From corruption to perversion: sexually explicit imagery, forensic medicine, and sexual psychopathology (1862–1927)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Inventories of commercial imagery considered obscene or pornographic were first seen in the latter half of the 1900s, in the form of grass-roots initiatives by European public morality protectors Ludwig Kemmer, Louis Comte, and Comte’s disciple Émile Pourésy. Research became a coordinated exercise in Germany in the 1920s, led by Berlin detective superintendent Detloff von Behr. These hostile inventories speak to the practical historical interrelation between demarcations of the obscene and the perverse. Despite perennial allusions to its corrupting nature, neither producers nor consumers of explicit photography acquired a robust profile in early twentieth-century sexual psychopathology and sexology more generally. Beyond the perennial appropriation of medical epithets by moral hygienists, pornography was long denied the status of a forensic psychological problem. It was the early trailblazers of the anti-obscenity movement who mobilized the nineteenth-century diagnostic parlance of sexual derailment (sadism, satyrism, perversion, erotomania); in response, polemicists diagnosed prudes as cases of erotophobia and pornolagny. The German contributors highlighted the existence of a diversified ‘perverted’ content and Von Behr showed the greatest aspiration to thus extend the subject’s salience for forensic psychiatry, although he ultimately earned little recognition in ensuing discussions, whether of public decency or sexual psychology.