pornography

Figure of Magdalenian man at Ribeira de Piscos

The above figure is discussed in an article by J. Angulo Cuesta and M. García Diez entitled ‘Diversity and meaning of Palaeolithic phallic male representations in Western Europe‘. (See also article ‘Cave paintings show aspects of sex beyond the reproductive‘.) The figure is said to be ejaculating.

In his book The Nature of Paleolithic Art Dale Guthrie discusses rock drawings of this kind (though not necessarily this drawing) as a kind of graffiti. An article at livescience, ‘Ancient Cave Art Full of Teenage Graffiti‘, provides a brief introduction to Guthrie’s book.

The art of ejaculation continues to be celebrated at Garmskiss, and, in an entry at the blog {feuilleton}, John Coulthart has gathered together some great pictures of art, both old and new, that depict ejaculation in all its glory.

In the meantime graffiti has moved on. The new graffiti can be seen at the site Wooster Collective.

On cave art more generally, Matthias Schulz observes in ‘Pornography in Clay‘ at Spiegel Online:

The walls of the La Marche cave in western France are literally blanketed with erotic images, 14,000-year-old drawings reminiscent of the Kamasutra. One image of a head plunging between a woman’s thighs seems to portray oral sex. Another shows a standing couple, their bodies entwined, while the man’s penis penetrates his partner.

Nowadays we are more likely to find such depictions in books, films and on the internet than on the secret walls of our cities - with the notable exception of the backs of toilet doors!

For more prehistoric erotic art fun see also Adonis from Chernitz / Lake Constance. Also see Historia del arte erotico.

This blog operates under the motto of ‘virtue, happiness and erotica‘. I contend that we are currently living in an age where, in the West, happiness is the guiding principle, having displaced virtue around the end of the 1700s. While the timeline is somewhat more complex than that, I happen to come from a society where, after around 1830, there can be little doubt that most of the institutions were built from a foundation of Benthamite happiness rather than the old model of virtue - be it the virtuous citizen, or the virtuous aristocracy. Virtue was important to happiness, but happiness was primary.

Soon I will be posting chapters from John Adams’ “Sketches of the History, Genius, Disposition, Accomplishments, Employments, Customs, Virtues, and Vices, of the Fair Sex in All Parts of the World, Interspersed with Many Singular and Entertaining Anecdotes,” published in 1807. The advertisement page (directly after the title page) declares the guiding principle of the book to be:

“Virtue alone is happiness below—”

According to this motto (is ‘motto’ the right word?) virtue is primary, happiness follows. In fact Western history can be understood as a battle between virtue and happiness, with virtue having been the primary guiding principle for most of the last 2,500 years.(1) Epicurus v Stoicism, and also Epicurus v the Platonic philosopher king, who is a character of ultimate virtue (think the Pope, or a monarch).

In Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye there is an episode that occurs in a church in Seville. The priest, a representative of the culture of virtue, is thoroughly destroyed and desecrated by three characters (trinity!!??) indulging in a lusty pursuit of the culture of pleasure. (The politics of happiness are (broadly) built on the idea that we pursue pleasure for our happiness, and are (generally) repelled from that which causes us pain.)

Here is the relevant text. I put it up believing that it will not destroy the book for you. The book is short and masterful and would itself survive any desecration!

One can readily imagine my stupor at watching Simone kneel down by the cabinet of the lugubrious confessor. While she confessed her sins, I waited, extremely anxious to see the outcome of such an unexpected action. I assumed this sordid creature was going to burst from his booth, pounce upon the impious girl, and flagellate her. I was even getting ready to knock the dreadful phantom down and treat him to a few kicks; but nothing of the sort happened: the booth remained closed, Simone spoke on and on through the tiny grilled window, and that was all.

I was exchanging sharply interrogatory looks with Sir Edmund when things began to grow clear: Simone was slowly scratching her thigh, moving her legs apart; keeping one knee on the prayer stool, she shifted one foot to the floor, and she was exposing more and more of her legs over her stockings while still murmuring her confession. At times she even seemed to be tossing off. I softly drew up at the side to try and see what was happening: Simone really was masturbating, the left part of her face was pressed against the grille near the priest’s head, her limbs tensed, her thighs splayed, her fingers rummaging deep in the fur; I was able to touch her, I bared her cunt for an instant. At that moment, I distinctly heard her say:

“Father, I still have not confessed the worst sin of all.”

A few seconds of silence.

“The worst sin of all is very simply that I’m tossing off while talking to you.”

More seconds of whispering inside, and finally almost aloud:

“If you don’t believe me, I can show you.”

And indeed, Simone stood up and spread one thigh before the eye of the window while masturbating with a quick, sure hand.

“All right, priest,” cried Simone, banging away at the confessional, “what are you doing in your shack there? Tossing off, too?”

But the confessional kept its peace.

“Well, then I’ll open.”

And Simone pulled out the door.

Inside, the visionary, standing there with lowered head, was mopping a sweat-bathed brow. The girl groped for his cock under the cassock: he didn’t turn a hair. She pulled up the filthy black skirt so that the long cock stuck out, pink and hard: all he did was throw back his head with a grimace, and a hiss escaped through his teeth, but he didn’t interfere with Simone, who shoved the bestiality into her mouth and took long sucks on it.

Sir Edmund and I were immobile in our stupor. For my part, I was spellbound with admiration, and I didn’t know what else to do, when the enigmatic Englishman resolutely strode to the confessional and, after edging Simone aside as delicately as could be, dragged the larva out of its hole by its wrists, and flung it brutally at our feet: the vile priest lay there like a cadaver, his teeth to the ground, not uttering a cry. We promptly carried him to the vestry.

His fly was open, his cock dangling, his face livid and drenched with sweat, he didn’t resist, but breathed heavily: we put him in a large wooden armchair with architectural decorations.

“Señores,” the wretch snivelled, “you must think I am a hypocrite.”

“No,” replied Sir Edmund with a categorical intonation.

Simone asked him: “What’s your name?”

“Don Aminado,” he answered.

Simone slapped the sacerdotal pig, which gave him another hard-on. We stripped off all his clothes, and Simone crouched down and pissed on them like a bitch. Then she wanked and sucked the pig while I urinated in his nostrils. Finally, to top off this cold exaltation, I fucked Simone in the arse while she violently sucked his cock.

Meanwhile, Sir Edmund, contemplating the scene with his characteristic poker face, carefully inspected the room where we had found refuge. He glimpsed a tiny key hanging from a nail in the woodwork.

“What is that key for?” he asked Don Aminado.

From the expression of dread on the priest’s face, Sir Edmund realised it was the key to the tabernacle.

The Englishman returned a few moments later, carrying a ciborium of twisted gold, decorated with a quantity of angels as naked as cupids. The wretched Don Aminado gaped at this receptacle of consecrated hosts on the floor, and his handsome moronic face, already contorted because Simone was flagellating his cock with her teeth and tongue, was now fully gasping and panting.

After barricading the door, Sir Edmund rummaged through the closets until he finally lit upon on a large chalice, whereupon he asked us to abandon the wretch for an instant.

“Look,” he explained to Simone, “the eucharistic hosts in the ciborium, and here the chalice where they put white wine.”

“They smell like come,” said Simone, sniffing the unleavened wafers.

“Precisely,” continued Sir Edmund. “The hosts, as you see, are nothing other than Christ’s sperm in the form of small white biscuits. And as for the wine they put in the chalice, the ecclesiastics say it is the blood of Christ, but they are obviously mistaken. If they really thought it was the blood, they would use red wine, but since they employ only white wine, they are showing that at the bottom of their hearts they are quite aware that this is urine.”

The lucidity of this logic was so convincing that Simone and I required no further explanation. She, armed with the chalice and I with the ciborium, the two of us marched over to Don Aminado, who was still inert in his armchair, faintly agitated by a slight quiver through his body.

Simone began by slamming the base of the chalice against his skull, which jolted him and left him utterly dazed. Then she resumed sucking him, which provoked his ignoble rattles. After bringing his senses to a height of fury with Sir Edmund ’s help and mine, she gave him a hard shake.

“That’s not all,” she said in a voice that brooked no reply. “It’s time to piss.”

And she struck his face again with the chalice, but at the same time she stripped naked before him and I finger-fucked her.

Sir Edmund’s gaze, fixed on the stunned eyes of the young cleric, was so imperious that the thing went off with barely any hitch; Don Aminado noisily poured his urine into the chalice, which Simone held under this thick cock.

“And now, drink,” commanded Sir Edmund.

The paralysed wretch drank with a well-nigh filthy ecstasy at one long gluttonous draft. Again Simone sucked and wanked him; he continued gurgling desperately and revelling in it. With a demented gesture, he bashed the sacred chamber pot against a wall. Four robust arms lifted him up and, with open thighs, his body erect, and yelling like a pig being slaughtered, he spurted his come on the hosts in the ciborium, which Simone held in front of him while masturbating him.

In the next chapter things get even more extreme for the priest.

With a wonderful symmetry all this occurs in Seville, the same location as for Fénelon’s golden age society in Télémaque (Telemachus) (Vol 1, p150), written in 1699, one of the most influential political works during the following century. Télémaque is all about the virtuous ruler, and Fénelon’s golden age in southern Spain is the ultimate virtuous society. Note that Fénelon is one of those referred to in the above Advertisment.

Many thanks to Jahsonic for introducing me to this book via his wiki, art and popular culture. At his entry on Bataille he states: ‘ Along with Gilles Deleuze, Bataille is a patron saint of this wiki.’ Rightly so.

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(1) There is a nice little use of the virtue/happiness dichotomy in Alexander Dumas (père), Pictures of Travel in the South of France, London, Offices of the National Illustrated Library, p 109 (no date, but the travels were between 1834 and 1836, and the book was originally published in French around 1842 ):

[After seeking refuge from the rain at an inn at St. Péray, on the road between Vienne and Valence, Dumas and his travelling companion Jadin, prepare themselves for the dubious benefit of some house wine, having previously that day sampled a very pleasing hermitage.]

[The inn] was full of people who, caught like us in the storm, were treating themselves to some nice looking white wine, and waiting for the storm to pass over. While we were drying our clothes, Jadin and I looked at each other to know whether we should do the same. The hermitage we had drank in the morning prepared us badly for the wine of a public-house; however, as the external damp went off, we felt the necessity of warmth inside. We therefore determined to ask our hostess, half from necessity and half in payment for her hospitality, for the usual bit of bread and cheese and bottle of new wine, which were brought us immediately. In all doubtful cases, like the present, it was always Jadin who sacrificed himself. He half filled his glass, held it to the light, turned it round, examined it in every way, and, satisfied with his inspection, raised it to his mouth with more confidence. As for me, I followed his movements with the anxiety of a man who, without putting himself forwards, must share the good or bad fate of his travelling companion. I saw Jadin silently taste his first mouthful, then a second, then a third, then empty his glass and fill it again, all without uttering a word, and with an increasing astonishment which had something religious and grateful about it. Then he began to try it again, with the same precautions, and appeared to finish it with the same enjoyment.

“Well!” said I, still waiting.

“True happiness is only to be found in virtue,” answered Jadin, gravely; “we are virtuous, and heaven rewards us; taste the wine.”

The pictures you see below are early 19C pornography, by Rowlandson. Francis Place wrote a little about how pornography was sold around 1780s, even to children.

Francis Place was born on November 3, 1771, and died January 1, 1854. He became wealthy from his tailoring business and devoted the latter part of his life to politics. Here he writes of the pornography that was available in London in the 1770s and 80s:

Obscene prints were sold at all the principal Print Shops and at most others. At Roach’s – in Russell Court where Play books and school books and stationary were sold, Mrs Roach used to open a portfolio to any boy and to any maid servant, who came to buy a penny or other book or a sheet of paper, the portfolio contained a multitude of obscene prints – some coloured some, not, and asked them if they wanted some pretty pictures, and she encouraged them to look at them. And this was done by many others. This was common to other shops (Add.MS 36625, f. 8)

Page 51 The Autobiography of Francis Place, ed by Mary Thale, Cambridge University Press, 1972.

A book which covers some of this territory is:

City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London by Vic Gatrell

Miscellaneous pictures at Wikipedia.

Variety of themes at artandpopularculture, particularly history of erotic depictions.

See the essay Romanticism, Materialism, and the Origins of Modern Pornography by Bradford K. Mudge in which the following pictures are used, but note that these are from the early 19C - click on picture for full size version:

Above: Rowlandson illustrations for early 1800s edition of Jean Barrin’s 1683 Venus in the Cloister.

Rowlandson - Family on a Journey Laying the Dust

Rowlandson - The Ride to Rumford

Rowlandson - The Jugglers

Rowlandson - Lonesome Pleasures

Rowlandson - The Harem

Rowlandson - The Pasha

Rowlandson - Cunnyseurs

Rowlandson - Pygmalion

Illustration from Juliette by the Marquis de Sade.