-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Jon Johanning
> Checked out any excavated Roman bedroom walls or floor mosaics lately?
*** Roman floor mosaics were probably for fertility... Whatever such images were about, it wasn't pornographic in anything but the most banal and generic sense. Certainly not part of the pornographic genre.
Ken quoted Dr. Hunt:
> Until Sade, sexual imagery was used primarily for other political or
> religious purposes:
> fertility, regicide...
I'm sorry, but anyone who thinks that people weren't consuming pictures and text to get off on them long before Sade is suffering from a serious case of academic tunnel vision -- I don't care how impressive her credentials are.
*** You're missing the point. Hunt's position isn't that people didn't get off before Sade, but that pornography as a kind of autonomous "form" of writing / depiction didn't exist until rather recently. It certainly wasn't consumed the same way until men had private space and leisure time in addition to secularisation of sex. Feeling guilty about masturbating is one thing, but believing that an elder god is going to destroy your crops if you waste your seed is another. As Peter Brown once wrote - it was an age went people bent at the knee, not just for other people but to gods and goddesses. Have a look at any of the writings on purity and impurity and sexual pollution. These folks weren't kidding around. If your deity tells you to eat your dead, you eat your dead. In short: think genre. Just because it looks the same today as it did 2600 year ago doesn't make it the same.
I am relying on the following definition of "pornography."
1 : the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement 2 : material (as books or a photograph) that depicts erotic behavior and is intended to cause sexual excitement (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary)
*** Does that exclude anything? That kind of definition is fine for Merriam-Webster, and perhaps the author of the next bestselling anthology of erotic whatever.... but it really lacks a degree of discrimination. No doubt the Song of Songs is pornographic according to this definition, but so is every single other fertility ritual ever performed or written about. I think we should distinguish between the 32 year old jerking off to Andrew Blake and the recently married couple who sacrifice a pig to the local spirits while reading some sort of racy hymn written in the 6th century.
best, ken