Pornography
The presence of pornographic materials, writings, plays, and songs was prevalent in the American colonies, although what was then considered pornographic differs from that of today. There were few laws which addressed the word specifically, which has distracted some researchers from observing its presence. The colonial language used words such as lewd, lascivious, immoral, lustful, wanton, and so forth to describe what today would be called pornographic.
Benjamin Franklin both enjoyed and created it in writings and cartoons, often by disguising it within drawings or what would now be called graphics. Clergy warned against it from the pulpits, claiming that viewing pornographic materials would lead the miscreant to other, more serious violations of the law, including masturbation, which was considered to be immoral and also illegal. A young man named Samuel Terry of Springfield Massachusetts was fined and given lashes after being found behind the churchyard, “…chafing his yard to provoak (sic) lust,” driven to the offense by lewd thoughts arising from immoral speech.
A growing literature in the colonies germinated in colonial times against the immorality of slavery, and the prevalence of masters and overseers using female slaves for sexual purposes. This drew much of its material from the Islamic world, then called muhammedism by the Western world, with slaveowners entertained by harems selected for the purpose. Slave markets too were described in pornographic detail as the potential buyer examined females offered for sale.
Native American habits and behaviors were also distorted by writers hoping to titillate their readers, describing multiple wives living with their husband in the same lodge, with all of them engaging in sexual activity together, and with wives being traded back and forth among the men of the tribe. These accounts were often described as being from the records of French missionaries living among the Indians, and were used to further denigrate the Indians as savages practicing the sexual behavior of wild beasts, although the behavior was also graphically described.
Pornographic materials in the form of letters and pamphlets were also produced describing the breeding sheds of the southern plantations, where women were raped by men selected by the master in order to produce children. As much anti-slavery propaganda as pornography, these were produced for consumption of men in the North during the first emergence of the anti-slavery movement. Slavery was already becoming an issue of discomfort and debate in the colonies prior to the Revolutionary War, but pornography was not.
