- (This page is about the sexual subject matter. For the electronic act of the same name, see Pornography(2)).
Pornography (often abbreviated porn) is the portrayal of sexual subject matter for the exclusive purpose of sexual arousal. Pornography may be presented in a variety of media, including books, magazines, postcards, photographs, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, phone calls, writing, film, video, and video games. The term applies to the depiction of the act rather than the act itself, and so does not include live exhibitions like sex shows and striptease. The primary subjects of present-day pornographic depictions are pornographic models, who pose for still photographs, and pornographic actors or porn stars, who perform in pornographic films. If dramatic skills are not involved, a performer in a porn film may also be called a model.
Links To Peel[]
In an article published in February 1989 by Offbeat Magazine, Peel was asked what his views of pornography:
"I have genuinely never seen any hard pornography and don't want to. Someone used to send me a magazine called Whitehouse a couple of years back. It was like a butcher's shop window, or some medical journal and I found it not the least bit attractive. I tend to personalise things and think, how would I feel if my daughter had to make a living doing things like that?" [1]
His opinion on page 3 girls:
Samantha Fox
"In some ways, I think things like page three are worse, because there is a sort of phony moralising that goes with it which is very distasteful. I once had to review a film with Samantha Fox and I got the impression if she hadn't shown everyone her tits she would have been hard pressed to get a job on the checkout at Tesco's." [2]
Peel interviewed a soft porn actress, Ylva Maria Thompson, in 1993 as part of his programme called John Peel In Scandinavia, where he asked her about Tusen Och En Natt (Thousand And One Nights) and whether the contents of the erotic films on her programmes are violent towards women, which she replied as saying that they were artistic and not extreme.
After playing the Melys track Porn Myself in 2000, he revisited his opinion on the subject:
"I've never, to be honest with you, been terrifically into porn, or indeed seen a great deal of it, and I know that people always say, "I found it thoroughly amusing myself." But I did at one stage used to get sent magazines (this is absolutely true, you think, yeah, bet you did, you just went out and bought them, you dirty old brute), but somebody used to send me kind of softcore pornography and things, and I quite enjoyed them as much as anything for the kind of language they used, because they were a bit reluctant to use really rude words (not any longer, as it turns out, but back then they were), so that they were fairly kind of harmless, like "enpurpled", or "glistening" suddenly took on a totally different meaning. I rather liked that, those kind of circumlocutions, but as I say, they don't use them now." [3]
As if to prove this latter point, John invented the band name Flying Cream Shots by taking a photo caption from a Dutch pornographic magazine written by a friend he knew when living in Dallas.