by Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com Porn For Women
As some of the most anti-porn critics tell the tale, it’s tempting to conclude that America was just walking along one day in the early 60s, minding its own very chaste and fundamentally decent Judeo-Christian business, when demon-possessed, raincoat-wearing sleazeballs like Reuben Sturman emerged like horny, four-legged fishmen from a primordial, wantonly sexual ooze, toting along with them sexually explicit short films originally created by suspicious, wild-bearded Italians like Lasse Braun.
The truth is that porn goes back just a bit further than that – you know, roughly to the first time some pioneering pre-homo sapiens sapiens biped realized that he could scratch pictures into a rock using another rock? (Unfortunately, that quasi-simian visionary’s work was brutally panned by early critics, who complained that it objectified cavewomen, and lacked both artistry and taste, setting a pattern of critique that continues to dog pornographers to this day.)
This week, there’s a story out of the UK that serves to remind us that – no shit! – humans enjoying dirty pictures is nothing at all new. Not surprisingly, the story also reminds us that embarrassment and shame over our enjoyment of dirty pictures is nothing new, either.
Read on…
Back in 1962, there was a fire at the “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese” pub (no, I didn’t make that name up) which, in addition to tragically destroying a lot of valuable, life-sustaining hard liquor, also revealed hitherto concealed tiles that dated back to sometime in the 18th Century.
Faced with such a momentous and historic discovery, the people who found the tiles did the only sensible thing they could: immediately wrapped them up and locked the tiles inside a vault to protect the British public from their corrupting and ruinous influence. (Nope, I didn’t make that part up, either). Flash forward over 50 years, and the now rediscovered tiles are on display at the Museum of London – but only as a late night exhibit, from which anyone under the age of 18 is barred. (Again, I shit thee not.)
This whole story is so delightfully and unavoidably British, somehow. Here we are, in an age when just about every living person knows that hardcore porn is not just readily available but nigh unavoidable online, and the London Museum seriously sees it necessary to restrict access to a set of explicit reliefs, the likes of which wouldn’t even elicit a titter of laughter from the modern schoolboy? Hell, all these tiles would elicit from a schoolboy at this point would be a yawn – followed perhaps by a Tweet reading: “Strolling the London Museum with history class, looking at lame old sex carvings. #BoredToFuckingDeath”
While the museum’s exhibit and the circumstances of its discovery remind us that explicit depictions are nothing new, they also speak to a real disconnect between the social norms that we attempt to cling to in the Western world and the realities of the Internet Age. On the one hand, we nearly insist that every person old enough to grasp a smartphone be surgically connected to one, and then encourage them to share every detail of their mundane daily life with the rest of the world. On the other hand, we selectively hyperventilate over the prospect of minors being exposed to nakedness, even as we literally put in their hands highly convenient Internet access tools.
I’m not saying that we should give up on the idea of sustaining some notion of youthful innocence, or make Deepthroat required viewing for Ms. Johnson’s 5th grade class, just that when it comes to sexually explicit tiles made in the 18th Century, there might be more historical value than corruptive influence with respect to the high school-aged kids for whom human naughty bits are not exactly an abiding mystery.
In other words, once your 16 year-old has discovered PornHub, maybe letting him view Michelangelo’s David uncensored wouldn’t be that big a deal? (Just a little food for thought.)
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