New meanings for pornography?

Jonathan Lighter wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM
Fri Oct 27 15:25:51 UTC 2006


This brings back an amusing memory that Fred may want to include in his book some day.

  In the mid sixties I saw a paperback whose back cover featured a pleasant young woman emitting a talk balloon that said, "Pornography ? I don't even have a pornograph."

  The 'Net attributes this _bon mot_ to various latter-day celebs. However, JSTOR reveals the following:

  1962 Hon. Harlan Cleveland, in _PMLA_ LXXVIII (May 1963) 1:  Until recently, talk of getting others to set up foreign aid programs of their own was met with innocent unconcern, like the young lady (returning from language study abroad, I suppose) who was asked by the Customs inspector if she was carrying any pornography and replied, "Why, Sir, I don't even own a pornograph !"

  PMLA identifies Cleveland (or "Harlan," as my students would call him) as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs.

  This story implies that actual pornographs exist in other cultures.  But the inspector was obviously not getting ready to impound copies of _Playboy_, which, in terms of the then publically permissible, "went about as fer as they could go."

  So even in '62, when _Fanny Hill_ could not legally be published in the U.S., "pornography" had very strong connotations of cheap sleaze.  _Fanny_ now appears in Penguin, Signet, and Oxford Classics editions.

  JL

David Bowie <db.list at PMPKN.NET> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: David Bowie
Subject: New meanings for pornography?
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So Playboy recently conducted a tryout session/preliminary photo shoot
here in Orlando to find, um, models for its upcoming "Girls of
Conference USA" issue: story at
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/orl-playboy2406oct24,0,4636626.story

(Sidebar: Girls of Conference USA? The SEC, Big 12, Big 10, PAC 10, even
the Big East i can understand. But Conference USA? There's some
barrel-bottom scraping going on here, it seems to me.)

Anyway, aside from the bemusement that occurs when you see former
students quoted in a news article like this one, what most caught my
attention was this quote:

"'It's not like it's pornography,' said Pamela Runsick, 22,
a senior from Melbourne majoring in advertising and public
relations, who stripped down to a black lace bra, panties
and high heels for a test shoot. 'It's Playboy. It's
glamorous.'"

Since any definition of "pornography" i've ever run across before seems
to have, at core, the purpose of some sort of sexual titillation or
prurience involved, it seems to me that Playboy counts.

Of course, the most recent Playboy i've seen was one from the early 70s
i ran across in the basement of the house i grew up in. Times have
changed, maybe all the models wear parkas now or something.

More seriously, it sounds like this student is using "pornography" to
mean something like what i'd have to use an adjective for: "hard-core
pornography". Anyone else seen anything similar lately, or have i just
not noticed something that's been obvious to everybody else?

--
David Bowie University of Central Florida
Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
house, there is too little; some must be purchased. If there is
chocolate in the house, there is too much; it must be consumed.

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