People have spent millions of words debating this question. Since my definition is simple and rigid, it settles the matter once and for all. I don't expect anyone to adopt the formulation I lay out here, because it would take all the fun out of the argument.

Most folks think of erotica as being gauzy, pretty or non-explicit, and think of pornography as explicit, harsh and unaesthetic.

One thing I've found over the years is that if your definition relies on subjective traits like "beauty" or "quality" you don't have a definition.

But there is a reliable and fairly objective definition of pornography. Function.

There was a time when it meant something to call any fairly explicit erotica "pornography." The Egon Schiele piece shown here was called pornography. Today only an utter rube would call it that... it's now a respected artwork and precisely the sort of thing people today mean by "erotica."

But by looking at function we have a definition that was as valid in 1908 as 2008. To put it bluntly, did the artist craft the work to facilitate masturbation?

Egon Schiele did not do this drawing (right) as a commercial product designed to be looked at while masturbating, so it's not pornography. Over the years, some people of both sexes have probably masturbated while looking at this picture. But some people masturbate looking at sensible shoes, burning buildings or autopsy photos. Or while reading the Bible.

The question isn't whether a work arouses somebody, but whether it is designed to facilitate masturbation.

Lots and lots of art is clearly intended to arouse sexual feelings. Botticelli's Venus. Michelangelo's David. Almost all paperback romance novels. Half the programming on television, half the movies out of Hollywood, 90% of fashion advertising... it's almost easier to make a list of works that don't seek to arouse sexual feelings! All that sexual imagery is intended to arouse, but it doesn't make formal concessions to the actual act of masturbation.

An image designed to make you think about sex, and even get a little hot under the collar, is not usually pornography. There is an aesthetic pleasure in erotic imagery—even intense, explicit imagery that most would call pornographic—that has nothing to do with physical acts. To many adults, sexual imagery is enjoyable. People like sexy movies. People like watching beautiful nearly naked men and women on the beach.

For forty years the cover of every single issue of Cosmopolitan magazine has been a nearly naked woman, often with an unmistakably lewd accent on the bare concealment of the nipples and vulva. No men buy Cosmopolitan... a lot of women obviously respond to the images.

Using a functional intent standard, some things that seem tame today are pornography and some very explicit and arousing works are not pornography.

Using my definition, an artwork will not change classification every few years based on meandering contemporary taste. The Victorian novel MY SECRET LIFE was clearly written with the intent that it be read with one hand. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER was not. (In practice, many more people have masturbated reading LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER because it's a more widely read book, but that's not the question.)

This brings us to the word pornographic. That's an adjective, describing almost all pornography and also works that appropriate the aesthetics of pornography, or subjects most closely associated with pornography. But a work can be pornographic without being pornography.

The Egon Schiele drawing cited above is pornographic. It resembles a lot of pornography. It has aspects of pornography. It employs a pose we most  associate with pornography. But it is not pornography because it wasn't designed as such.

And this has nothing to do with quality! Everything I've said would pertain if Egon Schiele was a lousy artist.

I sometimes wonder whether 1970s porn movies are real pornography. They are full of intensely arousing images and it was quite obvious to everyone at the time that they were pornography. But the modern video-porn era has shown us what REAL pornography is like.

Real movies compress time. The editor's job is to keep things moving. In a modern porn film [sic] the sex goes on for-ever. It's not uncommon to see an unbroken five or ten-minute shot of something pumping into something else. It's more like security camera footage than cinema! The endless, Sysiphean ungh--ungh--ungh that marks the modern porn video is an accommodation of biological reality. Ten seconds isn't enough for the purpose. At least not for most people. And, just as most beer is—as a mathematical reality—brewed for alcoholics, most pornography is made for people who masturbate a lot, so the time frame is longer and longer. More biological reality.

(This isn't the only cinematic concession to biology. Alfred Hitchcock said that the ideal length of a feature film was determined by the capacity of the human bladder, and he's right. Decade after decade, movies averaged about 97 minutes. Longer films, like GONE WITH THE WIND, were shown with an intermission. The creeping running time of blockbusters today is all about DVD and pay-per-view. RETURN OF THE KING, a fine movie, was torture  in the theatre at 3+ hours. Especially for fidgeting little kids! But it's a great experience on DVD where you can pause the damn thing.)

Modern porn consumers, conditioned to videos clearly designed as masturbation aides, would find 1970s movies dysfunctional. The sex scenes fly by. The really arousing pornographic shots last ten seconds, rather than ten minutes. They're like... movies!

A 1970s porno loop of nothing but sex, designed to be watched in a little private booth, was clearly designed as a masturbation aid. But what are we to make of the 1970s theatrical feature? I saw BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR at a midnight showing at a prestigious art-house theatre. Nobody in the audience was doing anything untoward, and anyone who did would have been arrested. So the film was not functioning as pornography. It doubtless served as a springboard to a lot of sex later that night among couples in attendance—and self-sex among others in attendance—but I'm sure FROM HERE TO ETERNITY did also, back in the 1950s.

And there are a few art films today like INTIMACY and ROMANCE that function as well as pornography as BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR.

But the 1970s film-makers knew at the time that their movies had function; to be marketed they had to have enough in it to appeal to "the rain-coat crowd." (Men in the sleazier adult theaters who played with themselves under cover of a coat in their lap.). So those films are, no matter how accomplished and aesthetic, pornography. That does not, in itself, make them bad art. A functional artwork can be as great as anything else.

The conflation of merit with purpose or motive is one of the most pernicious errors in thinking about art. It's snobbery for the sake of snobbery, and retards our entire understanding of art. An artist's motives cannot redeem a lousy piece of art or diminish a masterwork. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA was intended to make a lot of money at the box office, and happens to be a far greater work of art than almost any student film project made with the purest artistic motives.

The word "pornography" should not be used as a synonym for ugly or thoughtless erotica. (The correct term for ugly, thoughtless pornography is, "ugly, thoughtless pornography.")

Chris
benevolent dictator of Atomic Cinema