Follow up question; what is the earliest example of something being porn and not just art? How can historians even tell?

Archaeologist here. It's entirely possible that they were pornographic - we can't know. We can't look into the minds of the carvers. They didn't write anything down for us to go off of. Everything that anyone can say about any piece of prehistoric art will always be just conjecture.

A lot of people believe that the Venus and related sculptures are fertility idols because of what they depict - pregnant belly, large breasts and wide hips, and that's it. No face, no or limited arms, no feet. It's a mother, not a nubile young woman. An idea I've heard that I always liked is that they are self portraits; depictions of what a hugely pregnant woman sees when she looks down at her body. We know that they were not easy to make (stone carvings made with stone tools are not a casual undertaking, or at least not something done in an afternoon), and that they must have been a labor of love no matter the purpose. Maybe the prettier porn ladies were carved from softer wood and have been lost to time? Who knows.

We can make guesses and we can try to justify our ideas, but ultimately we can never know. Anybody who says otherwise is a hack.

Art History student here. The Venus of Willendorf was definitely not a dirty gag gift, way too much skill and time went into it for that.

However, whether or not it's porn depends on your definition of porn. The best definition I can think of is "something to jack off to, but that has no other inherent value". By this definition, the Venus of Willendorf as well as the Bella Desnuda and Manet's Olympia are not porn. You could jack off to them, and I'm sure many did, but they also had artistic value, just because of the technique and time that went into them. So they would be on par with a Pedro Almodovar movie or the Titanic sex scene. Erotic, but not porn.

By this definition of porn, there was probably no porn in the stone age because the time and effort required to make a figure realistic enough to jack off to made it inherently worth more than that. Once we had pens and paper though, you do start to see what can definitely be called porn, crude drawings that are obviously intended for only one purpose... I'm not gonna find you any examples because I'm in the office with my mom.

So yeah, I'd say they were pornographic in some ways, but not necessarily porn. Porn wouldn't have survived this long. You think art students in the year 3000 will be learning about Madison Ivy?

I have a follow up question. This is regarding stories about the Venus of Willendorf from my art school that I'm not able to verify.

In class, we discussed aspects of Venus of Willendorf that suggested it's use in ritual. The ritual my instructors told me about related to Venus of Willendorf's pointed feet (or lack of feet). I was told the figures were ritualistically pushed into the dirt to encourage crop growth.

If this is accurate, it would relate to OP's question by suggesting a specific ritualistic use instead of an arousal use. Has anyone else ever read this?

Some of these were just self-portraits. There's a pervasive bias toward imagining that historical art was created by men or for men but in reality women created much of it. For example, many "fertility figures" such as the Venus of Willendorf appear highly distorted, giving the impression of being stylized. But when viewed from the right perspective they actually share the same appearance as when viewing one's own body, lending credence to the notion that these sorts of objects were predominantly created by women and primarily a representation of their own bodies.

[1] Toward Decolonizing Gender by McCoid and McDermott