The Blue Monkey Review

For a couple of years now I've joked with SHU library director David Stanley about developing a "pornography studies" collection at Reeves library. Of course, I must have known, or could have guessed, that there really was such a field of study. A recent issue of UCBerkeley News interviews UCB film scholar Linda Williams, author of Hard Core, about her studies of pornographic film. [Thanks to Neha Bawa for bringing this to my attention.]

This article is interesting for giving an overview of issues that the study of pornography addresses. Among others is the class barrier that originally existed in the consumption of pornography. A secret "gentlemen only" museum housed the unearthed erotic frescoes of Pompeii during the 19th century. William refers to the work of another scholar who shows how "'gentlemen' first attempted to keep the lower classes and women from looking at the equivalents of the frescoes from Pompeii, and how this has slowly broken down by class and by gender."

The interviewer then asked if there were such secret museums today. "Oh, certainly," Williams replied. "My favorite recent example is Jesse Helms waving Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs on the floor of the Senate in order to persuade his colleagues to defund the NEA. He wanted the senators to be scandalized, but he also asked that all the women and pages leave the chamber! Only in a gentlemen-only “secret museum” can you do that."