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From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
What they are depends, as usual, entirely on the individual. What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.
The word itself, we are told, means ’pertaining to harlots’ — the graph of the harlot. But nowadays, what is a harlot? If she was a woman who took money from a man in return for going to bed with him — really, most wives sold themselves, in the past, and plenty of harlots gave themselves, when they felt like it, for nothing. If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule. And probably most harlots had somewhere a streak of womanly generosity. Why be so cut and dried? The law is a dreary thing, and its judgments have nothing to do with life. --D. H. Lawrence, “Pornography and Obscenity�?, This Quarter, 1929, July-August-September. Vol. 2 #1, pp. 17-27.
