Most of Kathleen Lubey's analysis in What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century concentrates on examining three books in detail: The History of the Human Heart, or Adventures of a Young Gentleman (1749), and two companion pieces, The Progress of Nature (1744) and The Child of Nature (1774). The first is a romping novel which is at the heart of much of Lubey's research and was a focus for her previous book, Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760 (2012). She points to Human Heart as a book that encapsulates what she means by pornography: “accounts of genital activity that are embedded within narrative and that connect to a social world beyond the immediate action being described” (2). However, there are only a handful of pages in Human Heart which might be described as pornographic, notably a scene describing when the “posture girls … ejaculate into the glasses that are then drunk off by the men” (96). About The Child of Nature, she argues that “[w]hat is pornographic about the novel is not genital description but its ongoing articulation of the social and economic injustices women endure” (113). She even entitles this section “Pornography Without Sex” and admits that The Child of Nature seems atypical of pornography. In that case, I wonder how it can be used as a basis for her hypothesis. Her main claim here is to show how in these early pornographic narratives, “sex thoroughly intersects with social relations” (5). The social comments within the novels are her major concern, particularly what they say about women and sexual freedom. But then aren't all narratives connected to their culture somehow, either in reflecting it or negating it? After all, pornography, as with any other writing, is not written in a cultural vacuum.
What Pornography Knows is divided into four main chapters, the first two concentrating on the eighteenth century, the latter two on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the first chapter, “Genital Parts,” Lubey asserts her argument that there is a general genital untethering of women from their being as a whole. This is certainly true in some pornography where the vagina, the penis, or both were the focal point—and not the person it was attached to—but this is by no means true of all pornography, where assertive personalities often come through the texts. A broader analysis of pornographic books would have helped (or possibly hindered) her arguments; otherwise, they feel rather nebulous.
A second argument she posits—that the whole idea of pornography is fighting against some sort of heterosexual imperative—is by no means applicable to all pornography. While I can agree with Lubey's suggestion that pornography explores non-heterosexual sex, this is surely because it is titillating and not because it is taking a serious position against the heterosexual norm. Lesbian and sodomy scenes, masturbation, and the use of dildoes are used in pornography to provide diversity and added excitement, not to make an imperative social comment. While her suggestion that pornography “broadly and definitively protests hierarchical social relations” (21) is certainly true of some writings, much pornography follows conventional thinking.
To make a third point, Lubey examines Human Heart to tease out the way the narrative points to sexual injustices for women in society. Pornography is not just about sexual satisfaction; it is also imbued with social discussion. This is not a new contention, but she makes it emphatically and repeatedly, as a basis for her overarching argument. Eighteenth-century pornography writers often wrote about feminist concerns as part of their social and cultural philosophizing on issues that interested them. Authors saw female pleasure as something to which women were entitled. Lubey's brief discussion of Venus in the Cloister (1683) and Dialogue Between a Married Lady and a Maid (1740) shows they were typical of pornography, which normalised women's sexual desire. Arguments against the moral and sexual restrictions imposed on women were part and parcel of the eighteenth-century erotic portrayals of the sexually active women described in pornography.
More vital, and better written, are her last two chapters, on “The Victorian Eighteenth Century: Publishing an Erotics of Inequity” and “Uncoupling: Pornography and Feminism in the Countercultural Era,” as she has ditched the more tenuous arguments along with the loquacious, highly stylized language. She shows how the material she discussed from the eighteenth century was reworked by the publishers, substituting the philosophizing on women's sexual freedom with more salacious detail. By reading these texts closely, Lubey shows how publishers edited the same material across time, a useful analysis which highlights changing tastes and cultural values, as other scholars have shown, notably Roy Porter in his study of Aristotle's Masterpiece (“‘The Secrets of Generation Display'd’: Aristotle's Master-piece in Eighteenth-Century England,” in ‘Tis Nature's Fault': Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment, ed. Robert Purks Maccubbin [1988], 1-21).
Lubey's exploration of the machinations of Henry Ashbee, William Dugdale, Patrick Kearney, Stephen Marcus, and Peter Fryer is clearer and more concise. The Victorians’ shift into realms of greater masculine aggression generally signals the direction pornography was moving. Any social or ethical discussions of the earliest version of eighteenth-century erotica were expunged as the Victorians thrusted toward explicit descriptions of sex acts. Any delays, asides, or footnotes on religion, medicine, or education that hindered the action were deleted. The publishers were aiming for fast money and sensational content in order to reach a wider audience. By the time of exotic Turkish pornography, such as The Lustful Turk (1828) and Seraglio Scenes (1830), women characters had become much more submissive, and the sex scenes more frequent. Eroticization through depersonalization was also a key development. Lubey's strength here lies in teasing out these differences between the centuries.
Lubey's suggestion of Peter Fryer as the editor of the 1968 version of Human Heart (behind the pseudonym James Graham, after the eighteenth-century original sex quack) is intriguing, and her overall examination of the development of pulp fictional pornography provides some good points. Pulp fiction notably limits conversation about the vulnerability of women evident in the eighteenth-century versions, and the domestication of men and marriage as a conspicuous ending were overridden in the pulp versions by unrestrained sexual pursuits. Despite his claim for sexual liberation, Fryer (if he was Graham) apparently could not tolerate the feminist dissent evident in the original version and edited it out. By now, the text had been trimmed to focus on eroticized bodies, masculine prowess, and consummated sex acts rather than any philosophical discussion.
By the resurgence of the so-called second wave feminist movement, according to Lubey, Fryer was attempting to align the republishing of this erotica with a move toward sexual liberation. Whether we can believe publishers’ claims is another matter, and they could just as easily have been using a marketing ploy—trying to extend their market to women and fighting against censorship in general. In the final pages, an assessment of feminist arguments covering Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Susan Brownmiller, among others, Lubey dismisses all the polarization of arguments, whether for or against pornography, and proposes a way forward. She urges us to recognize pornography as a site where social issues are being conferred within the text and to uncover these other topics. However, despite its limitations, What Pornography Knows makes some bold claims and contributes to the broad scholarship in its attempt to contextualize pornography.
