Anyway, Richard E. Geis has already done it much better, in his excellent book How to Write Porno Novels for Fun and Profit
, published in 1986: Geis is a kind of an obscure figure, and practically the only references you can find to him online, are from used booksellers, but if the story he tells in Porno Novels can be trusted, he spent his career writing pulp fiction, usually of the erotic kind, from the early 1960's through the early 1980's, when he gave it up because the porn-expectations had become too gross for his taste.According to his retelling, standards for porn were about as free as they were going to get, right around the beginning of the 1970's, when a writer could describe pretty much whatever they wanted, with whatever four-letter words they wanted, but preferably in the context of a good story ("young women and men with hang-ups that [can] only be cured by a sexual catharsis", being the one the readers liked best). Before that, prudish editorial standards restricted what writers could include in their books. Four-letter words, descriptions of genitals, and extended sex scenes, for example, were all taboo at the beginning of the '60's. By the 1980's however, it was narrative that had become taboo. Anyone who wanted anything with a little culture to it, had changed over to reading mass-market novels, which were quite graphic enough themselves, by then. Most of the remaining porn-fans out there, were watching XXX-rated movies. And the remaining sex-book readers, "didn't give a shit about characterization... All readers wanted was a series of very graphic, very gross sex acts. One after another..." [Geis, Richard E.: How to Write Porno Novels for Fun and Profit. Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend, WA. 1985. pp.12, 13.]
So in other words, the common wisdom is wrong. Porn isn't getting grosser. It already got about as gross as it was going to get, back in the 1980's. (And if you want to look around anyway, you're going to find some pretty graphic stuff, dating from the 18th and 19th centuries.) What has been getting grosser though, and right straight along ever since the 19th century for that matter, is mainstream culture, and this, I think, is a more interesting story to tell:
Did you know, that at the beginning of his career, Charles Dickens was considered a low-life writer, whose stories of vulgar life were not suitable for young ladies to read?
Dicken's first novel The Pickwick Papers, published in 1836, although it was charming and comical overall, turned dark toward the second half, with prison scenes that shocked middle class readers of the time with their realism. His second novel, Oliver Twist, published a year later, with its cast of fences, thieves, and streetwalkers, was considered even more shocking, and Lord Melbourne, Prime Minster, role model (and secret crush) of Queen Victoria, warned the young queen not to read it, because it dealt with "paupers, criminals and other unpleasant subjects". The young author was so horrified by this misunderstanding of his work, that he wrote a special new preface for Oliver, in which he laid out his intention in putting such low characters into his book, which was " to draw a knot of such associates in crime as really did exist; to paint them in all their deformity, in all their wretchedness, in all the squalid misery of their lives; to show them as they really were, for ever skulking uneasily through the dirtiest paths of life, with the great black ghastly gallows closing up their prospect, turn them where they might", because it was the TRUTH, and because by showing the ugliness of a life of crime, he hoped he might keep young people from romanticizing criminals.
After Oliver Twist, there were other Victorian works, of varying degrees of popularity, that also pushed the envelope in terms of subject matter. The Scarlet Letter, from 1850, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles, from 1891, both had stories that included premarital sex (it is a tossup as to which one would have been the more shocking to readers: Tess actually included a sex scene, of sorts, but on the other hand, in Scarlet Letter, it was a clergyman who did the dirty deed). And the entire story of Way Down East, a play from 1897, that was filmed in 1920 by D.W. Griffith, was about an unwed mother, who was thrown out of her father's home to die, and then rescued by the heroic young man who loved her despite her "shame".
The early twentieth century saw even more "shocking" material being released, such as Three Weeks by Elinor Glyn, which is the story of a Baltic queen who finds the meaning of life in her illicit love affair with a young English gentleman, and The Sheik by E.M. Hull, which is the story of a young English gentlewoman, who finds the meaning of life in her illicit love affair with an Arab prince (are we noticing a leitmotif here?).
For a while there, film could be quite frank in what it showed. Films like Intolerance, and Cleopatra, starring the infamous Theda Bara, dressed women in the barest minimum of costuming, with beads covering just their nipples up top, and a few skimpy draperies below, and for a while there, Cecil B. DeMille made quite a career for himself, with movies like Why Change Your Wife, Why Not Change Your Husband, and Old Wives For New. Then in the early 1930's, a lot of people got their brains melted when they went to see a German movie called Ecstasy, and managed to catch a vague glimpse of Hedy Lamarr's nipples in one scene, and of her bare buttocks in another scene, where she runs through the trees buck nekkid, kind of like a Bigfoot, only prettier, and the censors rushed in to clamp down on Hollywood.
These were the kinds of things that were blush-making in the thirties. Thereafter filmmakers had to be a lot more careful. Kisses had to be short, doubles entendres had to be kept short on the entendre (which put quite a crimp in the career of film queen Mae West), and sex could only be shown by implication, such as in the rape scene from Gone With The Wind.
People got to be pretty good at reading between the lines before film standards loosened up again in the 1960's. They knew what it meant when a movie took place in a women's prison, and why all those spinsters were so frustrated in Tennessee Williams movies.
At the same time though, this was when literature was starting to get freer and more vulgar. Relatively speaking, of course. This was the time Russell Kirk was talking about, when he spoke of people reading Ayn Rand's books "for the fornicating bits" (both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged contain overwrought little mini-scenes, where non-consensual sex turns out to be exactly what the heroine needs, to get her humming and happy with the world again). It was the era when mass-market paperbacks promised more than the censors would let them deliver, with titles like Dope Inc., and Musk, Hashish, and Blood, blurbs that promised to tell about young men who were tempted by the "twilight life", or so desperate to prove their manhood that they would "go with a prostitute", and covers where no matter what the story was, the young woman's top was always just a hair's breadth away from falling off completely, kind of like the girlfriend's in Menace Beach.
It was the heyday of Kurt Vonnegut's character, Kilgore Trout, when low-end publishers often sandwiched pictures of "wide-open, split beavers" in between science fiction stories, to keep from getting their magazines confiscated by the censors.
Then ten more years went by, and they were the important years of the swinging 60's. Films got more outspoken, and so did novels. I will never forget finding Frank Yerby's novel The Girl From Storyville, first published in 1972, and checking it out at my hometown library when I was 14: My mom tried to warn me away from that one; she told me I might find it "too adventurous" for my taste. Having had a chance to look into the book by that point, I made sure to play dumb, and told her that I liked adventure stories. There was no way I was letting go of a book as educational as that one was, with its sex-descriptions that were way more detailed than anything I had ever read before ("There's something infinitely sad and comical about a pair of small white feet waving in the air on either side of a lean brown rump, muscular as all get-out and hairy enough to justify Darwin, isn't there? And the motions -- pelvic writhe, partial withdrawal, total repenetration, buttock tension, thrust and heave (yet, in this case, somehow, always gently) are, let us admit it, more than a trifle absurd."), and its dark story of a girl who was so insecure of her father's love that she had to go out and degrade herself with every man she met.
I was innocent for a girl of my generation (or maybe I just read older books). I didn't read Scruples (famed for being the only thing besides the Bible that girls were reading in 1980) until the mid-80's. And I still haven't seen The Blue Lagoon (and having waited this long, I think I can survive the rest of my life without doing). But I did pay attention to what was going on around me, and I knew that the mass media was getting freer. Silhouette came out with a romance series called Desire, in which no girl got hitched without enjoying several long, explicit sexual romps with her true love beforehand. First cable TV, and then after that the internet, made video porn available right away, to anyone, without anyone else being the wiser. ...Frank Zappa recorded Sheik Yerbouti and it was supposedly "all about the music" (and not about the fact that he dropped the f-bomb every two seconds and talked about peoples' assholes) for crying out loud.
And now it is thirty years later. And what I notice is that things have sort of come full-circle, back to the wonderful days of the early 70's that Richard Geis talks about so lovingly. Hardcore sex is getting coupled with story again, maybe not in out-and-out porn writing, but in manga, and romantic novels, both het and gay-friendly, as well as in original stories, written by young girls, just for their own enjoyment.
A good example of this new kind of erotic storytelling can be found in the work of Sean Michael, author of gay-friendly romances, such as his "Jarhead" series. Michael's work is always extremely graphic (examples can be found: here), but there is heart to it. The characters are likable, and he takes the time to give them real events in their lives, and not always good ones, as well, instead of just hot, male-on-male action.
I like to think Richard Geis would be pleased, if he knew we were following in his footsteps again.
HyperSmash
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