How Has Porn Changed Through History?
Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
History Hit
4.8 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With Christmas around the corner and everything being oh-so wholesome, we thought we would offer an episode from the archives of something not-so wholesome: a history of porn.
What did porn look like before the internet? Who was it for? And how has it changed since?
In this episode, Kate chats to Kathleen Lubey, a professor at St. John’s University and specialist in eighteenth-century literature.
Kathleen talks us through the history of pornography… that is, the type of history that can’t be deleted.
Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Anisha Deva.
All music from Epidemic Sounds.
Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello again, my lovely betwixters. It's me. Do you remember earlier this year when we went |
| 0:04.6 | completely mad and we did a betwixt live show? Well, it went so well that we are now doing it |
| 0:10.7 | again next year. Only we are doing two shows. We have one in Edinburgh on the 23rd of May and one in |
| 0:17.6 | London Town on the 25th of May. And tickets are available right now, just in time for Christmas. |
| 0:24.3 | Go to Fanefanef.com.com.uk and search for Betwixt and we will see you there. |
| 0:30.3 | Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister, and you're listening to Betwixter Sheets. |
| 0:37.0 | Hello, thank you for choosing us above what |
| 0:39.7 | billions of other podcasts you could be listening to right now, some of them rather good. So thank |
| 0:45.1 | you for joining us again. But before we can go any further, I do have to tell you, this is an |
| 0:49.2 | adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in adultery way, and we'll cover a range of adult subjects. |
| 0:56.2 | You should be an adult too. Are you suitably warned? I think we are. Right, let's get on with it. |
| 1:05.6 | Porn. Hmm. It's kind of ubiquitous in our modern society, isn't it? There's people worrying about it. There's people watching it. There's people doing it. It's just everywhere and no one can seem to come up with a reasonable answer to any of this that keeps everybody happy. Who should be watching it? Who should not be watching it? Where should you be watching it? Who should be doing it? What should you be paying for it? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. |
| 1:28.5 | But what is porn? |
| 1:30.8 | And what was porn before the internet? |
| 1:33.4 | I'm sure that we're recalling grubby magazines |
| 1:36.0 | and porn found in hedges strewn around the countryside. |
| 1:39.3 | But what about before magazines? |
| 1:41.6 | What about before people could read widely? |
| 1:44.1 | What did porn look like then? Has it always been with us? |
| 1:47.7 | Well, today on Betwixt the Sheet, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. |
| 2:21.2 | One of the things that we love to do here on Betwixt is talk about perversions. I mean, we do, |
| 2:27.5 | really. That's why you're here too. And what is more perverted than punography? Well, quite a lot of things actually, but porn is pretty twisted. |
... |
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