From: "Kenneth MacKendrick"
** That neighbours' coveted one ass or another is not pornographic... it has to do with property relations and property rights. My point was that in general "sex" was related to fertility, not to enjoyment. The Biblical text is rather clear that it should be the expectation of women that "sex" will often be coerced; the viewpoint is entirely male.
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CB: How about the "adulterers" ? Hard to see that as a property or fertility relationship. Fornicators ?
Anyway, it doesn't take the majority. If a minority had secular sex and some of them used depictions or poems about sex for pleasure, then ain't that "modern" pornography ?
A lot of modern pornographers are male supremacists, no ?
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** BTW --> I'm not arguing that people didn't have sex, I'm not arguing that people didn't experience lust, I'm not arguing that people got drunk and took off their clothes... I'm just saying: pornography as a genre is theorised (by some) is probably modern. And the question I had was this: is the advent of pornography linked to modern notions of political economy (public and private sphere), secular surveillance (panopticon), and masculine power (fraternity). I have no doubt that people all over the world have been masturbating for some 5 million years.
Ken
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CB: Well, yea. You've made it a tautology, by defining "pornography" in terms of linkage to "modern notions of political economy", which by definition means nobody before modern political economy could have "pornography". Of course, there was masculine power before modern times, and one might suspect it played a role in sex and representations of sex. Do you think people had sex in public all the time before the modern era ? I don't know about that.
I guess if you want a political economic differentiation, modern pornographics are commodities ( fetish in a different sense :>), maybe ?); old stuff probably wasn't commodities as much.