up to the slogan with the vintage material sorted under decades but also under ‘photosets’ and ‘magazines’. You can also click on ‘movies’, ‘scenes’, and ‘models’. Accordingly, it is quite easily navigated. The magazines are scanned and uploaded as pdf documents, so you can – after paying the member’s fee – download each issue and save it on your own computer. For a researcher, this would seem a dream (although an expensive one). That very first issue that is missing from Lund University Library can be downloaded and saved. Although the magazines do not appear on the site in order, they are clearly marked by issue number, and also, which is missing in the physical first issues, the year in which it was published. The scan is page by page, so written text is included. Why even bother to travel to Lund or Stockholm in order to study the early – or later – issues of Private, in particular since part of that research work would include photographing interesting features and thereby transforming the entire material experience of turning the once glossy pages of the magazine into a digital one of clicking on the thumb prints in your cell phone gallery.

Edits to porn history

In ‘Sanitizing the Seventies’, Whitney Strub convincingly demonstrates missing and edited scenes on the video releases of 1970s films which have resulted in a ‘tamer’ pornography, with a lesser degree of both misogyny and transgressive, potentially queer sex acts: ‘Gone from both straight and gay films were not only rape scenes and allusions to incest and intergenerational sex but also water sports, fisting, and other transgressive sex acts, all of which had been staples of the genre’ (Strub 2019, 20). As such edits were the results of corporate decisions, rather than, for instance, state censorship or the prohibition of certain acts on film, the removal of potentially disturbing scenes left no apparent trace and can only be found by comparing original releases with later video releases (2019, 22). Strub very correctly identifies this as a problem for how we can understand the history of sexual representation, not least since several porn scholars have analyzed films on video or DVD which in their original versions in cinemas contained scenes that are no longer there. There is an additional aspect to this, relating to the current anti-pornography argument claiming that contemporary pornography is more violent, degrading, and aggressive to women than it used to be in the past. With an incomplete picture of the pornography of the past, such a claim is harder to refute.

Looking at the digital releases of old Private issues, it seems, at a first glance, as if they have not hesitated to retain some of the more transgressive and possibly misogynist stuff. Of course, a short piece signed by Betty Dodson under the heading ‘Confessions of a woman pornographer’ may not be obviously transgressive (Private no. 19), but as early as issue 11 there is a feature on transsexuals, with photographs and a short text about the right to be who you are. More striking is the several pages long ‘Confessions of a sado-therapist’, about Monique von Cleef and her assistant Pia, with several photographs of men tied up and descriptions of what is done to them (Private no. 20). In that same issue, stone-age woman Lopa is raped in a vicious attack that awakens her lust in spite of herself, in a photographic story that is ‘the best I have ever produced’ according to Milton himself in the teaser in the preceding issue.

However, the blatant defiance of the law that was, in a way, Milton’s achievement and, according to himself, his raison d’etre, has been abandoned by modern Private in an absolutely necessary move: young women have suddenly become older or have no age indication at all. This is very subtly done, hardly noticeable apart from the incongruous references to teddy bears in the actual text about Lillian, age 18 years, who used to be Lillian, age 14 years, in the original issue’s heading. Irene, who was 16 years old in the 1960s, now has no age at all indicated in the heading or the text. One page with readers’ own photographs is missing. On this page, there was one image showing a woman with, according to the caption, her 14-year-old male lover. Private has erased the digital memory of its flirtations with what today is legally defined as child pornography.

This erasure is, very simply, necessary. Putting the issues online as they were would be a crime. Assuming that the models are not under 18 years old, the pictures themselves are not illegal, but giving the impression that they are younger is, in Sweden and in many other countries, against the law. It should be underlined that none of the women in these pictures look as if they are underage. The problem is the age stated in the captions. However, it should also be noted that finding out how old they actually were when the photographs were taken would be a difficult, perhaps impossible, endeavour.

For Private, there is really no alternative here but to ‘edit history’, apart from not uploading the oldest issues at all. With regards to films, Church has observed that ‘specific lines of dialogue were clumsily dubbed over if originally containing passing reference to sex with women younger than 18’ (2016, 135). In a similar, yet subtly different, manner, Adult Loop Database did not list Color Climax titles with underage performers (cf. Church 2016, 144; Larsson 2017, 116). In 2016, however, Adult Loop Database changed their policy, commenting that there had been questions around this and that there is ‘a widely spread misconception of people to think that all underage content in that era originated from Color Climax Corporation’ (Adult Loop Database, ‘Color Climax', 2021). The subtle difference here is that publishing the mere titles is not illegal, and the reason for not listing them is more a matter of taste or morals. As the statement concerning the decision to change the policy confirms, simply observing that there are titles that are unmentionable raises more questions, and perhaps also wild imaginations, than actually listing the titles, albeit with clear markers as to their illegal content. Also, Adult Loop Database is a non-profit initiative, intended to function as a source of information about these ‘orphan films’ (Schaefer 2007). Shedding light on what is unknown and dispelling misconceptions would be within the parameters of their project.

However, when it comes to the actual content and not just the titles of films, the illegality is clear. Archives and libraries have to handle such material with caution as well, which consequently has led to difficulties for researchers to access some of the magazines from this time period. Amateur collectors have been known to throw away or burn sexually explicit material where it might be surmised that the models are minors.

When Private printed these images and texts in the late 1960s, the issue of whether the pictures were legal or not was moot. Before 1971, the magazine was operating at the limits of or outside the law anyway. After the legalization in 1971, it was still forbidden to produce pornography containing people under the age of consent (15 years old). The distribution, selling, and possession of such material, however, was not.

Considering the atrocities involved in creating child pornography or, as it is sometimes called, documented abuse of children, the increasingly stricter laws and increasing transnational cooperation to curb such activities are undoubtedly reasonable. However, by purging pornography history of its flirtations with – and sometimes outright connection to – child pornography, a ‘sanitation’ takes place that has profound consequences for how we can write – and for what we can know of – the history of sexually explicit material. The shameful fact of the early years of modern pornography’s relative liberalness with regards to age is a weak point, and holds an eerie position – conveniently forgotten when anti-porn activists argue that porn only develops into more extreme, violent, and degrading forms, but equally conveniently forgotten by those who look to the pioneering days as the ‘golden age’ of porn (see Paasonen and Saarenmaa 2007, 23–32).

Strub describes the removal of misogynist or transgressive scenes from 1970s films as ‘an editing of sexual memory, with serious consequences for our historical understanding of sexual representation’ (2019, 22). In the case of the edits of privateclassics.com, it is more of an unsolvable dilemma – how can we know about something that is supposed, according to the law, to be unknowable? Child pornography seems, for this time period, to make up a very small share of sexual representation. The National Library of Sweden, in their investigation into how to handle such material, estimated that of the library’s holdings, about ‘one shelf meter’ consists of child pornography, of which almost everything was published and sent to the library when it was still legal (Rydén 2009, 25). The titles listed on Adult Loop Database are few. Nevertheless, glossing over this, albeit small, part entails a kind of white-washing of pornography’s history.

An additional issue to address concerns the models. As mentioned previously, without the stated age in the captions they would not be perceived of as underaged. However, they are still the unknowns in this matter – having been paid to model, they have no copyright and make no money on the re-capitalizing of their pictures. This is not unique to pornography – Swedish actress Harriet Andersson jokingly complained about the production stills from Summer with Monika (Bergman, dir. 1953) that she never made any money from the extreme reproduction and circulation of the famous image of her in an off-the-shoulders cardigan (Lumholdt 2005). However, it could be argued that the fame brought to her through that film and that picture in some way contributed to her career, while the anonymous women in the vintage Private issues are unknown and very likely unpaid for this new rendition of them on the internet. Church (2016, 201–204) elaborates on ‘the tension’ between the precarious sex workers and the producers, exhibitors, and distributors who are the ones who ostensibly retain the rights – or claim to hold the rights – to films and magazines. Unlike actresses and models in mainstream media, appearing in pornographic material might quite likely not contribute to a further career, but rather the opposite: it can function as an obstacle to a mainstream career. And as Church notes, the career of modelling or performing in sexually explicit material is usually a short-lived one. In the case of these Private models, they are unknown, just as their framing in the vintage issues has become unknowable. Even if it was possible to identify them, they might not want to be identified. But this is also a kind of erasure from the history of pornography, an omission made already at the time by calling them Irene or Lillian instead of their real names, an anonymity that might have been desired by the models themselves and that they might wish to keep. At the same time, they remain at the centre of both nostalgic fan interest and the inquiry made here.

Conclusion

Using Private Classics for research purposes is quite possible, yet fraught with difficulty. On the one hand, the scanned back catalogue and its interface are easily navigable, well scanned, and contain relevant metadata. As with historical research in general, contextual knowledge is necessary, but rarely have I encountered historic material so smoothly organized and effortlessly manageable. However, to discern what had been purged, it took quite a detailed comparison with the actual, physical copies at Lund University Library. Thus, to fall for the temptation to use Private Classics – and only Private Classics – for historic research purposes would lead to a wrongful conception of pornography’s history.

In this case, however, it is not a simple sanitizing of transgressive or misogynist scenes. It is a very clear case of complying with the law. Also, the purpose of creating a website for Private Classics was, of course, not to facilitate research; rather, the project ties in and tries to capitalize with the same nostalgia for the ‘golden age of porn’ as the re-releases of old classics, distribution companies such as Alpha Blue Archives or the Swedish Klubb Super8, documentaries, fiction films, and television series about this time period – from Inside Deep Throat to The Deuce. Both Private Classics and Danish Color Climax highlight their own past on their websites – to be one of the oldest, still existing porn production companies in the world is no small feat, but age also seems to be used as a signifier of quality and vintage pornography remembered as ‘better’, more ‘exclusive’ than the readily accessible porn clips of Pornhub and Xhamster. At the same time, the nostalgia for the ‘age of scarcity’ can be easily indulged in the ‘age of plenty’. However, in the transition to digital, not only the materiality of the pre-digital is lost. The physical handling of previous owners, the actual use of the pornographic connected to that materiality, is lost too. But perhaps more importantly, the sanitizing of things that may prove too much or too far out for a contemporary audience and a contemporary legal situation, not only creates a false impression of history, but also feeds into that nostalgia as well as into anti-porn activists’ arguments about how pornography becomes ever more ruthless, violent, and degrading.

As compared to other edits of misogynist and transgressive material, however, this purging is unavoidable. There is no way Private Classics could legally have digitalized this material for re-release on the internet without making these changes, and there is no way anyone could argue that they should be able to, either. Nevertheless, it places a great responsibility on us as scholars, to be aware and vigilant in our research so as to not contribute to a misguided nostalgia or a cleaned-up version of history.

Acknowledgements

This article was originally written as a presentation at the symposium ‘Pornography in the Pre-Digital Era: Distribution, Consumption, and the Law’ at Linnaeus University, 24–25 April 2019. The symposium was organized by Mariah Larsson and Tommy Gustafsson.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The original symposium was funded by Riksbankens jubileumsfond.