For one tradition challenged by 20th-century art, whether in the John Berger or Art Activist Barbie style, has been the representation of women as “nude”. But another tradition in need of smashing was the one that nudes, while nude, must be tastefully so. The result was that even as feminists denounced the “male gaze” in visual art as dehumanising and porn-adjacent, other corners of visual art became steadily more sexually explicit.
In 1998, for example, the West Midlands Police paedophile and pornography unit mounted a (doomed) court case against the University of Central England for displaying two “obscene”’ photos by Robert Mapplethorpe. Fast-forward another decade and a half, and the convergence was still more advanced: Paul McCarthy’s installation “WS” featured a half-dressed Snow White in what looks a great deal like the early stages of a gangbang with the Seven Dwarfs.
A couple of years later, performance artist Emma Sulkowicz appeared in Ceci C’est Pas Un Viol (“This Is Not A Rape”). This 8-minute video recorded Sulkowicz having sex with an anonymous actor in scenes that appeared to begin consensually but ended in what looked like non-consensual anal rape.
If you’ve drunk the 20th-century boundary-pushing Kool-Aid, either as an artist or a pornographer or — like Emma Sulkowicz — both, there’s no reason why this shouldn’t all be fine. From this perspective we can argue, with art historian Julia Friedman, that “Classic Nudes” is a route into fine art: “a democratizing project, one that could expand the museum-going audience by engaging their interest”.
And there are plenty for whom pushing everyone’s boundaries on acceptable levels of explicitly sexual imagery seems not just to be an acceptable part of culture, but something more like evangelism. Back in 2015, Richard Dawkins suggested that we might “beam erotic videos to theocracies”, seemingly on the assumption that viewing porn would help such benighted places break out of their hidebound superstitions.
And just last week, nepotism enjoyer and liberal arch-troll Flora Gill tweeted that we should produce “entry level porn” for children. This suggestion, though roundly condemned and swiftly deleted, nonetheless reappeared a few days later for debate on Woman’s Hour, suggesting an elite Overton window just itching to sidle ever further in the direction of porn-as-moral-crusade.
For it remains widely received opinion that openness is good by definition: a view also shared by Pornhub’s art guide. Here, what’s hidden is assumed only to be so because of the type of superstition Richard Dawkins would like to see cleansed from “theocracies” through the transmission of porn.
Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing In A Stream (1654), for example, in which a woman lifts her petticoats to paddle, is described by our Pornhub copywriter as “a precursor to the sort of porn that starts with a romantic bubble bath and ends in unspeakable things being done with a rubber duck”. Rembrandt’s gentle riverside eroticism, then, is a primitive precursor to more mature works of slippery-when-wet horndoggery such as, say, “Naturally Busty Gabbie’s Sensual Bathtub Sex”.
Of Rubens’s Nymphs and Satyrs (1615), Pornhub tells us it was created by a society “certainly orgy-curious, but also frustratingly constrained by the strict religious order of the day”. Clearly the 17th century would have been greatly improved by access to Richard Dawkins-approved pornography. What struck me about it, though, and what leaks from every jaded paragraph penned by Pornhub’s tragically suborned art historian, is the implicit admission it makes: openness kills eroticism.
Rubens’s world might have been “frustratingly constrained”, but that constraint also delivers the painting’s erotic charge. The same applies to every innuendo pointed out by Classic Nudes: every half-glimpsed crotch, every frilly dress suggesting vaginal lips, every hand caressing a snake. The power lies, precisely, in not saying the quiet part out loud. The dividing line between art and porn may shift as cultural taboos change; but what distinguishes art from porn is its relationship to boundaries.
Art dances with boundaries; porn hates and seeks to destroy them. And this isn’t a static condition, but a process, for consumers as well as producers. Studies have shown porn consumers have to go looking for ever more forbidden taboos in order to keep getting the same frisson of transgression.
In his proposal for porn evangelism, Richard Dawkins added that of course such content should be “gentle, woman-respecting eroticism”. Gill likewise argues that the point of providing curated porn to children is because at least that’s better than the “violent, hardcore” variety.
So evangelism should employ nice porn, not (as Dawkins puts it) the “violent, woman-hating” sort we see so often on, er, Pornhub, where common tags include “raped teen” and “crying teen”. But what the proponents of openness refuse to acknowledge is that their commitment to boundary-smashing inexorably finds itself, whether in art or porn, precisely in the monstrous places they’re so keen to disavow.
Instead of nodding politely, like the producers of Woman’s Hour, to the proposal that we foster yet more “openness”, we should listen to the poignant message-in-a-bottle conveyed by Pornhub’s Classic Nudes: constrained eroticism is infinitely sexier than the sort that’s on display for everyone. And the alternative will always, inexorably, end up producing abominations. Perhaps next time they’ll even call it art.
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