This is an email of mine. I was having a long email conversation with my CTY friends about many controversial topics. We went from gender roles to homosexuality to gun control to drinking age to the age of consent to pornography, at which point one guy got a little too offended at the idea. At some point, we got to the topic of erotic art. My little essay is so explicit, it got blocked by someone's spam filter and I had to reverse the text so the filter wouldn't recognize it.
If you're totally wtf-grossed out by the topic, that's your problem.
For the erotic art... It kinda depends on what counts as erotic. And that is relative. Take the example of a girl's thighs. If you can see them because she's lifting up her skirt, that would be pornographic, but if you can see them because she's wearing a swimsuit, that could count as art.
But that's not universal. Take a Wahabi (meaning, fundamentalist Muslim; we learned that today) to the pool and he'd either avert his eyes at the shocking sight, or start drooling. In the customs of fundamentalist Islam, all female skin is supposed to be hidden; therefore, showing any skin is pornographic.
Whereas in some European countries like France, it's quite common and nonsexual to see the bare breasts of a sunbather. To them it's just a normal thing to do, nothing to get excited about - so they don't get excited about it. However, when people wear suggestive clothes, even if they cover more than what a sunbather wears, they have the same response as we do.
At the extreme, we have nudist colonies. They treat the human body as natural and something to be proud of. To them, unless you're having sex, the naked body is not a sexual thing. I guess it boils down to this: Exposed body parts are sexual if and only if sex is the only reason they would be exposed. That seems obvious now, phrased in this way, but... here we are.
I'll put it in an even more general form: By definition, stuff is pornographic iff [this means "if and only if"] it suggests the act of sex. In our culture, you almost never see a naked woman for nonsexual purposes. Hence, to us, a picture of a naked woman is automatically porn, but to a nudist, not necessarily.
How does this apply to erotic art? I think it's basically like this: You have a painting that shows a woman who's naked for some nonsexual purpose. Someone who considers it art will just say "Hmm, a naked woman doing [whatever she's doing in the painting]." Someone who finds it erotic thinks "Hmm, a naked woman that I'd like to...". Since both interpretations are possible, depending on the mood of the observer, it is erotic art.
I think erotic art is basically the blurred line, the middle ground, the nonexistent unbiased news source (remember the hostile media effect? People on each side of the Lebanon conflict thought the news was biased towards the other side?). Those who think erotic art is porn are usually the ones who think porn is bad, and those who think it's not porn are probably also more tolerant of porn. So both sides will probably go for each other's throats, each righteously believing that the other has crossed the boundary - because they, by definition of which group they belong to, see the boundary in different places. Gleh, I'm a cynic. But there you go.
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5 comments:
the sad thing about reading your essay is that I actually found myself thinking about it afterwards. XD
This actually all makes pretty good sense, but I would just like to comment that even though you hear of a lot of Europeans sunbathing au naturale, it is actually illegal in almost all of the beaches there, it's just that they don't enforce the law.
You imply that erotic-ness and sexuality are bad things. Or at least very very touchy (pun intended), and it is different from other forms of, "beauty".
A reason why some (mostly women) wear suggestive clothes is because they feel that implying sex is a form of beauty, because everyone can understand that feeling of want. Likewise, when art has a naked woman, it's often trying to project that this woman is beautiful, and just showing a pretty face isn't enough (to get the audience going).
Scopi - Well, for a lot of people, like (I would imagine) school administrators, anything involving sex is BAD IMMORAL EVIL. There was this guy, Saint Augustine (lived around 400 AD), who said that sex was a necessary evil needed to propagate the human population. Since then, the Christian Church has been really uptight about sex. As most Americans are Christian, a lot of our policies come from that.
Have you heard of abstinence-only sex ed? That's one of these holdovers from the Dark Ages. The depiction in Mean Girls is pretty accurate: "If you do touch each other, you will get chlamydia. And die."
Yeah, Americans are too uptight about such things. And I am too! (I've gotta stop!)
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