Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The rule of prostitutes; dominating influence of courtezans.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A government by prostitutes, or a government dominated by them.
  • noun The period in the papacy known as The Rule of the Harlots, being about 30 or 60 years starting in 904 A.D.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

porn- +‎ -o- +‎ -cracy

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Examples

  • The pontificate of Sergius III was remarkable for the rise of what papal historians call a "pornocracy," or rule of the harlots, a reversal of the natural order as they saw it, according to Liber pontificalis and a later chronicler who was also biased against Sergius III.

    LT Saloon 2009

  • The nadir of the papacy (the “pornocracy”): the landed aristocracy of Rome, under the leadership of the senator Theophylact, his wife, Theodora, and his daughter Marozia (mistress of Pope Sergius III and mother of Sergius's son John, later Pope John XI), dominated the curia.

    f. The Papacy and Italy 2001

  • To the dissolution of marriage, the break-up of family life, free love, promiscuity -- in a word, to pornocracy.

    The Dominant Sex: A Study in the Sociology of Sex Differentiation, by Mathilde and Mathias Vaerting; translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul 1923

  • The supreme court ruling means a pornocracy is within our grasp

    Hartford Advocate: News 2010

  • The supreme court ruling means a pornocracy is within our grasp

    Hartford Advocate: News 2010

  • And, we ask, was it by the survival of the fittest that Julius Ceasar, [tr. note: sic] one of the grandest rulers of all ages, should succumb under the daggers of Brutus and Cassius: that Paul and Seneca should die by authority of their inferior, Nero; that Popery, rotten to the core and represented by men who would have brought on the ignominous [tr. note: sic] collapse or extinction of every other dynasty in the days of the Roman pornocracy, should survive, while the illustrious house of Henry I. sank away to ruin in the third and fourth generation; that John Hus should die at the stake and Jean Charlier de Gerson in timid monastic retirement, while

    Evolution An Investigation and a Critique Theodore Graebner 1913

  • "Suffering is necessary," answered the Moslem; "and I do not grieve at such an end to the pornocracy.

    Historical Miniatures August Strindberg 1880

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