What is pornography.? If you lived before the middle of the 19th century your answer would have been very different than one of today. Pornography, the way we view it, hasn't always existed. The word itself originally had a completely different definition The word pornography was coined from two ancient Greek words
πόρνη (pórnē "prostitute" and πορνεία porneía “prostitution")
γράφειν (gráphein "to write or to record", derived meaning "illustration", as in “graph”)
thus meaning "a written description or illustration of prostitutes or prostitution”. Keep in mind that there is no judgement here, just a description. Some descriptions and some illustrations may have been a bit erotic, some may have been extremely erotic, but the definition of the word says nothing about the erotic or obscene nature of anything in this category. Our modern idea of Pornography is not even generally a naturally occurring idea. Many cultures don't have a concept of pornography.This new idea is typically seen as an invention of Victorian science. The discovery of sites like Pompeii and Herculaneum and the Europeans interactions with other less sexually repressive cultures in the East, was profoundly important in the history of the term. The sexually explicit artifacts that were unearthed and the renderings of those artifacts, were a problem. The portrayals of sexual contact or even actual intercourse on the walls of the temples encountered by European travelers to India were a problem. Other more creative explicit descriptions or illustrations of anything sexual soon became a problem. The development of photography and the relative ease of printing made the wide proliferation of this material inevitable and that most definitely was a problem. Not only were these things problems, they were dangerous. Because they were dangerous they needed to be controlled. The easiest way to control them was legislation. The panicked response to this type of art began a process which would culminate in the legal prohibition of sexually explicit material which today we describe as pornography. Sometime in the mid 1800s the word pornography began to take on a new meaning. In 1842, the word referred to an "ancient obscene painting, especially in temples of Bacchus." In 1857 the English Obscene Publications Act was enacted at the urging of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. The Act, which applied to the United Kingdom and Ireland, made the sale of obscene material a statutory offense, giving the courts power to seize and destroy offending material. Soon after this, the meaning of the word pornography was quickly expanded to include all forms of "objectionable or obscene material in art and literature". As early as 1864, Webster's Dictionary defined the word bluntly as "a licentious painting” They couldn't destroy artifacts, they couldn't deny them, so they locked them away. This new concept of pornography helped facilitate the hiding away of these and other certain "harmful" things. If you could label something as pornography then you had a good reason to eliminate it or at least keep it hidden from public view.