20th
Sizzling Pompeii Action, Volume 26
Today I finally got it together to head down to the National Gallery to see the Pompeii exhibit. It was beautiful, and it made me half regret my limited stay in the dump that was Naples, because I didn’t have enough time to go see the real deal.
A lot of people don’t know this, but the discovery of Pompeii, buried in ash and preserved like a fly in amber, was actually the start of what we modern western tight asses call “pornography.”
I’m not joking. It’s true.
Pompeii was discovered in the late 1600’s, but it was first properly excavated by a pack of British archaeologists who were firmly entrenched in the mindset, mannerisms and mores of Victorian England. You know, the guys in the late 19th century who placed a premium on manners and clothing. The sort of folks that pranced around and fought duels while their women died of broken hearts. At least that’s how it was spun. I mean, I imagine it was pretty easy for the guys to “be gentlemen” and to “respect the virtue of the women” that they had to spend three years ”courting” if there was a fully functioning brothel on every corner, as there was in Victorian London.
But anyway, the guys that dug up Pompeii were the prototype “gentlemen” of the time, and they were laboring under a major delusion.
That delusion would be the Victorian British idea of what Rome was supposed to be. The idea that the Romans were simply an 1800 year old perfect reflection of themselves. A bit misguided, surely, what with all the multiple Gods and what not, but really, weren’t they doing the same thing back in 56 B.C. that the Brits were doing in the late 19th century? Going around the whole world and setting up colonies, bringing a bit of civilization to the savages?
So these historians and archaeologists that really first got to work on truly excavating the ruins at Pompeii probably expected to find cricket bats and tea sets and fox hunting outfits.
They found something else entirely. In fact, there was a big debate among these folks as to whether or not they should just bury the place all over again and forget that they ever found it.
One of the first things that they found was this statue, which, as you can see, shows the Greek demigod Pan getting it on with a goat. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, I think that goat is male. And did they find this statue in the ancient Roman equivalent of the back of a sock drawer? Nope. They found it in a temple.
They also found graffiti advertising the best whorehouses in town, advertisements for local gambling establishments and carvings of erect phalluses on practically every wall available. And that was the LEAST OF IT. And it freaked the Brits out. I mean, they had whorehouses and gambling establishments in London, but the Victorian Brits were at least discreet about such things. The Romans were apparently about as clandestine as a U2 concert about their perversions. Except that they weren’t perversions to them. As far as the Romans were concerned, having a ten-HUT male unit on your wall was the equivalent of a Catholic having a crucifix on his. Getting freaky was a religious experience. Whorehouses weren’t something you slunk into after dark. They were something that you proudly marched into on the way back from church. Hell, some of them were IN the churches themselves.
The Victorian Brits weren’t having ANY of this.
Did you know that most of the artifacts that were discovered by the Brits at Pompeii were locked in a vault at the British Museum, and in order to see them you had to be “of a certain character?” Meaning that you had to be rich or you had to have it written down in stone that you were a real, honest-to-god historian, or both?
I mean, you can’t have the RABBLE wandering around the ancient marble dongs and statues of Mars having a three way, could you? It’s simply not the done thing. No, the only people who could handle such things were the “Gentlemen.”
But of course, word got around to the “regular” people that there was some pretty freaky stuff going on at the British Museum, and a hell of a lot of “Gentlemen” made a good bit of supplemental income off of selling drawings or written descriptions of what was in there. Some enterprising guys even had copies made of some of the heavier works of art and sold them at a high profit.
And OF COURSE owning these things became a crime, and OF COURSE that meant that everyone in all of London had to have them. Man, if you think it was a bitch hiding your VHS copy of Debbie Does Damn Near Everybody from your mom, imagine how tough it must have been for Nigel Worthington Thudpucker the Third to hide his miniature statues of Jupiter tagging Minerva from his nannies.
You can pretty much follow the chain directly from the stuff that they had in the vault at the British Museum to the hand painted postcards that were sold in back alleys to “scandalous” daguerreotypes to the movie theaters on the “wrong” side of town to the stuff that you supposedly don’t have on the hard drive of the machine that you are using to read this, and if you do, well, oops, you don’t know how it got there. It’s porn. And it is, to use a really bad pun, a perfect example of the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith at work. The more you make something “wrong,” the more people will demand it in droves, and the more valuable it becomes.
And at this point, porn quite literally runs a great deal of our economy. Aside from people buying it in boxcar lots, it also settles a lot of our technology issues for us. Beta or VHS? That was settled by how many porn titles were available on which format. HDDVD or Blu Ray? Settled the same way. And what really powers the internet? I can absolutely guarantee you that about eight seconds after one of those uber nerds figured out how to turn pictures into little bits of ones and zeros, one of the first things that he sent to his buddy over the phone lines out of the basement of NORAD was the Playmate of The Month.
If you view this objectively, it seems completely ridiculous. But that’s the way it is. There is a whole subculture driving our economy, and it is based on our unspoken fear/obsession over our naughty bits. And, of course, most of the people who complain the loudest about “perversions” and such usually have porn collections that you can see from outer space. Or else they are compensating for something else entirely.
I have to wonder what our lives would be like if we were simply honest with one another about sex instead of clinging to our Puritan roots about it. I wonder what life would be like if we just shrugged our shoulders and said “Yeah? SO WHAT” about how people behave in the bedroom. Would there even be a porn industry? Would we be spared the bogus outrage of all these groups screaming about “The CHIIILLLDDREN?” Would people have bought Madonna or Britney Spears as “musicians” if the sexual element wasn’t all tied up in it?
Can we grow up at some point? Maybe we can focus on things that matter if we do.
