The TGIF Sex Blog (Obscenity, Pornography, and Erotica)

¡Hola! Everybody...
As I mentioned yesterday, I will continue my exploration into the conservative mindset in the coming week. To me, the conservative mindset is a lot like a Chicken Little squawking about the sky falling down... LOL

Anyway, today it’s about that other conservative bugaboo: sex. ::grin:: I have finished the short story The Collazo Girls that I first started here and others titled Cinderella, Cocksucker, and Marialogue. Anyway, I might post snippets of these here on Fridays, see how they pan out...

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-=[ Obscenity, Pornography, and Erotica ]=-

“To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.”

-- Marquis de Sade

I’ve seen many, many blogs pretending to address pornography, but I have yet to see one grab the subject by the throat (or testicles). Pornography is a complicated phenomenon. There is the reality that pornography in the US cannot be separated from the political and legal battles for free speech and the First Amendment, and at the same time, it also and perhaps has always been a profitable business -- often controlled by organized crime.

Pornographic sexual imagery have ranged from profound explorations of desire -- as in Pauline Reage’s Story of O -- to typecast variations of sexual positions. The sexual explicitness of pornography ranges from soft-core images of attractive models posing or running in woods to gritty depictions of kinky sex acts in alleys. Pornography has been used to reinforce the most vulgar of stereotypes of sex roles, standards of beauty, and power dynamics and also has contributed to the education of desire. It is a fantasy machine or a form of conversation (discourse) about sex. And it can be all these things at the same time.

Some time between 1500 and 1800 in Western Europe, pornography become known both as a literary genre and as a category of knowledge about sex. The first pornographers were among the free thinkers, heretics, and libertines of the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras (I count them as my intellectual ancestors LOL). Obscenity and pornography from the beginning challenged the status quo. They challenged social boundaries between the classes, re-situated the location between what was deemed public and private, redefined social relations of the sexes, and -- most dangerously -- sought to undermine those in political and religious authority. Prominent figures of the French Enlightenment, such as Denis Diderot, occasionally wrote pornographic fiction to explore the meanings of male and female, pleasure and sensation, power and autonomy.

Obscenity, on the other hand, is the landscape upon which the legal and political battles have been waged. It was originally brought about by the Greeks in order to draw the line to between public and private use of sexual language and imagery. Classic Greek comedy, for example, was lewd and frequently used sexual and offensive language in order to make fun of and put down public figures, events, and even gods.

Freud, taking his cue from the classical definition, argued that the obscene remark or joke pulls off its shocking effect through the unspoken acknowledgment of sexual hang-ups in mixed male-female settings. Lenny Bruce (who influenced later comedians such as Richard Pryor among others) made a career pushing the envelope, transgressing borders which up to that point excluded explicit sexual speech. Even today, listening to Bruce’s routines can be an adventure. To paraphrase one commentator, the obscene word plays the function of exposing conventional conversation as a hypocrisy covering up sexual desire. And let’s not forget that by classical definition, the descriptions of President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky’s sexual activities in The Starr Report were obscene.

Modern-day legal battles have modified the meaning of obesity over the years. Some of the greatest works of literature were once censored as obscene. One of the greatest books ever, Ulysses, by James Joyce was banned in the US. As was Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Henry Miller is one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. The irony is his most important work -- Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn and his trilogy, Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus -- though written in the 30s and 40s was not published in the US until the early 60s because of its blunt language and its explicit accounts of sexual encounters.

No discussion of obscenity would be complete without Supreme Court Justice Brennan’s statement that “sex and obscenity are not synonymous... [obscene material] is material having a tendency to excite lustful thought.” In other words, the classical definition of obscenity has been transformed from referring to a boundary between public and private speech, to a form of speech that excites lustful thoughts. Brennan’s four part definition of obscenity has deeply influenced the legal battle over pornography: “[1] Whether to the average person, [2] applying contemporary community standards, [3] the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole [4] appeals to prurient interests.”

This battle over obscenity and pornography also created a public space, without which the sexual revolution would be difficult to envision, in which it became possible to discuss sex and to represent it both literally and visually.

Love,

Eddie