![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Simpsons intro in Game of Thrones style.
RPF (or really RPA) and its role in catalyzing the case that became Lawrence v. Texas: “There was sexually explicit art on the walls, notably a pencil drawing of a naked James Dean with oversized genitals…. [T]he arresting officers in the Lawrence case never agreed on what they saw that night, and, in fact, reported seeing completely different conduct at the time. Two of the four officers who entered the apartment reported seeing two men having sex. Yet one officer reported seeing anal sex and the other remembered seeing oral sex. The other two saw no sex at all. At least three saw the homoerotic drawing.”
This so much needs to be part of a SPN story: A popular early pregnancy book written by monks (!) wisely advised women that, as Epstein recounts, "if a cat ejaculated on sage and then a man ate the sperm-tainted herb, he would grow a cat in his stomach and vomit it out."
And not unrelatedly, I love this kid's prediction of what he will be doing in 100 years.
Of Muscles and Men: Essays on the Sword and Sandal Film, ed. Michael G. Cornelius: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. I had no idea that there were 20 films starring Hercules or someone just like him from Italy from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, but it turns out they were a big deal, forming a genre known as peplum (for the skirt). (Among other things, this is another instance of multiple versions of the same character coexisting without apparent trouble.) This book is a basically unsurprising, often sympathetic collection of analyses of the anxieties around masculinity and by extension individualism/democracy with which the peplum film engaged. There are also essays about more modern versions of the genre, such as Gladiator, 300, and Troy (those are the mightiest thighs I ever have theen! I mean--), as well as some discussion of the Starz series Spartacus (one contributor suggests that the show owes more to video games than to other predecessors) and even some He-Man and Disney Hercules. For reasons that I can’t quite understand but probably have something to do with the collection’s flirtation, but not full engagement, with the concept of camp, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena are completely missing.
Donna Dennis, Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York: I enjoyed this history of the dance between smut and the law. Dennis argues, among other things, that publishers trying to stay on the right side of the law turned to explicit violence combined with nonexplicit sex, because sex was the target—something we see today. I was somewhat amused by the argument that “the indirectness that characterized sexual expression in even the most shocking examples of sensational literature may have stemmed from ‘deep-seated guilt’ about sexual desire and the ‘residual repressiveness of the Puritan conscience,’” producing euphemisms like “snowy globes.” Okay, sure, but also I think there’s only so many times per paragraph you can really write “tits” and still feel okay about yourself as a writer. I’m not saying that “throbbing member” or “snowy globes” is a good solution for most writers, just that it’s not always obvious what you should be writing. Dennis also notes that—unlike the sex reformers and contraception advocates also prosecuted under the Comstock laws in the later part of her period—porn publishers didn’t appeal to the First Amendment to defend themselves. If they defended themselves at all, it was on the grounds that enforcement worked an unconstitutional taking of private property (the expensive plates used to print the fancier books) and privacy. I was also interested in her suggestion that the lack of prosecution of obscenity by Tammany Hall reflected a relative preference for enforcing the laws against assaults and small property crimes—the kinds of things likely to happen to lower-class citizens—over enforcing the laws relating to public morality—the kinds of things upper-class citizens didn’t like to see in “their” city. Not just ideology about what the public wants from its laws, but also real resource constraints, are involved in these choices, and that’s a good reminder. In Dennis’s account, lack of enforcement reflected “both pervasive corruption and principled opposition to Republican moral ideology.” And finally, Dennis points out that Congress barred obscenity from the US mail, but neglected to regulate private express companies, providing them with a significant source of income: just another instance of porn as lucrative business model for new markets.
RPF (or really RPA) and its role in catalyzing the case that became Lawrence v. Texas: “There was sexually explicit art on the walls, notably a pencil drawing of a naked James Dean with oversized genitals…. [T]he arresting officers in the Lawrence case never agreed on what they saw that night, and, in fact, reported seeing completely different conduct at the time. Two of the four officers who entered the apartment reported seeing two men having sex. Yet one officer reported seeing anal sex and the other remembered seeing oral sex. The other two saw no sex at all. At least three saw the homoerotic drawing.”
This so much needs to be part of a SPN story: A popular early pregnancy book written by monks (!) wisely advised women that, as Epstein recounts, "if a cat ejaculated on sage and then a man ate the sperm-tainted herb, he would grow a cat in his stomach and vomit it out."
And not unrelatedly, I love this kid's prediction of what he will be doing in 100 years.
Of Muscles and Men: Essays on the Sword and Sandal Film, ed. Michael G. Cornelius: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. I had no idea that there were 20 films starring Hercules or someone just like him from Italy from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, but it turns out they were a big deal, forming a genre known as peplum (for the skirt). (Among other things, this is another instance of multiple versions of the same character coexisting without apparent trouble.) This book is a basically unsurprising, often sympathetic collection of analyses of the anxieties around masculinity and by extension individualism/democracy with which the peplum film engaged. There are also essays about more modern versions of the genre, such as Gladiator, 300, and Troy (those are the mightiest thighs I ever have theen! I mean--), as well as some discussion of the Starz series Spartacus (one contributor suggests that the show owes more to video games than to other predecessors) and even some He-Man and Disney Hercules. For reasons that I can’t quite understand but probably have something to do with the collection’s flirtation, but not full engagement, with the concept of camp, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena are completely missing.
Donna Dennis, Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York: I enjoyed this history of the dance between smut and the law. Dennis argues, among other things, that publishers trying to stay on the right side of the law turned to explicit violence combined with nonexplicit sex, because sex was the target—something we see today. I was somewhat amused by the argument that “the indirectness that characterized sexual expression in even the most shocking examples of sensational literature may have stemmed from ‘deep-seated guilt’ about sexual desire and the ‘residual repressiveness of the Puritan conscience,’” producing euphemisms like “snowy globes.” Okay, sure, but also I think there’s only so many times per paragraph you can really write “tits” and still feel okay about yourself as a writer. I’m not saying that “throbbing member” or “snowy globes” is a good solution for most writers, just that it’s not always obvious what you should be writing. Dennis also notes that—unlike the sex reformers and contraception advocates also prosecuted under the Comstock laws in the later part of her period—porn publishers didn’t appeal to the First Amendment to defend themselves. If they defended themselves at all, it was on the grounds that enforcement worked an unconstitutional taking of private property (the expensive plates used to print the fancier books) and privacy. I was also interested in her suggestion that the lack of prosecution of obscenity by Tammany Hall reflected a relative preference for enforcing the laws against assaults and small property crimes—the kinds of things likely to happen to lower-class citizens—over enforcing the laws relating to public morality—the kinds of things upper-class citizens didn’t like to see in “their” city. Not just ideology about what the public wants from its laws, but also real resource constraints, are involved in these choices, and that’s a good reminder. In Dennis’s account, lack of enforcement reflected “both pervasive corruption and principled opposition to Republican moral ideology.” And finally, Dennis points out that Congress barred obscenity from the US mail, but neglected to regulate private express companies, providing them with a significant source of income: just another instance of porn as lucrative business model for new markets.
Tags:
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
*and at the take-down of the What to Expect when You're Expecting book genre*
Thank you for the links.