A brief definition of Pornography
Pornography … a term that has been heavily contested in many courts across America. But what exactly is pornography? Is a nude painting of Adam and Eve pornography? If Anna Nicole Smith appears in Penthouse magazine in an erotic position, is that art? Most people can’t see the art in nude sculpture, painting, or photography. Pornography is all in the presentation. Pornography is the use of any artistic media to simply evoke only sexual stimulation.
Pornography is basically a blanket that covers all types of material such as explicit literature, photography, films, and videotapes with varying degrees of sexual content. So pornography is a very broad term. However, the key term sexual content needs to be defined. Sexual content is anything that evokes thoughts of eroticism and sexual stimulus. So this excludes art that has nude subject matter. Most art is not supposed to evoke feelings of eroticism. Art deals with the feelings of the artist and more commonly, social issues. On the other hand, if an artist takes a picture of a man having sex with a woman for the sake of taking a picture of a man having sex with a woman is pornography.
A student at the University of Oklahoma painted a picture of a woman posed in an erotic position with her breasts exposed that was entitled “Porno Barbie”. This painting is not pornography. The artist did not have sexual stimuli in mind when he painted this painting. This painting was painted with a social issue in mind. This issue was pornography it self. It dealt with society’s perception of “The Perfect Woman”. It states that our society needs to look at women as people, not pieces of meat. IT was painted as a parody on pornography and Barbie. Barbie is looked on by young girls and even middle-aged woman as a model of what women should look like. Most girls have owned a Barbie doll and many try their best to look like her. The painting was a visual model of what is wrong with society. If it induced any sexual thought it was purely inadvertent.
Hustler magazine was started in the late sixties and has come under intense fire from the United States Supreme Court. Larry Flynt has found himself in the High Court six times. His magazine [Hustler] is the subject of his anguish. Hustler is one of the most sexually explicit magazines the United States has ever seen. Furthermore, the magazine hasn’t changed in over thirty years. This magazine is a prime example of what pornography truly is. Larry Flynt has taken women from every walk of life and put them in sexually explicit situations. He made this magazine for the masses of lonely men on in America that can’t find women on their own and need sexual stimulation of some variety. There is no artistic merit in the photography, the literature, or the illustration in Hustler or any magazine published by Larry Flynt. It is crude, it has no meaning, and the illustration deals mostly with the politician that has come under fire lately. Furthermore, the illustration is not drawn well and depicts the politician performing detestable sexual acts on anything from animals to their own mother. This type of obscene literature is the epitome of what pornography is.
In the movie “Basic Instinct”, starring Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas, there is a scene where Ms Stone is being Interrogated by Mr. Douglas and a group of men. The script called for Ms Stone to wear a short dress and to be seated on a rotating chair. She spun around on the chair during the interview and at one point she exposed her crotch to the men and to the camera. This is not pornography. Since this scene was written in to the script because it played a vital role in describing the character that Ms Stone was playing. If she didn’t do this, she wouldn’t come off as the “slut” her character was supposed to be. She wanted to be exactly the same character she was writing about. A scene like this is one of many of the erotic scenes that build this character. This scenario is similar with every well-scripted movie that has nude scenes in it. A nude scene in a movie is written into the script to represent the destruction of boundaries or to obviously show passion between two people.
In many cases nudity in film does not add to the film in any way. This is pornography. In a film such as “Debbie Does Dallas” there is very little script. If there is a script, it is usually a maximum of three pages long and basically outlines the setting of the sex scenes and very little dialogue. Speaking of dialogue, it is mostly improvised or is written scene by scene on the day of shooting. There is no logical sequence of events in a movie like this. The musical score is usually done on a synthesizer with a bass guitar line and intermittent saxophone riffs. And the gratuitous sex scenes have nothing to do with the premise of the “story” being told, they are just sex scenes. There is no artistic merit in a film such as this. There is no plot to speak of, the cinematography is crude, and the direction is of the lowest rate. This is pornography.
So pornography isn’t just nudity. Pornography is nudity that is degrading and obscene. It is degrading to the subjects, and the person that views the material. A photograph of a nude woman can be tasteful or it can be contemptible depending on the way the photograph is shot. Thus, a nude photograph can be art. Art is graceful, elegant. Pornography is not art.