If there ever was a cost-effective, mass-market literary and film genre with a limitless talent pool, it is pornography. An industry that breaks down the chauvinistic employment inequality, porn does for women what the industrial revolution did for child labour. With the potential to express oneself in creative and experimental ways, thousands of would-be smut artists are bending over backwards to lend a hand to an ever exploding market, often in the face of stiff competition.
Depicting nudity or sexual acts is nothing new. One look at a Greek and Roman art is enough to confirm they were a wang-out bunch who could handle some marble skin and layers of sultry drapery. The Greeks celebrated gods and goddesses involved directly with sex who were both raunchy and promiscuous. As for the Romans, who could be bothered engaging in demeaning acts with naked statues after a long day at the gladiators with a belly full of olives and wine?
Actually, that may not be completely accurate. Although most Romans did not participate in rampant grape-feeding orgies, they were definitely not prudes. The reality is that sex was not shameful or secretly consumed in front of the computer until Victorian England became utterly petrified about boobs. The word pornography was not even invented until a treasure trove of statues depicting multiple naughty position positions was discovered in – you guessed it – Pompeii.
The Victorian establishment decided to house-up these saucy artworks in an Italian museum, allowing only senior (male) academics access to them. Prudish restrictions of social interaction in order to rub out the unwholesome elements of the working classes, combined with the anonymity of city living lead to, ironically, an epidemic of prostitution in London. The argument that “neo-classical” art in the 1850s was indeed soft porn starts to sound less like feminist tripe when viewed in that perspective*.
Depicting nudity or sexual acts is nothing new. One look at a Greek and Roman art is enough to confirm they were a wang-out bunch who could handle some marble skin and layers of sultry drapery. The Greeks celebrated gods and goddesses involved directly with sex who were both raunchy and promiscuous. As for the Romans, who could be bothered engaging in demeaning acts with naked statues after a long day at the gladiators with a belly full of olives and wine?
Actually, that may not be completely accurate. Although most Romans did not participate in rampant grape-feeding orgies, they were definitely not prudes. The reality is that sex was not shameful or secretly consumed in front of the computer until Victorian England became utterly petrified about boobs. The word pornography was not even invented until a treasure trove of statues depicting multiple naughty position positions was discovered in – you guessed it – Pompeii.
The Victorian establishment decided to house-up these saucy artworks in an Italian museum, allowing only senior (male) academics access to them. Prudish restrictions of social interaction in order to rub out the unwholesome elements of the working classes, combined with the anonymity of city living lead to, ironically, an epidemic of prostitution in London. The argument that “neo-classical” art in the 1850s was indeed soft porn starts to sound less like feminist tripe when viewed in that perspective*.
Show me those earlobes you nasty slut.
Is there a horrid twist to this superficial obsession? Sex seems so bottled up that we have processed it into ultra-hardcore, three minute chunks like a bad chicken nugget. Has the male sexual association with photo-shopped Barbie dolls lead to labiaplasty and boob jobs? Or does the superficial image of women in the media reflect a horrid failure of female rebirth from the stereotypes of old? One thing is clear, the less sex is openly discussed and celebrated, the more it becomes deviance and smut in the infantile imaginations of the repressed.
* She was indeed the antithesis of all things graceful about women.
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