Vintage VR Porn: French Brothel Edition
A year ago in this space I wrote an overview of early virtual reality porn history. Naughty stereoscopes offered an early 3D porn viewing experience. Early pornographers made and sold a lot of this stuff!
A blogger I lost track of years ago bought these particular porn stereoscopes on eBay. The buyer scanned them and put them online in dribs and dabs over more than a year. As far as I know, this is the first time they all appear in one place. For what it’s worth, the buyer believed that the photos were French in origin, featuring French sex workers in the 1930s.
This is reasonable. The further back in time you go, the closer the association between porn and sex work. I mean, modeling for porn truly is a form of sex work. But lots of pretty-young-thing porn models don’t see it that way. And they may never do in-person sex work. But if you go far enough back in time, brothels were legal in many places (or at least tolerated by well-bribed police). Making porn? Not so much! That may be the reason that a lot of early photographic porn is seen to be published in settings that resemble brothels. We may presume that a brothel was the easiest place to find women who were willing to get paid for the erotic service of posing for dirty pictures.
Are these particular porn stereoscopes all by the same photographer, or taken in the same place? There’s no evidence except clues in the images themselves. At least some of them look to be from a common source, shot in the same place. There’s a lot of fun to be had, if you like that sort of thing, in comparing faces and lingerie and wallpaper patterns, trying to discern if the different photos are from the same photographer or the same brothel. (If you’re into it, click the images for the original, twice-as-big high-resolution scans, where such fine details show rather better.)
We would typically assume that a happening French brothel would be in Paris, or another urban setting. How, then, to explain that some of the photos in this set features bucolic nature scenes? It’s impossible to say, but the lingerie argues that these are not rural French farm lasses recruited at the village market during a Sunday motor-car picnic expedition.
My guess is that our heroic photographer passed around enough francs during his brothel photoshoots that his next suggestion was persuasive. Ladies, will you go for a drive with me to the countryside? I’ll bring my camera! It will fun, I promise, and you’ll be very well paid…
You will have noticed that a few of the related indoor brothel photos feature a flagellation scene and spanking or whipping poses. Can you spot the whip marks on at least one of the models in the outdoor scenes? For so long as there has been porn, some of it has been kinky! What this implies about human sexuality, I shall leave as an exercise for the reader…
