AHC: Earliest time for "adult" content to be acceptable in mainstream culture

I wasn't sure where to put this idea, since it could possibly stretch back to before the 20th century, but here goes.

When it comes to literature, plays, movies, and more, it was largely in the 20th century when racy content like profanity, violence, and sex gradually became more common in mainstream works. To put things very simply, the progression started gradually enough toward the early parts of the century; James Joyce's "Ulysses" caused a stir with some of its less-than-family-friendly content, movie audiences gasped when Clark Gable told Vivien Leigh that he, quite frankly, did not give a damn, and right in the middle of the century, "Catcher in the Rye" sparked controversy due to its profanity and depictions of the realities of teenagerhood. But this continued to change, and by about the 1970's, some of the most celebrated works in film, literature, music, and more featured racy material that wouln't have been acceptable years before.

Is there any way for this phenomenon to happen earlier/faster? What would it take for spicy language, violence, sexuality, and other racy material to be more or less acceptable in mainstream culture at an earlier time than OTL?
 
Well considering that many of the pre-chirstians ancients were quite chill with their sexuality and that the earliest tribes have been quite varied and egalitarian I'd have to say that it's always been around, just in various forms and scope.
 
None of them were trash. They were written in different times.
The problem is that the prudery of the Victorian Age was the reason that 'adult content' was more or less successfully banned from mainstream. Others did try something like that locally (Savonarola in Florence, the Puritans in England and in America).
 

NothingNow

Banned
Well considering that many of the pre-chirstians ancients were quite chill with their sexuality and that the earliest tribes have been quite varied and egalitarian I'd have to say that it's always been around, just in various forms and scope.

Hell, up until the Victorian era people were pretty chill about a lot of that, and regarding sex, it was a pretty normal thing, facts of life and all that, since it's hard to be squeamish about something if your parents do it in the family bed every night between sleeps.

Hell, even the puritains were like that. Bunch a horny fuckers probably got so hot and bothered over all that because the last thing they needed was someone getting all hot and bothered in Church and fucking there as well.
 
Simple. Have Victoria's Husband stay alive. Before he died she was for that time a very swinging lady. And Somehow butterfly away Reverend Bowlder were the word Bowlderism came from (Making stories and pictures safe for the kiddies and the like.
 
An interest fact is that some of the most stupid laws (e.g. that it is illegal to deflower a virgin) were made in the 18th century. And the Victorian Age also saw the imposition of Victorian morale upon other (non-European) cultures.
 
Simple. Have Victoria's Husband stay alive. Before he died she was for that time a very swinging lady. And Somehow butterfly away Reverend Bowlder were the word Bowlderism came from (Making stories and pictures safe for the kiddies and the like.

Boulder was doing the kids a favor; the stories he changed were, for the most part, completely unavailable to children in their original versions.
 
Boulder was doing the kids a favor; the stories he changed were, for the most part, completely unavailable to children in their original versions.
I doubt that he was alone responsible for the pruderity of the Victorian Age, because those changes did happen in all(?) European nations.
 
It's always been acceptable. Even at the height of the Victorian era and other such times, your 'average joe' would have been all in for brothels, drink and cursing. It's just that we get a skewed picture of culture because surprise surprise it was 'high society' who wrote such history and were the literate ones at the time, and so we only saw a fraction of societys 'acceptable culture'.

All we see today is that given (nearly) everybody in the west is literate, that we are just seeing the aspect of 'low society' in our popular media.

Thus there is no 'challenge' to this thread, just the OP being slightly ignorant of sociology and history.
 
You are correct. I believe that for movie, TV (and comics) the reason that adult content is not part of the mainstream can be found in the Hayes code (and of corse in the creation of the comics code (for comics) in 1950s). Adult content was always part of mainstream art and was again part of mainstream literature after Victorian morals have been left behind.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
The first animated cartoon was about a mouse with a large penis.

In one of the early Tarzan movies, Tarzan wears a lot less clothes than you would see in mainstream movies until the 1970's. Jane swims naked in a pool. The code was put in as a response to the early times in the 1950's, and we just pretend it did not happen.

As to a lack of porn, brothels used to fill the role. You can look up TR days as police chief to see how wide spread it was. He claimed 4% of women were prostitutes, which in today greater NYC would be 400K active hookers. In many states, it was during the women sufferage period that brothels were outlawed. Why watch a film when you can just rent a 2-bit whore. At a 25 cents a trick, this is about 25 dollars adjusted for inflation. If there were brothels through the USA and the average hooker charge 25 USD, there would be a lot fewer men using porn.

Or you can read the old Greek comedies.

Most of the "sexual virtue in the past" is a myth, made up by old men and women who don't want to tell their children what they did as youths.
 
A stronger backlash against Prohibition and fundamentalism in the 1920s-early 1930s might have prevented the Hays Code, allowing movies to gradually get more explicit by the end of the 1930s.
 
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