25, 000 Years of Erotic Freedom  

"Prior to this point, when mass production first became a possibility, erotic culture had existed only in the private realm of artists and collectors, which in public terms is much the same as saying it did not exist at all. The church had never previously adopted a position on pornography, simply because there wasn’t any, and was relatively slow to recognize it when it finally showed up. By William Blake’s day in the last half of the eighteenth century, contemporary London was awash with fuck-books and salacious prints of all varieties, including such essential publications as a best-selling directory of whores that introduced the phrase ‘as lewd as goats and monkeys’ to the English language, meant apparently as a recommendation, as a Regency equivalent to Michelin’s four stars. It’s also worth remembering the late 1700s as the era during which, in France, the Marquis Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade began to use outrageous, violent, scatological and frequently intensely dull pornography for the first time as a blunt instrument for social satire, finding in society’s great squeamishness about its carnal impulses a vulnerable underbelly that was open to attack." -- Alan Moore