Alan Moore - 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom

I bid him come towards me and give me his letter, at the same time throwing down, carelessly, a book I had in my hands. He colourd, and came within reach of delivering me the letter which he held out, awkwardly enough, for me to take, with his eyes riveted on my bosom, which was, through the designd disorder of my handkerchief, sufficiently bare, and rather shaded than hid.

Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
JOHN CLELAND (1749)

25,000 YEARS OF EROTIC FREEDOM

W HETHER WE SPEAK PERSONALLY or palaeoanthropologically, its fair to say that we humans start out fiddling with ourselves. Our improved scan technology reveals that most of us commence a life of self-pollution while in utero, and if we trace our culture back to the first artifacts that showed we had a culture, then we find ourselves confronted by a hubcap-headed humming-top of tits and ass carved lovingly from limestone, excavated from an Aurignacian settlement discovered in a northeastern Austrian village known as Willendorf.

The mighty Robert Crumb, back in his awesomely prolific Weirdo days, depicted the creator of the first Venus of Willendorf as Caveman Bob, a neurasthenic outcast with a strong resemblance to Crumb himselfperpetually horny, crouching in his cave, and whacking off over the big-butt fetish woman he had just made. Homo erectus.

Crumbs point, in all probability, was that while she may well have functioned as a magic icon to induce fertility, and while to modern eyes she stands as an example of the prehistoric genesis of art, the Willendorf Venus was an object of arousal in the eyes of her creator, a piece of stone-age stroke materialprimal pornography. He may also have been saying that if we trace culture to its very origins, we find its instigator to be an obsessive smut-hound and compulsive masturbator much like Crumb himselfor me, or you, or any of us if we are to be entirely candid.

Humans, whether individually while in the womb or as a species newly climbed down from the treetops that we had shared with kissing-cousin bonobos, discover early on that sexual self-stimulation is a source of great gratification, practically unique in our experience as mammals in that it is easily achievable and, unlike almost every other primitive activity, can be accomplished without risk of being maimed or eaten. Also, it can be acquired completely free of charge, which may well be a factor in societys subsequent attempts to regulate the sexual imaginationa point to which well return later.

This is not to say, of course, that all society is a direct result of chronic onanism, although I can see how one might come to that conclusion. Rather, it is to suggest that our impulse toward pornography has been with us since thumbs were first opposable, and that back at the outset of our bipedal experiment we saw it as a natural part of life, one of the nicer parts at that, and as a natural subject for our proto-artists.

Lest this be seen as a reinforcement of the view that porn is wholly a Neanderthal pursuit, we should perhaps consider ancient Greece and the erotic friezes that adorned its civic centersthe magnificently sculpted marble figure of the god Pan violating many of our current barnyard statutes and a really slutty nanny goat in the bargain. Images such as these were clearly seen as eminently suitable Grecian street furniture, depictions of an aspect of mammalian existence that all mammals knew about already and were comfortable regarding, and which no one from the youngest child to the most pious priest needed protecting from. In bygone Greece we see a culture plainly unperturbed by its erotic inclinations, largely saturated by both sexual imagery and sexual narratives.

We also see a culture where these attitudes would seem to have worked out quite well, both for the ancient Greeks and for humanity at large. They may well have been hollow-eyed and hairy-palmed erotomaniacs, but on the plus side they invented science, literature, philosophy, and, well, civilization, as it turns out.

Sexual openness and cultural progress walked hand-in-hand throughout the opening chapters of the human story in the West, and it wasnt until the advent of Christianity, or more specifically of the apostle Paul, that anybody realized we should all be thoroughly ashamed of both our bodies and those processes relating to them. Not until the Emperor Constantine had cut and pasted modern Christianity together from loose scraps of Mithraism and the solar cult of Sol Invictus, adopting the resultant theological collage as the religion of the Roman Empire, did we get to witness the effect of its ideas and doctrines when enacted on a whole society.

If we take a traditional (and predominantly Christian) view of the collapse of Rome, then conventional wisdom tells us that Rome was destroyed by decadence, sunk beneath the rising scumline of its orgies and of its own sexual permissiveness. The merest skim through Gibbon, on the other hand, will demonstrate that Rome had been a heaving, decadent, and orgiastic fleshpot more or less since its inception. It had fornicated its way quite successfully through several centuries without showing any serious signs of harm as a result. Once Constantine introduced compulsory Christianity to the Empire, though, it barely lasted another hundred years.

Largely, this was because Rome relied on foreign troopson cavalry from Egypt, for exampleto defend the Empire against the Teutonic hordes surrounding it. Foreign soldiers were originally happy to enlist, since Rome at that point took a pagan and syncretic standpoint that allowed recruits to worship their own gods while they were off in northern Europe holding back the Huns. Once the Empire had been Christianized, however, that was not an option. Romes new Christian leaders decided that it was their way or the stairway, and so consequently, off in distant lands, recruitment figures plummeted. The next thing anybody knew, there were barbarians everywhere: the Huns, the Franks, the Visigoths, and worst of all the Goths, with their white contact lenses and Cradle of Filth collections. Rome, effectively, was over, bar the shouting.

So, to recap what we have learned so far: Sexually open and progressive cultures such as ancient Greece have given the West almost all of its civilizing aspects, whereas sexually repressive cultures such as late Rome have given us the Dark Ages.

Let us fast-forward past almost a thousand years of Saxons, Danes, and Vikings ripped on fly agaric pillaging and raping their way through some sort of meteoric nuclear winter with brains dripping from their axes, howling about Odin and blood-eagling anybody who chose not to do the same. When lights eventually started to come on again across the Western world, we find a Christian church thats understandably concerned about attracting worshippers to its rough-hewn pewsand that had hit upon the notion of erotic art as one way of accomplishing this end. The spread-legged figure with a splayed vagina found crouched in the masonry of many medieval British churches, misidentified as a Sheelagh-na-Gig, as a leftover mother-goddess from some earlier religion, was in fact of purely Christian origin and was originally intended as an image representing Lust. If the folklorists had looked harder then they would have almost certainly found similar depictions of Wrath, Gluttony, Sloth, Avarice, and all the other deadly sins, although that petrified and gaping pussy does tend to seize more than its fair share of the attention, which is probably no accident. In churches of that period, displays of pornographic imagery were not at all uncommon, nor were they by any stretch of the imagination unintentional. Pictures of people copulating were a big draw when it came to pulling in the congregations, after all, and were not sinful in themselves if they could be explained away as warnings to the faithful: stern moral instructions to describe the shameful acts that, were they actually committed, would result in certain hellfire and damnation.