>The issue isn't whether a big change happened in modern times -- who
>would would deny that an explosion of printing presses would produce
>an explosion of porn? -- but whether porn existed before capitalism.
Representations of penises, vaginas, sexual intercourses, etc. in pre-capitalist societies that bourgeois Westerners, upon discovery, regarded as obscene and pornographic, i.e., to be separated from other aspects of human experience and thought, were not so regarded by denizens of pre-capitalist societies:
***** Just as we are today, the citizens of Pompeii were surrounded by images of sex, on tavern signs, street corners and in the domestic interior. As the Classical art scholar John R. Clarke has noted, `Here was a world before Christianity, before the Puritan ethic, before the association of shame and guilt with sexual acts.' Revealing their own prejudices, the early excavators reasoned that the erotic murals and artefacts could only derive from brothels. The finds confirmed the realisation -- already clear from the literary sources -- that the antique world was characterised by a quite different social and moral code from that of nineteenth-century Europe with its increasing onus on privacy and manners. Similar problems afflicted imperial Britain's encounter with the indigenous cultures of its colonies in India and the Far East. Here, in its monumental religious art, particularly its temple reliefs, heaven was depicted as a highly sexualised place, whereas the Victorian celestial vision -- with its strong Judeo-Christian legacy -- was entirely chaste in character.
<http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1373/9_50/65160638/print.jhtml> *****
Images of the sacred in Indian temples, mundane decorations in the city of Pompeii, etc. came to be classified as "pornography" by bourgeois Westerners who projected their modern category onto the pre-capitalist past. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>