Pornology

A timeline on pornography in the United States

1934 - The Hays Code, a Catholic code established to combat sexuality in motion pictures, becomes official. A film would be marked "condemned" if an inch of thigh was showing.

June 16, 1940 - Louis "Butchie" Peraino Sr. born

Jan. 5, 1948 - Alfred Kinsey publishes Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.

Jan. 10, 1949 - Linda Boreman (aka Lovelace) born

1950 - Burlesque films are born, with pasties and fishnet stockings

1951 - In The Sexual Revolution, Wilhelm Reich elaborates on the relationship between social repression and sexual repression by examining how the family and conservative sexual morality stifle political freedom

1951 - Smart Aleck, starring Candy Barr is made. Known as the first blue movie, it is sometimes referred to as the Deep Throat of its day

1953 - Playboy founded by Hugh Hefner after he was reportedly inspired by the 1948 Kinsey Report on male sexuality

1953 - Alfred Kinsey publishes Sexual Behavior in the Human Female

1954 - Garden of Eden, filmed in a nudist camp, is barred from New York and taken to court on the grounds of "unwholesome sexually alluring positions"

Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, approaches Gregory Pincus, a gynecologist, about the necessity of a birth control pill

1956 - Gregory Pincus, along with two other doctors, successfully conducts the first trials of an oral contraceptive with 60 female volunteers

1957 - Judge rules in favor of the Garden of Eden, saying "nudism in itself, and without lewdness or dirtiness, is not obscenity in law or in common sense"

1957 - Wilhelm Reich dies. A protégé of Freud's, Reich explored how social institutions limited sexual fulfillment, saying that the complete orgasm was the sign of health

1959 - Russ Meyer directs The Immoral Mr Teas, a movie about a hero who is cursed with the ability to mentally undress any woman that crosses his path

Late 50s - Norman Mailer begins writing The Time of Her Time, a work in which he seeks to capture the historical moment about to emerge. "Coming out of the orgy of the war," Mailer wrote, "our sense of sex and family was torn in two."

May 9,1960 - US Food and Drug Administration approves the first oral contraceptive for women

1960-62 - More topless comedies released: Nude On The Moon, The Monster & the Stripper, Goldilocks and the Three Bears. and BOING-G-G-G

1962 - Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown becomes a bestseller. The book offers candid advice on fashion, sex, love, career, and entertainment. The most controversial aspect of the book is not only its stress on the positive aspects of unmarried life, but on the importance of sex

1963 - The Feminine Mystique, written by Betty Friedan, is published

March 22, 1963 - Gerard Damiano's hair parlor opens in Queens, NY

1964-1966 - Kinky (mild S&M) movies, like Satan in High Heels, give way to "roughies" like The Defiler and Love Camp 7.

March 1964 - The first public screening of Andy Warhol's Blowjob takes place at Ruth Kligman's Washington Square Gallery.

1964 - "The Second Sexual Revolution," an article defining the first sexual revolution as happening in the years following World War I, is published

June 25, 1964 - The Vatican issues a condemnation of the birth control pill

1965 - The Rolling Stones song "Satisfaction" hits the radio

1965 - Helen Gurley Brown appointed editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan

1965 - "America's Best Kept Secret" (from The Erotic Revolution by Lawrence Lipton) explores couple swapping. The book argues that a minority of people have broken out of the "Old Morality" and that the New Sexual Morality was changing the way people live, conduct courtships, marry, and divorce

1966 - LSD becomes illegal. It gains popularity in the late 1960s, though usage in the United States will peak in the mid 1970s. Some studies suggest that 7.2 percent of US high school seniors report using it at least once a year.

1966 - "The Female Orgasm" (from Human Sexual Response by William Masters and Virginia Johnson) is published. Their research demonstrates that women could achieve sexual fulfillment independently of sex with men, and that women are capable of many more and deeper orgasms.

1966 - Mondo Freud (The World of Freud) released. The film is banned in Tennessee in 1967

September 1966 - Lou Peraino Sr. is arrested for the first time at All-State Film Lab.  Charges were later dismissed because of "insufficient evidence to warrant search and arrest."

-Ashley York