The Reason Underground

Sophisticated theorists of cultural decline argue that our modern era tolerates behavior formerly relegated to the underground. Unsophisticated theorists of cultural decline believe that no one screwed or snorted anything until around 1967. Members of the latter group may want -- for strictly educational reasons, natch -- to view the images collected at Porn Evolution, a site devoted to "sex from 1870 till 200X."

Warning: This is an actual porn site, so if you're offended by this sort of thing you might want to skip it, and if you're surfing the Web at work you might want to hold off clicking through until you've gone home. The boss might not be sympathetic when you explain that you're only looking at nekkid wimmin because of your deep interest in cultural history. Then again, your spouse might not take kindly to it, either. Caveat clickor.

[Via The Peculiar One.]

Comments

[dickie ron]

Thanks for the tip, Jesse. I was about to call up these... distracting images at work. But now I have something to look forward to tonight. (Leer)

[Brent Bozell and Joe Farah]

Liberal codswallop. Everyone knows, drugs and porn started with the election of Bill Clinton...

[Anonymous]

"Now I have something to look forward to tonight. (Leer)"

Remember to pick up the Vaseline on your way home, Dickie.

[Kevin Carson]

Anon:

"poo-poo"? Now you're REALLY getting me hot!

Seriously, Jesse, a lot of the links from this site are even more aggressively obnoxious than most porn sites that won't quit popping back up. Before I managed to clear all that crap out of my history, about twelve links had bookmarked themselves on my computer, and one of them had set itself as my homepage. The only thing it didn't do was open up a window I couldn't close. I'll take spam any day over that shit.

[Anonymous]

porn is as old of history, nobody disputes that.

but our cultural tragedy consists that porn is now moving into mainstream popular culture, and has sexualized children at younger and younger ages

you can poo-poo that all you want, but in the age of AIDs it isn't so cute

[Julian Sanchez]

"sexualized children at younger and younger ages"? On what timescale? Relative to 1950, maybe, but surely not relative to, say, 1700.

[dude]

As a general rule if someone thinks that our time is particularly libertine, that shows they don't know much history.

[Eric Deamer]

Young met something very different in 1700. In a time of significantly shorter life expectancy and significantly lower age of marriage and childbirth, of course people were sexualized "younger".

[jacob dreyer]

^as if young didn't also mean something diff. in 1950

[martin]

"but our cultural tragedy consists that porn is now moving into mainstream popular culture, and has sexualized children at younger and younger ages"
Yep, and in our zeal to protect them we have now succeeded in making every child a potential sex object, and every man a potential abuser.

I believe the big difference between then and now is that now we have a gazillion mostly self-appointed busybodies who see it as their life's mission to better society and "protect" it's members by dredging every last corner of the underground into public view and hence into mainstream culture. After that they work to get it criminalized to put it back in the bottle. Does that really make us all better protected or just better informed of things we might well like to be ignorant of?

And Kevin Carson:
I recommend you spend some time on learning safe surfing. Start by getting a browser, such as Mozilla, in which you can REALLY turn off pop-ups, javascript, cookies and mail-links. IE says you can, but then Microsoft says many things.

[Anonymous]

And Kevin, remember to keep your virus scanner updated, too.

[Croesus]

Actually, the notion that people as a rule "married young" in the middle ages and the early modern period is a myth. This was of course true of royalty and aristocrats, but your average peasant and the like did not marry early as a ule, because of the economics marraige at the time. People had to save up to marry, and that generally meant pushing the age of marraige until sometime in the mid-20s.

[Croesus]

BTW, if you think today is bad, think about a time in Europe in the middle ages when the newly born in Europe were layed outside homes to die of exposure in an effort to keep down the family size.