These words refer to the expression or representation of sexual desire or lust. Smutty is the informal and pornographic the formal word for frank allusions to or portrayals of sexual acts. Both can refer disapprovingly to literature or art preoccupied with this subject matter: a smutty series of drawings; a pornographic novel; a smutty film. Both words imply work designed to invoke a leer or outright sexual arousal, often of a neurotic kind. Smutty is more general and more charged with a feeling of abhorrence; it can refer also to suggestive remarks or dirty jokes: He was constantly making smutty comments that embarrassed everyone in the room. By contrast, pornographic is a more technical term referring strictly to literary, art or photographic work. The word suggests something that has no redeeming social or artistic worth and is designed to arouse prurient feelings in the average person.

Bawdy and ribald may once have been as condemnatory as the foregoing, though they have always applied more widely to actions as well as to works or remarks. Now both may sometimes be used to characterize sexual behaviour or references that are frank or earthy, but not necessarily smutty . Bawdy derives from a word referring to a procurer or prostitute, as can still be seen in the phrase, bawdy house. But the word refers more widely to sexual behaviour that is exuberant, lively, riotous or promiscuous: a bawdy novel about Elizabethan England; a bawdy brawling, amoral hulk of a man. While bawdy may suggest good humour, ribald specifically stresses an approach to sexuality that is both comic and bawdy : the ribald stories in Balzac’s Droll Tales . In reference to behaviour, the word adds a note of with or merriment: a ribald party thrown by the jet set, at which strip-tease films were shown in mixed company.