The Word "Pornography" Was Invented to Solve a Filing Problem

It entered English in an archaeology handbook, describing objects nobody could decide what to do with.

The word is younger than the photograph.

"Pornography" arrives in English around 1850, in a translation of a German handbook on the archaeology of art by C. O. Müller. It is not being used to condemn anything. It is being used to describe the antiquities of Pompeii — a scholar reaching for a term to cover a category of object that had just been dug out of the ground in embarrassing quantity.

The Greek root, pornographos, meant writing about prostitutes. It had sat unused in the classical vocabulary for centuries. What revived it, according to the literary scholar Walter Kendrick, was archaeology: the concept came out of the excavations, and modern English usage of the term appears only somewhere between 1755 and 1857.

The problem it was invented to solve

Pompeii and Herculaneum came out of the ash carrying an enormous volume of sexual imagery — frescoes, lamps, household ornaments, phalluses carved into paving stones and mounted over bakery doors.

This created a specific and unglamorous difficulty for the people cataloguing them. The objects were unquestionably valuable. They were also, by the standards of the courts funding the digs, unshowable. And they had to be written about, which meant scholars needed a word that would let them describe the material without themselves producing something indecent.

They needed, in other words, a clinical term. Greek supplied one.

The first dictionary definition, in 1857, is entirely in that register: a description of prostitutes or of prostitution, treated as a question of public hygiene. Webster's, in 1864, defined the word by pointing directly at the excavation — licentious painting of the kind found on the walls at Pompeii.

The category did not exist and then describe the objects. The objects arrived, and the category was built to hold them.

The same problem, in wood and iron

What happened to the collection itself makes the point more plainly than the etymology does.

An illustrated French guide to the material circulated around Europe in 1816 and was confiscated and destroyed by the authorities. In 1819 the Bourbon court ordered every object of a sexual nature removed from public view and locked in a separate room. In 1849 that room was bricked up.

After the revolutions of 1848, the government went further and proposed destroying the objects outright. The museum's director declined. Instead he ended access and fitted the door with three separate locks, the keys held by the director, the museum's controller, and the palace butler. Viewing was restricted to persons of mature age and known morals.

Three men, three keys, one door. It is the most literal possible expression of a classification problem: unable to decide what the objects were, the institution decided instead who was permitted to find out.

The room opened to the public in 2000 and moved to its own gallery in 2005 — 181 years after it was sealed.

What carried forward

The word outlived the filing system, and it kept the shape of its origin.

"Pornography" has never been a description of an image. It has always been a description of a permission: which material may be looked at, by whom, under what supervision. The Victorian version used locks and a butler. Later versions used obscenity statutes, then customs officers, then ratings boards, and now automated classifiers that make the same call several billion times a day without anyone reviewing the decisions.

The mechanism has changed completely. The underlying move has not. Somebody upstream sorts the material into the visible and the restricted, and the person who actually wants to look is the last party consulted.

That is why browsable indexes exist at all. When the sorting is done elsewhere and the labels are not audited, the only way to know what something is, is to find out for yourself.

A footnote worth keeping

The Romans who made these objects had no word for them.

They had names for the gods depicted, for the rooms the frescoes decorated, for the charms hung over doorways to ward off bad luck. What they did not have was a single term grouping a wall painting, a lamp and a garden statue together on the grounds that all three showed sex.