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2 Responses to “figleaf totally has to read this post”
That’s actually very thoughtful of you, Sapho! Although, of course, I’m not the only one who should take a look because it really is pretty interesting.
I do know that one big difference between today and 100 years ago is that people still believed that the “loss” of a single ejaculation, even during intercourse with one’s married partner, was as harmful as losing a pint of blood. And took nearly as long to recover from!
Vaudeville and burlesque was also big 100 years ago and then, rather like today, the men involved were usually caricatures. Back then they were often mockable, standing in as surrogates of those who wanted sex but still felt nervous about loss of “precious bodily fluids.” Today, I think, the machine/business-like men of porn might stand for contemporary men’s anxieties about homosexual self-misidentification.
Those old images aren’t quite as benign as they appear to contemporary eyes, but they really do point in a great direction.
100 years ago we were still pretty involved in the (hard to believe today) belief that women could actually have sex with very few physical or medical consequences (social being obviously another story altogether), men who ejaculated “as often as” once a month were likely to die very young. (Sounds insane to our ears, yes, but back then mainstream doctors held that one ejaculation was equivalent to losing one pint of blood!)
Anyway, even knowing that the foolish-looking men and laughing women were slightly less socially integrated in their time than they seem from our perspective, from our perspective I think Nina’s on to something. If there is to a humanist pornography, as she proposes, then it’s probably going to have a whole mix of emotion and experience instead of just the two permitted by contemporary anxieties about sex and sexuality.
I like the premise of the post, though, which is that *if* there can be humanist pornography it would probably more closely resemble the porn of then than the porn of now.
November 19th, 2007 at 8:59 am
That’s actually very thoughtful of you, Sapho! Although, of course, I’m not the only one who should take a look because it really is pretty interesting.
I do know that one big difference between today and 100 years ago is that people still believed that the “loss” of a single ejaculation, even during intercourse with one’s married partner, was as harmful as losing a pint of blood. And took nearly as long to recover from!
Vaudeville and burlesque was also big 100 years ago and then, rather like today, the men involved were usually caricatures. Back then they were often mockable, standing in as surrogates of those who wanted sex but still felt nervous about loss of “precious bodily fluids.” Today, I think, the machine/business-like men of porn might stand for contemporary men’s anxieties about homosexual self-misidentification.
Those old images aren’t quite as benign as they appear to contemporary eyes, but they really do point in a great direction.
100 years ago we were still pretty involved in the (hard to believe today) belief that women could actually have sex with very few physical or medical consequences (social being obviously another story altogether), men who ejaculated “as often as” once a month were likely to die very young. (Sounds insane to our ears, yes, but back then mainstream doctors held that one ejaculation was equivalent to losing one pint of blood!)
Anyway, even knowing that the foolish-looking men and laughing women were slightly less socially integrated in their time than they seem from our perspective, from our perspective I think Nina’s on to something. If there is to a humanist pornography, as she proposes, then it’s probably going to have a whole mix of emotion and experience instead of just the two permitted by contemporary anxieties about sex and sexuality.
I like the premise of the post, though, which is that *if* there can be humanist pornography it would probably more closely resemble the porn of then than the porn of now.
November 19th, 2007 at 9:00 am
Oh, and thanks for the head’s up!