It's immediately clear he's interested in more than having his coat cleaned. In Surprised by the Guard, from 1930, a French farm girl is doing laundry outside when a soldier suddenly saunters up through the trees. In The Horny Haberdashery, from 1921, a male customer is hardly in the door before he drops his neatly pressed trousers to join two female workers engaged in maneuvers that would greatly concern today's HR. These short films, mostly from France, get straight to business. Still, the footage is unmistakably vintage, with jumpy cuts and very little narrative structure. In flagrante delicto, in the last century. "People don't often consider the prevalence of erotic films back then, but they were quite the commodity," Pornhub says. Long before the sexual revolution, it turns out, porn stars in petticoats engaged in a lot of the familiar erotic endeavors you'd see in adult films film today. There are sex toys, same-sex interludes, threesomes, foursomes and more-somes. As early as the 1920s, the films show voyeurism, bondage, spanking and cosplay. In The Hairdresser, from 1905, a woman styles her tresses, topless, looking like a classical painting come to life.īut later films are far less restrained than one might expect of ye olde sexy times - and definitely not safe for (most) work.
For example, in The Undressing, from 1896, a Victorian woman dares to show her naked feet. Some of the earlier offerings are pretty chaste.
The collection of 20 films spans the late 19th century to the 1940s. It's a fascinating romp through erotic history that's by turns charming, funny, artful and eye-opening. "These films show us that human sexuality was alive and well in the early 1900s," Pornhub says.
Things are about to get steamy in the drawing room.įor its new Remastered project (warning: link leads to NSFW images), adult streaming-video website Pornhub has, with the help of AI, restored and colorized a series of vintage erotic films, some going back more than 100 years, and posted them online. If your idea of good porn involves a randy dandy macking on matrons of the local haberdashery, loosen your bow ties and unfasten your corsets.