They say there are only two things certain in life. Death and taxes. Although I am not about to query the certainty of death, I am aware of many people who don’t pay their taxes.  What I am not so aware of, however, are people who don’t have a kinky bone, repressed or otherwise, in their body. We exist to pass on our genes. We also, rather helpfully, have a predisposition for visual arousal. Enter pornography.

As far back as 30,000 years ago, Paleolithic people carved numerous thick-thighed, mammoth-breasted figurines and the odd floating disembodied vulva into stone, although these tantalizing images are widely believed to have been intended for purposes of religion, rather than pure arousal. Fast forward a few thousand years to ancient Greece, and you couldn’t pick up a ceramic goblet without your lips coming into contact with some skillfully painted man-on-man action, or the silhouette of an aquiline profile buried between the thighs of a winged mistress.  Depictions of homosexuality and group sex – an act known in ancient India as ´the congress of a herd of cows´, according to one particularly charming translation from the original Sanskrit of the Kama Sutra – were also prevalent in public art. One such sculpture depicts Pan, the half-fawn god of fertility and flocks, engaging in a spot of the good ol´ missionary position with a large hirsute goat, right hoof cocked coquettishly by its open mouth. It was considered so obscene that it was first displayed in 2000 and remains in the Secret Museum of Naples. Indeed, the Victorians who rediscovered Pompeii in the late 18th century, who had seen themselves as intellectual heirs of the Roman Empire, were horrified to discover such images as the graphic paintings in brothels that served the dual purpose of advertising specific services and inspiring clients, as well as the omnipresent phallus street engravings that dutifully pointed in the direction of such establishments.

By the Medieval period, the explicit had merged seamlessly with the religious, as Carry On-style scenes of horny monks and naughty nuns graced the margins of holy illuminated manuscripts inspired, presumably, by a get-your-money´s-worth mentality as it was usually the only book people owned. With the invention of the printing press, however, pornography was instantly democratized, exposing the masses to such enlightening lines as Aretino´s´both in your pussy and in your behind, my cock will make me happy´, as well as to a new medium of social criticism – revolutionary France was positively awash with discrediting images of Marie Antoinette engaging in orgy after fantastical orgy.

And now of course we have infinite access to erotic material, not least via the internet that grants us access to all manner of pixilated titillation and lets us wiggle anonymous genitalia at each other via high-speed connections any time, anywhere. Far from the earliest pornographic daguerreotype images, which, due to the long exposures required often took the form of strangely un-sexual genital-exposing stills, we now have a plethora of all-humping, all-squelching, all-spurting sexual material at the click of a mouse. Pornography has moved form the streets of the ancient world to the home computer screen, with no little engraved phalli telling us where this global phenomenon is headed.