Erotica wants to lead talesmen on beyond where they ought to go, because they want to go there
Antisex
A long time ago, there were a bunch of crazy Jews. There were several of these crazies in different bunches, all lamenting the sorry state of Israel and blaming it on the wickedness of the Israelites, and foretelling that soon enough God was going to come and lay waste to His chosen people. Now one of these bunches went on to create a crazy cult that dominated all Europe for a thousand years. It dominates America now, because the Europeans in their Age of Explorations and Conquests, betook with them this crazy cult they call Christianity.
Now one of the hallmarks of Christianity is a hatred and repugnance for the human body, life on Earth, and most of all sex.
Jews can embrace sex, although there have been plenty of bunches of crazy Jews over the centuries that loathe sex. Muslims can also embrace sex, although there have been a few bunches of crazy Muslims over the centuries that loathe sex.
Christians loathe sex, and about the best that can be said of them is that there have been a rare few bunches of crazy Christians who embrace sex; also, that Christians over the past 500 years or so have been the biggest hypocrites of any cults going. I suppose this has saved them from going extinct (so far).
I am, as you probably guessed, a bit of an anti-cleric.
I see a difference, also, between a cult that prefers the ascetic, and one that hates the world and the human body and its pleasures, including sex. An ascetic cult like Hinduism, can say that abstaining from worldly pleasures is better than indulging in them, without saying that indulging in worldly pleasures is evil, which is what the Christians have said. It seems that in Hindu over the centuries a model of living developed in which men and women lived in the world, married, enjoyed food and drink and each other’s bodies, raised families, and then, in the declining years of their lives, withdrew from the world and all its delights, meditated, and sought oneness with whatever lay beyond. Under this model, no stigma attached to the part of life that enjoyed the world, and the withdrawal from life was not mandated — only admired.
The Sorry End
The cultural Puritanism of Christianity leaves me unsure whether erotica (which are tales whose main effect is the sexual arousal of their audience) is a lesser, weaker, or ‘degraded’ form of tales. Under the Christian regimes that have oppressed Europeans and their daughter-states, the happy sweet joys of sex have been condemned, forbidden, outlawed. This has created a great deal of tension, since something we all like and want is also taboo, and its enjoyment has been attended with various forms of cruel punishment. Erotic art of all forms, including erotic tales, has lurked at the margins, usually outside the law, clandestine, shameful, something to enjoy and then regret.
Erotica, then, has been unable (until quite recently — the past two generations only when it was freed, and only haltingly at that) to join in the common culture of tales. A tale could not be frankly erotic, even in some small passages; if it was so, it was forbidden, and condemned to a small, secret, illegal ghetto, where only works of pornography and erotica could exist. Either a tale ‘abstained’ from sex or it must, then, wallow in it wholly.
The sorry end of this trend is that a divide has sprung up between tales for the general audience, and tales that deal with sex. Over the past two generations this has begun to break down, but that is not very much time as cultural changes go, and the recent rise of the Christian fascists in an increasingly fascistic America has led to attempts to undo the latter advances in freedom, and push sex back into its outlaw underground.
Raunch and Titillation
When I look back over the pulp magazines of the 1930s through 1950s, I see a lot of titillation, what we could call ‘chaste erotica.’ There will be scantily-clad, even naked, damsels on the covers and interior illustrations, drawn abstractly, or in a ‘cheesecake’ style of coy hints and winks. In the same way the tales would hint at sex, and even ‘outrageous’ sexual practices, but never quite come to terms with it.
By contrast, once censorship in America was overturned in the courts (to all practical purposes), erotica quickly advanced to outright, honest, raunch: explicit and graphic portrayals in works that were pornography (art, and tales, that are mainly created with the intention of arousing their audience).
The Battle or the Slide
In between chaste denial of sex, and the open honest wallowing in it, there comes a period of great conflict. Talesmen (and their brother-artists of other media) would fight to deal with sex in slightly more honest, more open, and more central ways in their tales. Censors would confiscate books and magazines and throw a few ‘pornographers’ in jail. The public, meanwhile, was torn. Many enjoyed the new freedom, and didn’t see that they were hurting anyone; many enjoyed and felt guilt for it; many enjoyed and proclaimed boldly that sex was not only nothing to be ashamed of, it was something to celebrate. Many others feared, loathed, and were horrified at the new freedom, and did everything they could to oppose it.
Over the course of this battle (or slide into iniquity, as the crazy unhypocritical Christians would call it), talesmen had a lot of fun dealing with the legal limits of the time, and seeing how far they could push the censors. This required a great deal of wit, subtlety, and artistry. The suggestive became the byword of the time. It is often said that art flourishes when it exists under restraints that chafe it. This certainly applied to the time of the battle.
But once the battle was won, though the law had changed, the culture had hardly done so. The result was that pornographic tales still were penned within their (now-legal) ghetto, and ‘serious’ works of art and ‘popular mainstream’ tales could at best play the old sly wink-wink games they had before. Which proved unsatisfying artistically and commercially: those in the audience who wanted sex games could get them, ‘the real thing’ and honestly portrayed, in the low-class hack works of the porn ghetto; these folks found mainstream works that hinted and did not ‘deliver’ to be unsatisfying; at the same time, those members of the audience who still feared and hated sex, considered mainstream works that went too far ‘beyond the line’ to be ‘trash.’ At first there was some critical acclaim for ‘bold and daring’ talesmen who pushed their tales over the line, and courted prosecution; once sex was legal, there was less of the ‘bold and daring’ flag to claim, and less critical acclaim.
The Murky, Shifting Line
So here we are today. We talesman can play with sex, a little, but there is always that line that, dare we cross it, will condemn our tales to the porn ghetto, and exclude us from the mainstream. And finding where this line lies is no easy matter.
The line exists, as far as I can see, in three ways:
- The frankness with which certain acts are portrayed
- The nature of those acts
- The prevalence of the passages and scenes that portray those acts
The Frankness. In telling of a spade, just how close will the talesman come to using the word ‘spade’?
The Nature. There is a range of sexual acts that today’s society considers ‘normal’ and ‘healthy.’ (What acts we include in this range has been changing for 40 years.) Where we include a particular act as it is shown in a tale also depends on whether the talesman tells us the act is performed as part of a ‘loving relationship’ with respect on both (all) sides, or whether it is purely recreational, or done out of hate.
The Prevalence. Out of a 400-page novel, how many pages are given over to sex scenes? How many pages do those scenes last? How central is sex to the subject matter of the tale? Does the tale deal with much else besides sex, and if so, is the other matter subordinate to the sex, or is the sex subordinate to the other matter?
Each of us must pick and choose his way, guided by the examples of other (and mainly the most popular) works in our genre.
(Composed on keyboard Saturday, April 12, 2008)
No comments:
Post a Comment