Porn - Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink by Dave Monroe, Fritz Allhoff, Gram Ponante Read Free Book Online Page B

we see it. 9 Surely historical “pornography” had a similar effect on its consumers as the modern sort, whatever they called it? This appeal to common sense is plausible, but can lead us astray the further back we go.Victorian archeologists excavating Pompeii confidently designated any building with sexually explicit wall paintings as a brothel, eventually identifying 35 of them, 80 times as many per capita as Rome itself. 10 Modern classicists interpret the material differently, concluding that the Romans had, by modern standards, an astonishingly broad-minded approach to interior décor. Shorn of context, the Pompeiian wall paintings strike us as pornographic, but perhaps the Romans saw them differently. Projecting our own standards into the past can lead to profound misunderstanding.
     
    Nevertheless, these worries can be answered directly for at least one work:
L’Ecole des filles
(1655), whose pretensions to philosophy are explicit in its subtitle,
La Philosophie des dames
. Its authorship has never been satisfactorily established, although its publishers, Jean L’Ange and Michel Millot, were respectively fined and hanged in effigy as putative authors. 11 The reader response to this book is unusually well documented.The English diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) records encountering it at a bookshop on 13 January 1668. His initial expectations of a suitable present for his wife are overturned by a quick browse, but on 8 February he returns to buy a copy for himself.The following night he reads it:
     
I did read through
L’Escholle des Filles
; a lewd book, but what doth me no wrong to read for information sake (but it did hazer [cause] my prick para [to] stand all the while, and una vez to decharger [to discharge once]); and after I had done it, I burned it, that it might not be among my books to my shame; and so at night to supper and then to bed. 12
     
    The ejaculatory effect, ineffectually concealed by Pepys’s macaronic jargon, and indeed the subsequent incineration, are recognizable in more modern porn consumers. The book which so moved Pepys is a dialogue between two women, in which the experienced Susanne instructs the prospective bride Fanchon in sexual technique. Its claims to philosophical interest may seem slim, but it has been read as both satirizing and utilizing the new scientific method of René Descartes – after a “discourse on method,” a “process of discovery . . . unfolds: isolation in a heated room, elimination of customary prejudices and external authorities, introspection and lucidly ordered exposition of the fundamentals derived from it.” 13
     
    The device of a young woman receiving sexual education from a more experienced woman is widespread; we saw it in
Thérèse philosophe
and
La Philosophie dans le boudoir
.The older woman is often, although not invariably, a current or former prostitute, hence such works are sometimes described as whore or courtesan dialogues. Numerous other contemporary examples could be cited; the common inspiration seems to be the
Ragionamenti
, or
Dialogues
, of Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) which first appeared in 1536, with a sequel in 1556. Aretino, a Renaissance humanist, made an even more influential contribution to erotic literature, the
Sonetti sopra I ‘XVI Modi’
(1524), or “sonnets on the sixteen ways of doing it.” These verses were inspired by a series of prints anatomically detailed enough to land their engraver in a papal prison. Aretino successfully lobbied the pope for his release – and then composed the accompanying sonnets. 14 The first of the
Ragionamenti
is a debate between two women, Nanna and Antonia, as to which of the three careers available to women – wife, nun, or whore – Nanna should choose for her daughter Pippa.They decide on the last, since “the nun betrays her holy vows and the married woman murders the holy bond of matrimony, but the whore violates neither her monastery nor her husband.” 15 In the sequel