(1) A simple purpose? It is tempting to think of pornography as having only one, very rudimentary purpose: sexual arousal of the audience. But a look at very early pornographic works, those that were produced in France and England between 1500 and 1800, shows how misleading that conception is. Almost all pornographic works of that era deliberately used the shock of sex to criticize religious and political authorities (Hunt 1996: 35). With their truth-telling trope they were meant to function as a powerful antidote to the many forms of repression in society and often had the explicit aim to educate people about politics, religion, society, and of course, sex. It is not a coincidence that these books were known in 18th century France as “livres philosophiques” (they were considered just as dangerous to society as philosophical treatises) and that the rise in pornography around 1740 coincided with the hey-day of the Enlightenment (Hunt 1996; Darnton 1995). Quite a few of the pornographic novels of that time even carried the term “philosophy” in the title (think of Sade’s La Philosophie dans le Boudoir, 1795) and some of them were actually written by prominent philosophers who were keen to use this extremely popular genre to divulge some of their ideas to the masses (think of Diderot’s Les Bijoux Indiscrets, 1748).