Euphemisms tend to lose their protective magic at a fairly rapid rate. Like Sisyphus, the moralists can never seem to to carry, drag or otherwise schlep that ball to the top of the mountain and give it back to its owner. Modern prudery. Are we living in the twenty-first century, or do we remain somehow anchored in the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth-century with trial by ordeal, when they killed women for being witches if they were unlucky enough to have floated after being pitched into a pond, lake, or river, or unable to spit coins of precious metal when stood on their head. It seems there is always some organized interference with other people’s pleasure.
Too many kill-joys were here and not enough Killroy’s.The various stripes of prudes are obsessed by an expansive awareness of the vast amount of unregulated pleasure that is being enjoyed around them; commonly referred to as sin. You have to wonder to some extent, whether all the gossip sites are in part constant and frustrating reminders of the reader’s own frustration and unhappiness; a sort of impulse to punish their tormentors and themselves. As television preachers and self-styles moralists have found out, often to their own embarrassment, they have little chance of ever making sex uninteresting.
http://i12bent.tumblr.com/post/295689410/allen-ginsberg-from-that-same-piece-in-life-on
And what kind of thing were the censors objecting to? You name it. Anything that disturbed the status quo, politically or morally.Now, this all might seem of historical interest only – but it is not. Cast your mind back to Britain’s the Brass Eye furore, When government ministers condemn a television program they have not seen, and right wing columnists jerk their knee in the same way the National Post in Canada did over the Jennifer Peto thesis.Remember that there are still a lot of tiny minds out there who want to control what we watch and think about; and in particular how we think about it. We have some deplorable ancestral karma to shake off… still.Prudery, as we know it, is fear and hatred of pleasures, primarily of sexual pleasures…
James Panero: ...I do not care to cast aspersions on the great Janson. But for me, a close-up investigation into Greuze—and Greuze demands further investigation, the details are so abundant—always throws these sermons into shades of moral doubt. In Broken Eggs, what do we make of the tiny bow and arrow resting on the barrel beside the boy (James Thompson has suggested he is a plainclothes Cupid)? If this is only a scene about virginal guilt, why have most of the eggs remained intact, including one now rolling over to the boy’s right foot? In the interaction between the parents, what is the father saying? Is it possible that he is trying to calm the mother, not chastise the daughter? And what about the expression on the young woman’s face? Yes, this is a meditation on erotic abandon. But the daughter alternates between contemplation and shame, her emotions broad-ranging, her expressions entirely unclear and far from didactic. http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/eroticprudery-panero-1877
THE CURIOUS WANTON
(By Thomas Rowlandson)
Miss Chloe in a wanton way
Her durgling would needs survey.
Before the glass displays her thighs
And at the sight with wonder cries,
“Is this the thing that day and night
Makes men fall out and madly fight ?
The source of sorrow and of joy
Which King and beggar both employ?
How grim it looks, yet enter in,
You’ll find a fund of sweets begin!”
"A true history of folk verse would long ante-date the bible, which in itself in the original tongues comprised merely a long record of tribal copulations and superstitions, along with an extensive assimilation of previous phallic and solar religions. We are not told today that there are at least nine different gods referred to by the biblical writers, nor that the ark, our altar, represents the vagina and contained a phallus. (SYMBOLISM IN RELATION TO RELIGION, OR CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM by James Ballantyne Hannay; Kegen Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd. London, n. d.; c. 1912, 394 pp.)"http://www.horntip.com/html/books_&_MSS/1940s/1945_folk_poems_and_ballads_%28HC%29/
“The Puritans and other intolerants by their processes of expurgation have succeeded in concentrating the basic human matters treated here to the point of virulence, thus making their complete suppression as impossible, as it is unnecessary. Only by ignoring things like excretions and copulation can their effect on our literature and our mores be diluted, and restored to the true proportion normally found in the lives of every kind and tolerant individual. …that false social customs, and NOT the obvious so-called pornography, are the causes which produce the sex maniac in the too-sheltered or psychologically ill. (SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN MALE by Alfred C. Kinsey, 1948, )
Ferlinghetti. 1950. City Lights Books. "Earlier the church suppressed and altered the holy writ, and exercised the same inconsistent censorship on literature now practised by the state under the manifold disguises of the law. During the middle ages the church's hypocritical jargon hypnotized the so-called civilized world. What resulted? The Dark Ages, ignorance, death, disease, and the Inquisition: historical symbols of the church's heyday! When the Elizabethans began to throw off the clerical yoke, truth began to re-establish itself, and the people began to produce the ancestors of the folk songs found in this book. Life tended to return to the healthy, the sane, the whole, and civilization moved forward toward a scientific understanding of matter, if not of man, dragging the church along with it like a piece of toilet paper clinging to a lady's skirt as she emerges from retirement. "http://www.sfnorthbeach.org/gallery/main.php/v/historic/Ferlinghetti_Banned-Books.jpg.html
…”The ‘satanic abuse’ hysteria was particularly appalling, but
r after year in America prudery exacts a terrible toll – as witness the unfortunate female schoolteachers packed often to prison with hefty sentences for having affairs with boys in their mid to late teens.
Is America permanently lodged in the 17th century so far as moral policing is concerned? The answer is Not exactly, since gay marriage wasn’t a big item on the legislative agenda of the colonies at that time. But regulation of sexual behaviour is the preferred route to wider social control. The control of sex and pornography is a major part of promulgating a puritanical political culture without ever imposing overt political censorship. Sexual repression, often through the allegation of ‘deviant’ fantasy crimes, is the designated stand-in for violations of the social order that are hard to crush in a courtroom. (Alexander Cockburn )
“Certain academic researchers have found , basically,( no surprise here) that authoritarians show especial sensitivity about sexual matters. Kelley found that high scorers on a balanced version of the F scale were more loath than low scorers to be shown pictures of masturbation. This finding would appear to fit well with the psychodynamic explanation of authoritarianism proffered by Adorno et al. (1950), but there is a much simpler explanation….. Sexual prudery was a prominent component of the Adorno et al. account of authoritarianism. Kelley, in other words, was simply rediscovering what Adorno et al. said in 1950.How is the Adorno/Kelley finding of an association between authoritarianism and sexual prudery to be explained? …
Whatever the academics, and pundits say; we are living in a period of relative enlightenment and ambiguous tolerance despite attempts today to equate fear of sex with numerous new second and third tier euphemisms like saving the planet, the war on drugs, terrorism, new diseases, etc. in which valid issues are appropriated, and manipulated into reactionary new forms….
Read More:
http://www.horntip.com/html/books_&_MSS/1940s/1945_folk_poems_and_ballads_%28HC%29/
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/eroticprudery-panero-1877
http://jonjayray.tripod.com/kelley.html
ADDENDUM (PICKWICK EXTRA):
“Furthermore most if not all of these poems are witty or funny, and since humor has a completely depressing effect on the erotic sense, one makes himself ridiculous in point of fact by charging them with aphrodisian properties. Under the stimulus of the erotic impulse it is true that our sense of values, our aesthetic sense, undergoes a complete reversal, and we do things otherwise ridiculous. The intelligent social reformer does not seek in these wide-spread folk songs for the causes of this change which so mysteriously takes place in all of us from time to time. He realizes that the needs of an erection are entirely disseparate forces from those that motivate our people to this poetry. These folk songs, therefore remain pure and harmless except to the self-appointed crusader whose miseducated and often maladjusted mind attributes to everyone else his own unhealthy reactions. Irrefutable proof of this salient point is found in A CHALLENGE TO SEX CENSORS by Theodore Schroeder, (Free Speech League, New York, 1938, 159 pp.) and in TO THE PURE …. A STUDY OF OBSCENITY AND THE CENSOR by M. L. Ernst, and W. Seagle, (The Viking Press, New York, 1928, 336 pp.)
Nick Mount:FORT WILLIAM, ONT., Oct. 3, 1959 (CP) — More than 700 copies of D. H. Lawrence’s controversial novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, have been taken from newsstands and burned. Henry Batho, manager of Central News Company, said he burned the books in the city incinerator last week rather than get in a fight with Fort William City Council. Mr. Batho said Fort William mayor Catherine Seppala came to his offices and suggested that the book was “pretty raw.” He said, “She didn’t order the books taken off the stands but said it would be a good idea.” Not wanting to get involved in a court case Mr. Batho said he also consulted the Fort William police chief who also thought it would be a good idea if the books were pulled off the stands. Mayor Seppala said no ban was in force but if the books ever appear again “I won’t hesitate to enforce a ban.” She said she had not read the book but merely looked at two paragraphs. On the strength of the two paragraphs she went to the distributor and suggested the book was about “the dirtiest thing ever put in print.http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2010.01-essay-what-thunder-bay-burned/
THE CAMEL AND THE SPHINX
Now the sex life of the camel
Is not as one may think.
One night in a fit of emotion,
He tried to bugger the sphinx.
But the sphinx’s posterior entrance
Was blocked by the sands of the Nile,
Which accounts for the hump on the camel
And the sphinx’s inscrutable smile!
——————————————————–
THE LARKING CULL
(By Thomas Rowlandson)
While on the bed the nymph reclined
Damon resolved to please his mind.
His generation tube he shows,
Between her swelling breasts it goes.
His fingers to her touch-hole sent
Alas to give her small content.
A larger thing would give more pleasure
She always loves to have full measure,
And who for greater joys do hunt
Than rising bubbies and a cunt.
Mae West. Leigh Ann Wheeler:In the 1920s and 1930s, audiences flocked to see strippers parade up and down runways, Rudolph Valentino take unconscious damsels to bed, and starlets reveal and trade their bodies for money. Such shows disturbed and puzzled many women -- as much in their popularity as in their ex- istence. Reformer Catheryne Cooke Gilman and her associates in the Min- neapolis, Minnesota, Women's Cooperative Alliance (WCA) strove not only to eradicate these spectacles but also to understand why people, par- ticularly young people, were attracted to them. After much study, WCA women concluded that a "conspiracy of silence" had given rise to an un- healthy curiosity about sexual matters. Their solution was to demystify sex with explicit sex education and suppress commercialized sex with ob- scenity law. By advocating that some types of sexual expression be liberated and others repressed, the sexual reform agenda of Gilman and the WCA simul- taneously challenged and reinforced contemporary obscenity law.http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=98499818
Read More: http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=98499818
…Just how funny was that story of the man in Fairfax County, Virginia, who got up early on Monday morning, October 19, and walked naked into his own kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee? The next significant thing that happened to 29-year-old Eric Williamson was the local cops arriving to charge him with indecent exposure.
It turns out that while he was brewing the coffee, a mother who was taking her seven-year-old son along a path beside Williamson’s house espied the naked householder and called the local precinct, or more likely her husband, who turns out to be a cop.
“Yes, I wasn’t wearing any clothes,” Williamson said later, “but I was alone, in my own home and I just got out of bed. It was dark and I had no idea anyone was outside looking in at me.”
The story ended up on TV, and in the opening rounds the newscasters and network blogs had merciless sport with the Fairfax police for their absurd behaviour. Hasn’t a man the right to walk around his own home (or in this case rented accommodation) dressed according to his fancy? Answer, obvious to anyone familiar with relevant case law: absolutely not. Williamson will be lucky if they don’t throw a cobbled-up indictment at him Peeved by public ridicule, the Fairfax cops turned up the heat…. ( Cockburn )
TO ROSALIE
(By Lord Byron)
When in the soft still night all are asleep,
Into thy chamber of delight I creep.
Finding thee deep in innocent repose.
Lips half apart, like petals of a rose
In spring-time when they have just begun to spread,
So are thy lips-as delicate and red.
As I creep near, I see thee turn and sigh
(As though some spirit told thee what thine eye
Doth fail to see). And as I bend over thee
Through the darkness I can dimly see
Thy budding breasts, fair flowers of delight,
Gleam with a shimmer, fairly white.
Gently I raise the coverlet from around
The dearest treasure man ever found.
Soft sinuous limbs of matchless shape and grace,
Hips filled with pleasure, shoulders to embrace,
Soft round delicious body, white and warm,
Gould anything be sweeter than thy form?
Moments I stand, enjoying ecstasies
Of expectations-glorious moments these;
Then not postponing longer joys divine
I slip between the covers and entwine
My arm around thy body, and, in turn,
I feel thy soft arms grow tight, and seem to burn
With fires that are not earthly.
Now they find mine, and close I draw
Thy quivering lips.
Thy fairy fingers creep with soft caress
O’er my trembling body, and no less …
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