angryphotoman wrote:
I love the Porn / Art debate. You know... there was no such thing as pornography until the 1800's. It was Victorian society saying that it wasn't appropriate for women to see lewd images and then sit in a parlor images and look at all sorts of goodies.

Actually Peter,

"In its original meaning, pornography was literally "writing about prostitutes", from the classical Greek roots ποÏ?νη and γÏ?αφειν. ΠοÏ?νη started as a euphemism and literally meant '(something) sold.' It is related to the verb πεÏ?νημι meaning 'to sell.' It derived from a Greek term for men who chronicled the well-known "pornai", or skilled prostitutes of ancient Greece. In more modern times, the term was adopted by social scientists to describe the work of men like Nicholas Restif and William Acton, who in the 18th and 19th centuries published treatises studying prostitution and proposing to regulate it. The term retained this meaning in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1905.

The term then came to mean writing about anything sexual, especially in a base manner, when the creation, presentation, or consumption of the material was for sexual stimulation. The term now refers to sexually related material of all kinds, both written and graphical. " - Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography

So, there wasn't really "pornography" in it's modern connotation until about 1900