Porn to be Wild

Jerk takes you back to the humble beginnings of the world's sexiest industry

Long before every connoisseur of smut could buy a rubber replica of his or her favorite porn star’s signature moneymaker (aka pee pees and hoo hahs), the realm of pornographic film was a simpler, tamer place.

Now we’re not talking simple and tame like the bland, vanilla landscape painted by Lassie and Leave it to Beaver. No, in these films mom and dad pushed their beds together every night and uglies were still bumped with nothing but vigor.

That being said, in pornographic cinema’s nascent stages, explicit films were not made to bolster a multi-billion dollar industry or to satisfy the gamut of sexual fetishists. Their purpose was merely to feed a very basic sexual curiosity with moving pictures of strangers’ Ds and Vs joined in the beautiful act of doin’ it.

In 1891, Thomas Edison, with the help of his assistant William K.L. Dickson, patented the original motion picture system, the Kinetoscope. Four years later, French brothers Louis and Auguste Lumiére held their first private screening of a film and later that year the first film screening to charge admission opened.

Moving film may not have been invented with documenting sexual acts for posterity in mind, but it certainly did not take long for enterprising directors to take that groundbreaking invention down a decidedly sexy avenue.

One year after the Lumiére’s first premiere, another Frenchman, Eugene Pirou, produced Le Coucher de la Marie, which featured actress Louise Willy performing the first onscreen striptease. That film is credited with pioneering both the “stag film” genre and the ubiquitous notion that the French are perverts.

It did not take long for that genre to become even more risqué, though, as 1907 saw the production of the earliest surviving hardcore pornographic film, El Sartorio, in Argentina. The plot of that film is as follows: three women are bathing in a river when they quite naturally decide to have sex with each other.

Shortly thereafter, the Devil shows up to the very same river — most likely planning on spending a lazy afternoon skipping stones and catching bullfrogs. Upon seeing the three ladies, the Great Satan puts aside any possible moral ambiguity and decides to force them to have sex with him — a scene that featured close-up shots of oral, vaginal and sacrilegious intercourse. Standard stuff.

But, at the turn of the 20th century, upstanding citizens frowned upon such films and relegated them to stag parties and all-male clubs.

Eventually, though, those underground stag films led to mainstream porn movements of both the soft-core and hard-core variety, with 1972’s Deep Throat becoming possibly the most famous pornographic film of all time — far ahead of the unpopular Andy Richter sex-tape, Taking Andy from Strangers.

And, though that very popularity further inflamed debates over pornography as obscenity versus healthy sexual representation, without that progress we might never have had the never-ending bounty of abject filth that is Internet porn.

Image courtesy of thezaz.nationallampoon.com