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Sparkle (2)
A while ago, I figured out that the best way to deal with the gym workouts that my broken neck require of me (as opposed to what I used to call "real" workouts, doing real things in the real world,) is to watch TV and movies on my iPod. Today I watched the first two hours of a truly interesting documentary about the history of porn as it relates to the history of civilization.
The other thing that came from my broken neck workouts are extremely modified movements, intended to eliminate jostling of and impact to my neck. As such, though I used to be an avid runner, I have now developed a strange no-impact gait. It must be very funny looking, like someone running in slow-motion, with an exaggerated long gait, deep bends, exaggerated movements happening slowly. In order to make it more challenging, I often "run" sideways and backwards, which has proven to be an excellent workout.
The gym is crowded, as it always is on Sunday. I am engrossed in my porn documentary. I am intensely fascinated with the way sexual power is used to control, enslave and sometimes liberate people. It fascinates me in one-on-one relationships, it fascinates me in how sexual manipulation is used to control people, it even fascinates me in terms of how organized religion uses it to enslave people into turning their own personal sexuality into a sort of fuel that serves the church instead of the individual.
As such, looking at how porn has developed, from the earliest cave drawings to internet chat rooms, fascinates me.
What I hadn't thought about previously was the origin of the word. Indeed, although graphically sexual art of all forms has been around since the dawn of civilization, it wasn't considered to be any different from any other art and was displayed and discussed the same way. The word porn didn't exist until the Victorian period, faced with a sudden political need to hide sexual images from society (and drive people into the pews as a way to amass "armies" for a religious war that would define political power.)
Specifically, it was a reaction to Pompeii. It seems that when the buried city of Pompeii was discovered, so was the largest collection of porn you can imagine. This revered civilization revealed houses with graphic depictions of sex on nearly every wall of any house. Painted onto the walls, not well-hung on them. The social standing of a person could be judged by both the quality and the quantity of these artworks - especially "fine" people even had the paintings placed on their servants quarters, even if those quarters were usually in the rear, of the house. There were statues of people engaged in all manner of sex acts in public squares, including one of the most famous pieces of erotic art in existence, a marble statue of Pan having sex with a goat.
Needless to say, given the era of this discovery, these works of art were all scuttled immediately into a secret room in the back of a museum in Naples. The last thing that anyone wanted, as we all descended into what would eventually lead to a Puritan revolution, was to see sex celebrated as something that everyone did, in lots of ways, and was as natural as eating, breathing and making art in the first place.
It was around this time that the word pornography came into being, with the sole purpose of protecting people from images of sexuality that may cause them to not think clearly, or... The political and academic discussions around the word, and the future legislation that would use the word in order to censor artistic expression for centuries to come, focused on the idea that people needed to be protected from images that tapped into their sexual energy. Because, it seems, people
