Sexual Symbolism Has Really Changed
By Bill Lasarow
August 31, 2024
Erotic fresco recovered in a Pompeiian home. Courtesy of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii.
In casual conversation with a female friend we were comparing notes on “Bridgerton” and some other current programs. She remarked how in the two seasons following the first, breakout season have played down the sex. That first season, she pointed out, was a variation on “Fifty Shades of Gray” in a Regency-era setting. I reflected on this as I read Matthew Kangas’ recent review of Kimberly Trowbridge. Kangas very much liked one of her paintings, “Hemlock in the Moss Garden,” a still life woodland painting done at the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island, off the coast of Seattle. He did not comment on its central feature, a vertical tree trunk, cropped at the top of the painting. Its phallic intent is visually striking and unexpected, call it an erotic surprise.
Egon Schiele, “Pair Embracing,” 1915. Courtesy of ArtMajeur.
It has been sixty years since Hugh Hefner launched “Playboy” with the then shocking photograph of Marilyn Monroe. By now digital media has both rendered “Playboy” a historical artifact and stood the long age of sexual modesty (or repression, as you will) on its head. Not to consume sexual material, assuming you are at least 18 years old, is now unusual, even a source of social embarrassment. To frankly acknowledge and discuss it is more than acceptable, it is very common, dinner party talk. Married couples on TV were, in that earlier age, consigned each to their own twin bed, and words such as “pregnant” were never uttered. The change in both sexual behavior and how we talk about it may be broad and deep, but it is unsurprisingly uneven.
Massimo Pacifico, Relief on one of the Khajuraho Group of Temples in Madhya Pradesh, India, photograph.
The temples were dedicated to both Hinduism and Jainism and date from the 11th century.
Courtesy of Massimo Pacifico.
The Dobbs repeal of the Constitutional right to abortion has further scrambled public discussion of sex. In the two years since that ruling, the language of reproductive health issues has had the additional effect of placing straightforward sexual conversation into the most public and political of contexts. Somehow, at the same time, legal measures have been passed in a handful of states to remove books from school libraries for containing sexual language and to make online pornography illegal in a last-ditch effort to roll back the hands of time. Buried beneath such ill-advised measures that lies a reasonable intent that originates with how we, as parents, minimize young children’s exposure to sexual images and language, and any potential for trauma. But the problem of exposure has become insoluble because both are so ubiquitous. What we are only beginning to learn is that the exposure itself is not the problem at all. The problem is the way we talk about it, not just the words but tone and inflection as well.
Antonio Allegri da Correggio, “Leda and the Swan,” 1532, oil on canvas, 75 1/4 x 59 7/8”. Courtesy of the Staatliche Museen of Berlin.
Sexual imagery has, of course, been around ever since human beings first figured out how to make drawing implements. Up until the development of mass media technologies it was both difficult and expensive to make such images portable, which made censorship feasible in those societies that chose that path. Imagery of all kinds existed extensively in the public place, ranging from elaborate commissions funded by religious and government bodies and by wealthy aristocrats, to self-appointed graffiti by street artists. The presence of sexual imagery has appeared in caves, in homes, on religious buildings, on exterior walls, but can go unnoticed in the cacophony of the larger visual environment. The more explicit that imagery the more likely it would be confined to private spaces. The long tradition of nudity in visual art has found many ways to downplay sexuality in order to address issues beyond sex, as well as to maintain patrons’ and public support.
Kimberly Trowbridge, “Hemlock in the Moss Garden,” 2024, oil on canvas, 60 x 72”. Courtesy of J. Rinehart Gallery, Seattle.
Trowbridge’s “Hemlock” painting quotes that past age, in which sexuality was very much present in visual art, but either hidden or gussied up into something respectable. That phallic symbols appeared regularly throughout the 1.5 millennia of the Christian era reflected a limited sexual knowledge, well understood social mores, and rigid religious authority that no longer holds sway beyond a small but energetic minority. Some are quite dismayed by this gradual change, to them a serious decline akin to the Biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, and these hard core moral police will mostly and ironically pine for the election of the sexual predator Trump34 because they fantasize that he will magically erase the last 80 years of the post-WWII era, an era that has been the greatest period of economic success, technological development, and, yes, general stability in the history of our species. To achieve their goal could only be undertaken by a truly lock-down dictatorship — and would only produce vast underground of birth control, abortion, and pornography, along with untoward suffering. The vehicle of a Trump34 presidency is laughable; their führer may lust after their money and blind fealty, but he only shares their vision as long as it brings him those benefits. Then there is the sheer joy he derives from the failure and humiliation of others, a rather different version of Harris’ and Waltz’ politics of joy.
Utagawa Kunisade, untitled page from a Japanese Pillow Book, or shunga (erotic art), ca. 1840, woodblock
print, colored inks on paper. Courtesy of the National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C.
One of our areas of greatest advancement in the post-War era has been the progress towards the full equality of women and people of color, not yet completely achieved by any stretch, but vastly improved over the state of equity from a 1945 starting point. The Dobbs decision reflects the desire of a minority of Americans whose religious morality and views would relegate everyone but themselves to a return to the back of the bus, in their view free to reproduce without the burden of suffrage. Their dogma that life begins at conception is so historically unusual and out of step with what we have learned through the vast strides in our scientific knowledge as to be merely a pretext. It is a last gasp effort to prevent the further intrusion of women into all sectors of society, to wield legitimate authority, an effort to reverse all of that, to return us all to an unbalanced paternalistic authority that has historically been a primary source of human suffering.
Jamie McCartney, “The Spice of Life,” 2006 hand cast plaster. Courtesy of the artist.
Sexual curiosity, it turns out, is a much more powerful force than submission to religious rule. Pornography may be readily available via the internet, but more significantly there is an enormous demand for it that is so organic as to be normative. It’s been embedded in media ranging from cinema to advertising for more than a century, and in visual art literally for millennia. So the initial jolt of radical availability is by now buried in the past, no longer radical but ordinary. The rapid advance of digital and other technologies has altered social behaviors and public moral standards to a degree that is liberating but at the same time threatening. The legitimate downsides will never be addressed successfully either through denial or repression, but by accepting the changes wrought with a critical eye towards regulating outcomes to favor our natural impulses and minimize and manage the negative outcomes.
