July 23, 2007 | Sex & Society

Grandpapa's pornographic past

With every technological advance, people will find a way to alter it for more prurient pursuits. The Internet started as a useful tool to share information, and quickly became a money-making opportunity for porn entrepreneurs. And while once underwear covered almost every inch of flesh, it eventually dwindled in size to draw attention to, rather than conceal, one's naughty bits.

Even the lowly phonograph, the precursor to the record player, became an instrument for sexual stimulation in the late 1800s. No, people were not sticking their dicks into the large amplifier. But they were recording what amounts to some of the earliest examples of audio pornography.

Bruce Young collects memorabilia from these bygone days, and in 1997 he happened to find a series of cylinder recordings of young men sharing dirty poems. The NY Times was only able to reprint “I never had it but twice in my life/Make me, just for tonight, your dear little wife,” as the least offensive lines from "The Virtue of Raw Oysters."

These were highly objectionable collections for the proudly prude Victorian society, and very similar to what we may find in Hustler Magazine today. Men were imprisoned for making or selling these recordings. And the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice hunted them down and destroyed them in order to maintain people's sense of modesty.

"Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s" is a new CD that collects many of these poems, jokes and stories. Though the sound quality is poor, they could easily rival some of the wonderful smut we have at our disposal today.

"We have long thought of the phonograph as something that simply reproduced music," offered Patrick Feaster, as  co-author of the CD's liner notes. "But early uses of the phonograph were incredibly experimental. People were trying pretty much everything, trying to figure out what they could put on these recordings to make a buck, everything from hymns and prayers at one extreme to obscenity on the other end."

At least now we know why Grandpa's mattress looked so lumpy!

• Naughty recordings from the 19th century [The Herald Tribune]
• Deacon Foster's Pew [aol.com]
• Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s - with samples of recordings [Archeophone Records]