I have neither read this, nor seen it enacted. Maybe I should? Can anyone recommend a staging, or adaptation?
Rather like art, culture, history, music and my many other interests, sex is frequently on my mind. And consequently sex in art and culture kind of triple-whammies things.
One thing I find kind of odd and irritating is that there’s not much that sits in my own idea of the Goldilocks zone, when it comes to sex. The way sex is treated is, all too often – unless absent altogether – either too tame or too extreme.
[NB: The above gallery uses very poor quality images, borrowed from the gutenberg.com online version of this work.]
By way of explaining what I mean, you go from the ubiquity of tits n’ ass – usually but not always clothed – in mainstream movie culture, to stuff like Pasoloni’s Salo.
I’m leaving the whole sticky area of porn to one side, as that’s essentially a masturbatory aid, rather than art or ‘culture’.*
In literary terms I guess you could equate this with a spectrum that ranges from the frisson of sex that smatters (or should that be splatters?) popular fiction – from Mills & Boon to Shades of Grey – to stuff that’s truly outside the pale, like de Sade’s deliberately ‘sacrilegious’ extremism.
In the end the kind of innocent yet knowing, or what I want to call ‘liberated’ handling (chortle) of sex quite often winds up being expressed at the level of folk art.
In jokes, bawdy songs, strange efflorescences of varied artefacts, from phallic devotional objects/totems, to mosaics and wall paintings, or decorating earthenware, jewellery, and whatnot. I wonder why this might be?
As Neil MacGregor discusses, in the brilliant History of the World in 100 Objects, when considering the Warren Cup, what was once shocking and taboo can become commonplace. What once, allegedly, threatened to shake polite society to its very foundations suddenly passes unnoticed.
The softer more titillating treatment of sex is almost always the more commonplace (superabundant these days), at least relative to the darker side. But even that relationship can shift over time. It wasn’t long ago, in myth if not in real life, that gods and beasts were frequently copping off with humans, or vice (pun intended) versa.
I think David Lee Roth put it quite well, when he described erotica as a feather, and porn as the whole plucked chicken.
Oscar Wilde, the author of Salome, was, as we all ought to know, jailed for two years for being gay. Or ‘gross indecency’, as it was then styled.
Homosexuality in England remained a ‘crime’ til 1967. In America this didn’t happen til 2003! And, unbelievably, in 2003 (under Blair) ‘The Sexual Offences Act 2003 made it illegal for more than two men to engage in consensual sexual activity in private.’ I’m shocked at that.
Voltaire once said ‘I don’t think there was ever any civilized nation that enacted laws against mores.’ Which, given how he was himself persecuted, seems unbelievably naive. But at the same time it shows that some societies 300-400 years ago might actually have been more liberal/tolerant than our supposedly permissive modern day ones. Even those that pride themselves on being ‘democratic’ and ‘free’!
To my eyes, Beardsley’s Salome illustrations appear tame. But if we are to believe some folk, they were at the time highly scandalous, just like the author of the work, Wilde. It’s hard for the modern liberally minded humanist to see how or why.
But there have always been hawkish prudes, eager to burn whoever is the witch of the hour. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there are as many such now as there ever were.
*Of course there is crossover. You get artistic porn, and pornograohic art. And every conceivable shade or combination between and beyond. But that’s not what I’m touching on (titter) here.
** I believe I/we once had some Beardsley coasters, sporting this image. I wonder what became of them?