Page 45 Review by Stephen
A cheerfully entertaining discourse in praise of art in service to the hand and glans, it's amazing how much more sense you can talk when liberated from the shame and embarrassment which two millennia of religious repression has sought to spike the foetally enjoyed fun of diddling yourself with. Illustrated by examples from Katsushika Hokusai and Aubrey Beardsley to Larry Clark and Allen Jones, it's a stimulating read climaxing with an extended tribute to Felicien Rops' proud Pornokrates whom I'd never come across before.
As Moore guides us through the ages in celebration of the human imagination, past the Caxton Press to the technologies of film, photography then the internet - taking in William Blake, the Tijuana Bibles, Kurtzman then Crumb and the astonishing precedent passed by Judge Horn in 1957 which excused erotic writing and art if it could be shown to have "the slightest redeeming social significance" - he argues that pornography can act as a safety valve of sexual imaginings which in more permissive countries like Holland, Denmark and Spain see no attendant rise in sex crime. Only in those societies which shut down that safety valve do we such violent eruptions. Or, going back a bit:
"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 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."
And when I write "spike" unseemly sexual stimulation, that's precisely what German and Austrian parents did to their children in the early half of the last century. Not only where boys' hands tied to their bedposts, but a ring with sharp spikes set inside was then often slotted over their flaccid member just in case of arousal. Which, you know, is going to happen at night. As a device intended to prevent filthy thoughts, doesn't that seem a little Marquis De Sade to you on the part of the parents, and as likely as not to cause pain to become inextricably linked with sexual desire? That generation turned out well, didn't it?
"Just to recap, then: sexually progressive cultures gave us mathematics, literature, philosophy, civilization, and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust. Not that I'm trying to load my argument, of course."
