“To live among the handmade,” philosopher and antiques dealer Leon Rosenstein once said, “is to live among the human.”
Well, there’s nothing more human than handmade pornography.
When you hear “pornography,” you might think of Playboy and Penthouse, X-rated movies and internet porn. But one type that has been largely hidden and forgotten is the pornography people make for themselves. Unlike pornography for profit, handmade pornography is crude and funny and subtle. It, too, contains multitudes.
Over the past decade, I’ve visited archives and museums, met with collectors and antiques dealers, and talked with artists and scholars to reconstruct the ways people across America, from the 1830s to the 1970s, drew, painted, glued, sewed and baked their own pornography. Some altered coins or carved objects from wood, stone and bone. Others wrote stories, made pamphlets and designed comic books.
Despite the concerted efforts of law enforcement and social purists to destroy sexual artifacts, thousands of these fascinating objects remain. And now I’m publishing the first history of homemade and handmade pornography.
I’ve titled the book “The People’s Porn” because the objects being considered come from a true representation of the American people. As opposed to commercially produced pornography imported first from Europe to early America and then pirated as bootleg editions in major cities, these materials, often made with rudimentary artistic skills, cropped up organically in communities, small and large, across the country.
Pornography went wherever Americans went – in life and in death, at war and at sea. Men carved wooden pornographic objects at logging camps in the 19th century, and they made pornographic scrimshaw on whaling vessels during the 18th and 19th centuries. Others were inspired to refashion the 19th-century liberty penny that had “ONE CENT” written on the reverse side of the coin. By changing the “E” to a “U,” many Americans had the same idea for rendering the coin obscene. Who knows how many pockets jingled with these pennies over the years?
In many handmade objects, sexual gestures stand right behind propriety and erections pop up in staid places. For example, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people made small, carved coffins as a form of memento mori that concealed carved figures inside. When you lift a coffin lid, the male figure’s erection pops up. The popular objects were hand-carved, hailing from places that still prepared their own dead for burial and still made coffins for neighbors and kinfolk. You can imagine them circulating discreetly at wakes and memorials, provoking laughter even as people mourned.
Pornographic objects also leered about the barnyard, a reminder that America was a largely rural country up until the 1920s. When pornography showed cocks mounting hens, dogs humping each other and pigs acting like swine, it demonstrated that animals remained underfoot and in people’s sexual imaginations.
And when called to war, men made pornographic objects out of spent shells and casings and adorned planes with their favorite nudes.
Despite the postwar world’s reputation for cultural conservatism, pornographic objects continued to be made in the home.
Women circulated patterns for pornographic potholders and aprons. Made with a wide variety of fabrics and trimmings, potholders came in pairs, with one side featuring a pop out penis and the other a vulva. Cookies, aprons, hook rugs, embroidery – all traditional women’s crafts – also came in pornographic form. Joined by explicitly feminist materials in the 1960s and 1970s, women’s creations show that the category of pornography can be much more capacious than you might think.
People from all walks of life – young and old, gay and straight, rich and poor, Black and white – made objects that the established order found embarrassing and preferred to ignore. Using commonly available materials, they found a way to express what moved them, what frightened them, what aroused them and what made them laugh.
Even as consumer culture expanded, pornography continued to be made by hand as people sought to articulate their own visions of sexuality. The mass market eventually took notice of these do-it-yourself productions, whether pornographic or not. By the 1990s, “amateur porn” started to flood the market in response to cravings for authenticity.
But you shouldn’t confuse this category of commercialized porn with what people made and continue to make. Handmade and homemade materials can expand our understanding of sexuality. Sometimes it’s beautiful. Sometimes it’s ugly.
As much as the world might like to limit sexuality to the realms of the uplifting and transcendent, homemade pornography – in all its incoherent, libidinal, confusing strangeness – reminds us that we are imperfect in body and in mind, subject to pain as well as pleasure, willing to laugh at ourselves and each other, and moved equally by the ridiculous, the violent and the sublime.
I was at an antiques show a few years ago when a dealer grinned widely as I approached. “Hey, come here, I want to show you something,” he said, as he turned to a highboy and pulled out a folk art carved wood figure of a man. When he adjusted a part of the figure, an erection appeared from within. We both laughed and shared a quick moment looking it over. Erotic or not, it was a fine carving and the surprise was undoubtedly special. After we were through giggling, the dealer walked over to his highboy and placed it back inside the drawer, hiding it away once again. He likely repeated the same act multiple times that show, pulling it from the drawer when those he felt comfortable with approached, knowingly or perhaps unknowingly following a tradition as old as time where we discretely share these kinds of objects with the near and dear. Lisa Z. Sigel has opened the drawer for good with her new book, The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America, where the historian speaks to the prolific creation of pornography and our unique culture that both harbors and represses it.
Greg Smith : You acknowledge a number of antique dealers who aided you in the preparation of your book. What did you learn from them?
Lisa Z. Sigel : I talked to many people – Steve Powers, Carl Hammer, Mark Rotenberg, Patrick Bell, Arthur Liverant, Ivan Stormgart – and they put me in touch with collectors who also shared their knowledge. Antique dealers are this vast source of knowledge. Most of them remember everything that has ever passed through their hands. They know how much things cost and whether it was a good price or not. They know who made something, when and where. Historians are used to working with documents, but dealers have all this knowledge in the back of their heads about artifacts and none of what they know is ever published. They clued me in to when things are important and when I should take note. They also gave me a crash course in how to recognize artistry and workmanship.
GS : You write that this is an archive of discrete objects. What can we learn by pulling back the veil on these deeply personal works?
LZS : We can learn something by pulling them together. A collector might have one, a dealer might have two. But usually you don’t see a whole group of them together. When we bring them together, we see an unacknowledged folk history or outsider history that people don’t recognize because they’ve never been thought of as a cohesive whole. When we look at them together, we start seeing what motivates groups of people around sexuality. It’s not an individual perversity but something that has a broader social import.
GS : Some pieces seem to border more on humor than sexuality, do you distinguish?
LZS : I don’t. We sometimes think that pornography must be serious and that you’re not supposed to laugh at sex. But if you look at some of these objects, you realize that people do laugh about sex and always did. There’s a peach pit monkey in my book, for example. This monkey has an enormous erection that it holds in one hand. In the other hand, it thumbs his nose at the viewer. It was carved by a prisoner around 1940. What better symbol for a prisoner than this tiny peach pit carving of a monkey thumbing his nose back at the warden who confiscated it. An anthropologist said that some things are good for thinking. Sex is good for thinking.
GS : You make a distinction between what people buy and what people make. What does the self-made object tell us that the mass-produced cannot?
LZS : Handmade objects let you hear people communicate in their own idiom. If you think of Aristotle’s Masterpiece (circa 1684), which other scholars have looked at to talk about our vernacular sexuality, it was a mass-produced pamphlet from Europe. It had a tradition in the European publishing trade before it came to America. I don’t think that’s where you’re going to find the American vernacular. The American sexual vernacular is going to come from handmade pamphlets, handmade carvings and scrimshaw that allowed people to develop their own voices about sexuality. Those voices might be a little less cosmopolitan, a little less polished and a little more rural. But they spoke to American ideas and culture.
GS : In what ways are they less polished?
LZS : They were less culturally polished. My first book was on Nineteenth Century British commercial pornography, and there you’ll find absolutely beautiful etchings. They were struck off in copies at 150 to 300 a run, but they were professional products that came from a commercial tradition. When you compare those books and those images with the homemade, there’s a roughness in handmade objects that you don’t see in commercial productions. But the handmade objects are also richer in meaning – there’s room for emotions in handmade material that commercial materials didn’t engage with because that’s not where the money was. With handmade objects, their makers created the thing that they wanted to envision rather than trying to communicate what someone else wanted to see. It’s more in tune to someone’s heart’s desires, only mediated by their skill.
GS : Does the skill make a difference to you?
LZS : It doesn’t make a difference to me, it makes a difference in the marketplace and where the objects end up. The masterful works will wind up in exquisite collections and they certainly deserve to be there. But for the historian in me, I have a place for the inexpertly done, because I want to know what people were expressing in that moment. I don’t need to be an art critic. I’m a historian who is trying to see a text or artifact in its context.
GS : What’s the most primitive example in the book?
LZS : There are some artifacts where you have to squint to see an erection. There’s one in which the erection is made from a pencil fragment, for example. It’s primitive not in terms of its style but in terms of the makers unwillingness to put in the work. There are also many examples of people taking magazine illustrations and adding genitalia. I mention a cookie in the collection of Kinsey.
GS : A cookie?
LZS : It’s a cookie in the Kinsey Institute archive. It’s a phallic cookie with little chocolate sprinkles as the pubic hair. It’s not the most expertly made cookie, and I think that after 60 or 70 years it’s not even edible.
GS : Tell me about the Kinsey Institute.
LZS : I worked there extensively and saw thousands of pieces. Seeing the Kinsey collections helped me establish this baseline for the range of objects available. The Kinsey Institute is a culturally rich institution with such a wealth of art, books, pamphlets, papers, you name it. It is also financially impoverished and if anyone reading this is wealthy, it would be a wonderful thing to finance it. Kinsey, himself, I think of him as a magpie, he collected everything. He had an enormous vision. Things that other people thought of as trash, he would be willing to collect and store and figure out what to do with later. The altered illustrations I mentioned earlier, most people would have called them trash but he thought they had intrinsic value. When he was working with prisons, they would send him objects made by prisoners and he would store and archive them. The result is this time capsule of sexual artifacts from the 1950s and 1960s, which were the richest periods for donations.
GS : From the early Twentieth Century on back, what kinds of forms have you illustrated in your book?
LZS : Today we think of pornography as photographs or videos, but before then there were carvings, plaques, drawings, paintings, writings, and so on. Once you have the development of a mass-produced consumer culture, with newspaper and magazines and posters, you start having handmade or homemade pornography transformed by it. The belief is that consumer culture wipes out homemade art, but it doesn’t. It inspires fan fiction and the reuse of commercial culture. Whatever media people used in their daily lives, they made into pornography.
GS : In American history, were any mediums more prolific than others?
LZS : Carvings – everyone had a knife to whittle with. I came across a few ceramics, but not as many as I would have thought. No doubt one of your readers will have more. And then paper art. Lots of people had access to writing materials and they would create their own illustrations, or write their own pornography or transcribe some they had seen, thus making it their own.
GS : Are coins a notable medium?
LZS : Coins are valuable for historic research in general, because of their durability and ability to be dated. Many handmade objects can’t be dated, but coins have a date. They also show the spread and relationship between individuals and the state. When you begin to add in transformed coins, it adds this funny gloss on an area of respectable scholarship. They are little miniatures versions of obscene objects: for example, there’s a flying eagle coin that someone made into a flying phallus. The remade coins span periods and cultures. This book is focused on America, but there are examples of French and English coins that were transformed. I gave a talk in England and a member of the audience was from a Scottish archeological museum. He said, “they’re pretty much in every site we dig up.”
GS : You touch on miniatures, why are so many of these pieces small?
LZS : They were easier to hide away. It’s what Carl Hammer calls “the plumber problem.” We have all these beautiful objects all over our house, but then the plumber comes to fix the pipe and they judge us by the art on our walls. A lot of the things people saved were smaller because you could hide them away.
GS : Were there any objects in particular that made an indelible impact on your book?
LZS : The scrimshaw at Mystic Seaport. They are such beautiful objects, so well authenticated. These were made by master craftsmen.
GS : Is historical American pornography any different than that of other cultures and countries?
LZS : We don’t know. There’s very little done on the history of pornography, period. Little done on the history of commercial pornography and less on handmade pornography. I’m hoping we’ll find out. I’ve come across Italian trench art that looks similar to America’s, but did they overlap? I’m hoping people will get excited and start excavating their own national tradition.
GS : Was handmade pornography more acceptable in ancient times?
LZS : Yes. Absolutely. There was no industrial pornography in ancient times so it was all handmade. We can see those sexual objects as art and we can accept that it’s important as a way to understand ancient societies. We can understand it in the far past and see how important it is, but when it comes closer in time to us, we get more uncomfortable.
GS : Are there any notable times in American history where specific environments fostered the prolific creation of pornography?
LZS : Whenever you see all male environments, pornography pops up. The Nineteenth Century was very sex-segregated, men socialized with men and women with women, and a lot of communities followed that pattern. Cowboys, loggers, miners, whalers – I suspect there was pornography coming out of those communities. Prisoners, for example, were not allowed to have pornography. By the way, most are still not allowed nor are they allowed to masturbate, it’s a safety standard. So prisoners would end up making their own pornography.
GS : It sounds like men were largely the creators?
LZS : With many of these objects, the assumption is that they were made by men, but there’s no proof. There is no provenance attached to them. But some objects were made by women. Women used traditional female crafts to create pornography. My favorites are the potholders. There were always two and one side had a penis and the other a vulva. Every time I’ve shown these in a talk, someone starts laughing and talking about some aunt or another who would break them out at holidays. There are so many versions of the potholders.
GS : What about periods of American history that explicitly repressed pornography?
LZS : In the aftermath of the Civil War, Anthony Comstock comes to mind. He worked with the post office to try to eliminate obscenity. That was 1869-1890. He became less effective in the early Twentieth Century and then died in 1915. His successor never had the same clout or charisma. Also, things changed after World War I. People were less concerned with obscenity and more concerned with recovery both from the Spanish flu and from the war.
GS : Did religion play a part?
LZS : Religion had a lot to do with wanting to keep people from being polluted by sexuality. Comstock talked about novels that would inflame people’s passion. He wasn’t talking about pornography, just commercial novels. His starting point was any commercial culture that wasn’t biblical in nature, anything more obscene than that was going to corrupt. But what saved a lot of these handmade objects is that these were private, they were not out in public. People could make them and laugh with a friend over them, but they weren’t circulating, which helped save them.
GS : I imagine much handmade pornography has likely been destroyed.
LZS : Anthony Comstock was really delighted to explain that he destroyed pornography and obscenity by the tonnage. He wouldn’t even allow the names of books to be put into the judicial record. Because of that, we don’t know what the first American pornographic novel is. We have a real lack of knowledge about the history of pornography of the Nineteenth Century. H. S. Ashby, an important British bibliographer, wrote about a New York photographer in the 1850s and mentioned the thousands of prints that this photographer made, but we don’t have any of them. Imagine if we could see what nudes looked like before the Civil War. All of those are gone.
GS : Do you feel curators shy away from pornography?
LZS : I think they recognize its value but they don’t know what to do with it. I think curators keep the objects and treat them well, but they don’t necessarily display them. Hopefully my book will encourage them to find a way to display this material.
GS : There’s still a stigma to researching pornography. Tell me about some of the roadblocks you’ve experienced.
LZS : People are uncomfortable with my work. At best, I get good-natured teasing but I’ve also been turned down for jobs and fellowships. There are no grants available for the study of pornography, not since the controversy over the Mapplethorpe exhibit in 1989. Since then, no public funding could be used for the study of pornography. And recently, it’s been quite difficult to get any money to fund research on sexuality at all. It’s been a labor of love on my part. It’s strange because sexuality is an intellectually rich area but people are embarrassed, and they would rather it disappear. There’s no other sort of subject where the study of something can get you in trouble with the law. I also study World War I, I look at photographs, memoirs and diaries, and war was awful, but the materials left behind are widely available to study. Whereas pornography, it’s still problematic to study even 100 years later. When people make claims that pornography is getting better or worse, that’s a statement of change over time, but if we don’t know about what has happened over time, we shouldn’t make that statement, we need a historical record in order to understand the change. That’s been my career – to try to understand that record.
Q&A: Lisa Z. Sigel. By Greg Smith. Antiques and the Arts Weekly, December 22, 2020.
One of my favorite places to visit as a kid was the Grafton Flea Market, an open-air swap meet/antiques market in Massachusetts. In addition to the fireworks, hermit crabs, and switchblades, I recall a few dirty crafts and lowbrow trinkets: a trucker cap depicting a fisherman standing up to his waist deep, while beneath the surface, a fish engulfed his penis like a worm; a circular ashtray decorated with a silhouette of a man and a woman copulating; and finally, I cannot forget the penis pipe with a bowl for “tobacco” in the scrotum. I remember the adults around me scoffing at these “trashy” objects, but in the dirty crafts’ irreverent depictions of “privates” I saw freedom and playfulness. Upon learning about The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America, by Lisa Z. Sigel, a historian from DePaul University, the same interest that captivated me at the flea market beckoned me to read the book. Sigel’s research glimpses into the history of sexuality in America through handmade pornographic objects, asking what handmade “trashy” sex objects reveal about our culture and its historical expressions of sexuality. The People’s Porn provides timelines and contexts showing that, no matter what obscenity laws our nation puts in place, individuals have always expressed their sexuality through art and crafts.
The book begins with a history of handmade pornographic objects between 1830 and 1930, the kind of items you would expect in a material culture study of sexual crafts and art, such as a naked lady scrimshaw. The second chapter delves into one of the main tensions in the study, the give and take between commercial and handmade porn from 1910 to the 1970s. The author sets the cutoff point in the 70s because Polaroid cameras, and soon after camcorders, made producing homemade pornography so easy that commercial pornography absorbed homemade pornography under the category “amateur” and the commercial/homemade/handmade distinction becomes too blurred. Chapter 3 examines items the Kinsey Institute collected from men in prison, while chapter 4 examines how the art world interacted with handmade pornography in the mid twentieth century. Then, the final chapter, looks briefly at amateur pornography since the 1970s.
The distinction between handmade and homemade is important. In this book, homemade pornography means photography and video; handmade refers to arts, crafts, and objects. The People’s Porn looks only at handmade pornography.
There are several definitional arguments that challenge readers of The People’s Porn, the most immediate being the definition of pornography. Of course, pornography is hard to define, so hard in fact that Justice Potter Stuart’s statement from the Jacobellis v Ohio obscenity case has become shorthand for things that are hard to define – “I know it when I see it.” Sigel doesn’t get much closer, pointing to the “contingent nature” of porn in history in which “historians recognize that objects like an erotic novel or figurine might have been understood as pornographic in the past, even if we do not look at them that way now.” The People’s Porn, the author claims, “tries to capture a sense of that contingency. It shows how some objects became art while others did not and explores how shifting definitions leave behind an impoverished vision of what pornography can mean.”
Indeed, the book takes a broad view of what can be defined as pornography, which is fine, but it is hard to say if these items were viewed as pornography at the time of their creation, by their creators, or by the people who later handled, traded, bought, or sold them. Of course, it would be too much to ask for Sigel to come up with a definition of pornography once and for all. Desire is highly personal and what is erotic changes from person to person. Furthermore, it seems expedient to use “handmade porn” as a shorthand for the objects discussed in the book. Still, perhaps acknowledging the nebulous definition of pornography and providing a clear list of criteria for inclusion in this specific study (for example, criteria might include violated obscenity laws as the time, depicted intercourse, expresses a sexual fantasy, or, expresses/invokes arousal) would have sufficed. When the “pornographic” nature of an object is unclear, it can be difficult to see how it relates to the central ideas of the book.
To provide a simple example, chapter one includes 19th century pennies vandalized to change “cent” to “cunt.” If they changed “shot” to “shit” or “pass” to “piss,” replacing anatomical/sexual obscenity with scatological obscenity, what would be the difference? Is there a difference between pornography and dirty jokes?
In the instance described above, the dirty penny falls within Sigel’s contingency definition well enough, and the passage is short enough, that the reader can accept the object’s subversive obscenity and not quibble. However, when Sigel extensively addresses Henry Darger, a famous “outsider artist,” I wanted a clearly delineated set of criteria for inclusion in the book. His work, called The Realms of the Unreal, incorporated drawing, tracing, collage, and text to tell fantastic and gruesome tales. It follows a family of hero-sisters, the Vivian Girls, as they fight evil forces that would enslave all children. My inability to reconcile Darger’s work with a clear set of criteria for pornography made his work feel out of place alongside overtly pornographic work such as “A Pretty Girl’s Companion and Guide to Love’s Sweetest Delights,” a graphically written and illustrated how-to guide from the 1870s that narrates sex acts in detail and something that recognizable as pornography today.
Because The People’s Porn devotes many pages to Darger, I would like to explain the definitional difficulty here further. His landlord discovered, shared, and eventually sold Realms of the Unreal, after the artist’s death. Darger left no commentary, so scholars and viewers must make meaning of his work without insight from its creator. However, what we do know about Darger suggests we should not project our expectations of a typically-abled person onto this artist. Darger spent part of his childhood in a home for “feebleminded” children and reported experiencing and witnessing significant abuse, which lead to a life-long interest in protecting children. Aside from one relationship, Darger lived an extremely isolated life and what little is known about him includes serious speculation about mental illness.
(Trigger warning: the following discussion of Darger’s work mentions sexual abuse.) Darger’s work is not primarily sexual, that is, the Vivian Girls and other children are often engaged in adventures or activities where sexuality is not the focus. The potentially pornographic aspects of The Realms of the Unreal depict abuse, not intercourse. The Vivian girls sometimes find themselves trapped and abused by adult men. It’s not surprising that viewers see these images as sexual, but, given Darger’s life, should we sexualize his depictions of abuse or question those impressions? Discussions of Realms of the Unreal often question why Darger drew the girls naked with male genitals, but representing intersex bodies is not inherently pornographic. Without clear criteria for his inclusion, I was unable to accept the contingent nature of pornography in the case of Henry Darger.
Chapter 3, “Men and Time: Prison Pornography, 1940s to 1960s,” dives into the Institute for Sex Research’s prison pornography collection. The Institute for Sex Research is now called the Kinsey Institute, named after famed sexuality researcher, Alfred Kinsey. From the 1940s to the 1960s, prison officials supplied the Institute for Sex Research with obscene materials confiscated from prisoners. Kinsey and his researchers visited prisons around the country, interviewing prisoners and prison officials. Though the discussions of the Kinsey Institute and its projects are fascinating, “Men and Time” includes many descriptions and images of sexual violence. Readers with trauma or indisposed to reading about sexual violence may wish to skip this chapter.
“Men and Time” includes many drawings. Some of the images gathered from prisons are well-drawn while others appear childlike or disfigured. For example, one prisoner depicted intercourse but did not feel the need to draw a head on the man, or arms on either the man or the woman. Not all prisoners’ drawings were as rudimentary, though. Some told stories in comic book style or drew images with real skill. However, even the more refined drawings taken from the prisons depicted violence towards women.
At the end of the chapter, Sigel observes, “in many ways, prison pornography echoed the wider range of handmade and homemade objects. In terms of themes and subjects, prison pornography reflected the larger world of sexual desires, rather than being atavistically set against it. Imprisoned men created images that mirrored subjects found in both commercial and homemade and handmade pornography.” While this is no doubt true in some instances, the clear contrast between the objects and images in this section and work described in other chapters makes it hard to draw the connection the author suggests. The other chapters show people engaging playfully with sexuality, from simple depictions of erections or to artistically refined fantasies. In contrast, the “Men and Time” chapter is dominated by sexual violence.
Chapter 4, “The Postwar World and the Making of a People’s Pornography, 1940s to 1970s,” introduces a wide array of mid-century artists who produced handmade pornography. From pin-ups on airplanes to toothpick holders with erections to phallic aprons, this chapter fulfilled my longing to learn about the dirty crafts I saw at the flea market so many years ago. Many of the creators remain nameless, but when the artifact was created by a notable artist, culture sometimes re-interpolated homemade pornography as art. Here again we find definitional arguments: when are dirty crafts folk art? When are they art brut or outsider art? When are they fine art? Sigel explains that classification is somewhat arbitrary, but there is some prejudice against handmade porn overall in how the art world interacts with these objects.
The book asks many more questions. How does homemade porn explore feminism? What varieties of homemade pornography do artists from traditionally marginalized or under-represented cultures create? How does capitalism attribute meaning to these objects and what does that mean for how we understand them? Through example after example – Steven Ashby’s wooden copulations to Elaine Bennett’s “Bitch Box” (a labia change purse); from threesomes with Batman, Robin and Catwoman to gay college orgy pamphlets – we encounter the proliferation of handmade porn.
Of these items and their historical context, Sigel writes:
“sex, formerly a place of laughter and scorn, soon became a place for pleasure, joy, and political intervention. Sex began to carry new meanings. It became a means of self-expression worthy of holding onto and savoring; it became violent, so that violent themes in commercial culture could be explored in handmade objects; and it became professionalized as craft culture entered museums and galleries. Concerned with issues of race and sex, inspired by consumer culture, inclusive, navel-gazing (both literally and figuratively closed parentheses, self-referential, violent, and political, a people’s pronoun if he had finally arrived.”
The final section, “Marketing Authenticity, 1970s Onward” looks at “the development of new technologies for the creation of amateur pornography and the commercialization of handmade and homemade objects.” Here, homemade and commercial merge. Polaroids and camcorders let people record themselves at home. The amateur category exploded in magazines and on VHS. This book does not explore the subject of user-made pornography distributed online, which is understandable, but does feel like a missing chapter from this study. Nudes on Snapchat, uploaded content on Pornhub, and topless photos on Reddit GoneWild must be the largest proliferation of homemade pornographic images ever. Understandably, digital artifacts in material culture can be studied apart and one book can’t contain everything. I will say that, given the care and clarity of The People’s Porn, if Lisa Sigel felt like following up on homemade pornography in the digital age, I would certainly be happy to read that book too.
The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America – Lisa Z. Sigel. By Eric Aldrich. Full Stop, October 1, 2020.
Sigel, whose previous books include Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Britain (2012) and Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–1914 (2002), refers to these items collectively as “handmade or homemade pornography.” This not strictly accurate: the Oxford English Dictionary defines pornography as “printed or visual material containing the explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity […] intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings.” That last bit — “intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings” — precludes all manner of racy knickknacks and lewd graffiti. Many of the curios examined by Sigel in her new book, The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America, were primarily intended to amuse or shock rather than to arouse, and thus cannot really be called “porn.” But it’s a neat shorthand that makes for a pleasingly alliterative title signaling the book’s central thesis: that the sexual folk art of yesterday constituted an organic and implicitly democratic repository of human creativity — “a robust, noisy vernacular tradition” that arose “from the ‘making classes’ rather than the ‘buying classes.’”
For Sigel, the ribald humor of these old objects connotes a playful and positive idea of what sex can be. “In articulating sex through a wink and a leer,” she writes, “homemade and handmade objects portrayed a sexuality both unsentimental and knowing”; “folk objects spoke of the sexuality in everyday life. They illustrated a spry and surprising sexuality in which sexual gestures stood right behind propriety and where erections popped up in staid places.” She contrasts this vision of “a sexuality defined by irreverence” with the soulless cynicism of commodified sexuality, which is inextricably bound up with exploitation and violence.
The question of agency — of who is making the art, and to what end — is central: Sigel contends that “remade objects, though not revolutionary, still constituted a form of radical expression.” In her reckoning, hierarchies of taste and technique are secondary to the raw truthfulness of the untutored and naïve. It is in this spirit that Sigel devotes a whole chapter to the outsider artist Henry Darger, many of whose works are held at the Kinsey. Darger’s unsettling drawings depict naked girls endowed with male genitals, hanging around with fully dressed adults. Sigel explains that Darger “represented a world of desires that aroused and disgusted him and one whose logic eluded him”; his “works demonstrate the heady and obsessive power of ephemera.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a book of this nature, the accompanying photographs are just as compelling as the text itself, if not more so. There are 97 of them, and they are frequently hilarious. As for the writing, it’s a mixed bag. Some of Sigel’s insights are more useful than others: her observation that the desire to re-form “CENT” into “CUNT” “suggests the profound desire to see the word [cunt] written and expressed in public” is almost audacious in its pointlessness; elsewhere we learn that “prison letters and prison art exhibit a certain veracity,” and “coins gesture to a culture of circulation.” As with the obligatory reference to “lived experience” — which crops up more than once — this tepid theorizing is par for the course in academic sociology; it functions as a sort of padding, and one has to learn to put up with it.
Sigel is nonetheless a companionable guide, offsetting the academese with occasional flashes of wit and bawdy remarks. Casting her eye over a penis-wielding Santa Claus made out of plywood and dowels, she quips that “the size of Santa’s erection shows that he is jolly for a reason.” Of the aforementioned altered coins, she puns: “Other national currencies were similarly debased.” Surveying a retouched photograph from a 1950s men’s magazine, in which the cover star has been relieved of his bathing suit and supplied with a big hard-on, Sigel observes that his “glance into the distance seems to invite the reader to join him.” She describes obscene images with droll matter-of-factness: “Sprays of liquid that emanate from the insertion point make the process seem onerous, though the squiggly public hairs give the scrotum a relaxed air.”
There is something a little reductive about Sigel’s portrayal of folk art as the embodiment of a timeless, authentic demos, pitted against the inherent elitism of institutionalized art. It’s a romantic and superficially progressive position, but it contains within it the seeds of a dangerous philistinism. Sigel’s reading of sexual mores is likewise somewhat rigid in its binary oppositions, and would have benefited from some dialectical nuance. It’s not always easy to distinguish between authentic fun and commerce in a world where almost everything is mediated by capitalist commodification: where exactly does “real” sexuality end and its bastardized iteration begin? We can say with certainty that an unimaginably vast trove of homemade amateur porn is being produced right this minute, on smartphones around the world; although much of it takes its cues from commercial pornography, it will in time form its own vernacular tradition. Pity the Lisa Sigels of the future, who will have to wade through the stuff. It will take forever.
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