Pornography: From the Greek pornographus - writing about prostitutes



One of the earliest forms of pornography discovered by archaeologists is graffiti scrawled on the walls of ancient Rome. These scribbles were drawn by commoners, depicting senators and other powerful figures being boned by horses or dogs.

When The Marquis de Sade unleashed his most famous pornographic novel, Justine, onto the masses, it was described by Napoleon Bonaparte himself as "the most abominable book ever engendered by the most depraved imagination". His earlier masterwork, The 120 Days of Sodom, has since been labelled by a literary critic as an "unsurpassed novel of terror and signal act of terrorism" and as a "book of purest destruction".

When porno hit the silver screen, it attracted filmmakers with a firm interest in pushing the limits of social acceptability, like Gerard Damiano, Shaun Costello and Zebedy Colt.



So what's my point with these little bits of trivia?

Porn is now often considered as a work designed to cause sexual arousal, with little to no artistic merit (a view stemming from a US legal defition coined by prudes in the '50s, to classify anything they didn't like). But historically, it has consistently been used as a form of protest against prevailing moral standards toward sexuality. Pornography is the most directly political of all genres. It's been censored by government bodies. It's been attacked by the self-proclaimed cultural elite. It's been picketed against. People have been imprisoned for producing it.

Nowadays, the battle is won. Porno is fully mainstream and some porn stars like Sasha Grey and Ron Jeremy have achieved celebrity status outside of the porno world. The most decisive blow against the puritans and prudes is the enormous rise in homemade amateur porn; created by regular, everyday people and posted on the internet, not for money, but merely for the sexual thrill of having thousands of strangers watch them fuck.



Here is a zone charting the path that lead toward porno's acceptance. Feel free to post your own reviews or anything porno related. Myself, I'll be mainly sticking to movies that are subversive, strange or dangerous in some manner. The groundbreaking and/or controversial stuff. Those movies that have an especially anti-social message to impart. Or simply just drug-fucked weird shit that fucks its way through convention and spunks all over shattered artistic boundaries. The genre is as widespread as any other, and I believe many would be surprised how far it drifts away from basic jerk-off material.

All taboos will be covered. (Well, all except one. I can't stand kids in regular films, so I sure as hell ain't gonna watch the annoying little fuckers in porn.) Documentaries about porn and pornographic documentaries will also be included, at some point.



Ultimately, my goal is to challenge any preconceptions you may have about porn and show that it can be appreciated on an intellectual and philosophical level. Believe it or not, much can be learned about the human condition and the human psyche from watching how we fuck and how we film ourselves fucking. You can easily watch porn with your brain as well as your genitals.

So sit back, grab a box of Kleenex and prepare to enter a dimension beyond that which is known to the prudish. It is a dimension as vast as Ron Jeremy's belly and as timeless as Linda Lovelace's gag reflex. It is the middle ground between voyeurism and exhibitionism, between the trashy and the epic, and it lies between the pit of man's debauchery and the summit of his desires. It is an area which we call... The Porno Zone.