In 2020, as the Meta-owned Instagram began to crack down on any explicitly erotic art or photography, I began to have an Areopagítica moment, “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
The 20th and early 21st centuries saw an expansive shift away from the narrow definitions of acceptability, allowing that obscenity laws and censorship were not in keeping with the values of a liberal society. Despite living a profoundly vanilla life myself and being a confessing christian — however latitudinous — the peculiar puritanisms suddenly reemergent in our era and the ways that a theocratic morality — absent the actual θεός — has leaked into our increasingly censorious secular discourse troubles me deeply. Enough so that I felt I needed to act on my longstanding interest in the history of human sexuality, particularly its literary and artistic expressions.
We have 37,000 years of red-blooded harlotry depicted in every medium by every kind of person. It is well past time that it was collected, as much as possible, into one place — a place that does not purpose to be a tawdry spank bank, but rather a tidy, elegant, well-designed academic overview of the fact that human beings fuck and are fucked, that we have since time immemorial immortalized our fucking in ink, paint, stone, wood, and every other material know to man.
Whatever purity cults and sexual ethics have come and gone and come again, there have always been a significant subset of the human race who have disregarded their dictates. There is no community on earth that has not at some point fostered a trade in pornographic art and literature and every technological innovation has quickly become a way to capture and disseminate works of a more than obviously carnal and promiscuous character.
One may entertain a seemingly endless array of reactions to such materials, whether indulgent or suppressive, but one cannot with any intellectual honesty deny the proliferation of sexually explicit creative work. There is nothing modern about it. It is my aim, therefore, to create a sort of database of antique, multicultural, globally-sourced pornography to settle once and for all whether we are justified in addressing the appetites of a society and its people by censorship and coercion or whether we are, in fact, merely the last in a long line of would-be authoritarian moralists who believe in depriving people of knowledge, the choice to experience, to see, to utter, to argue freely over this most elemental facet of human life.
The truth remains, whatever the zealous and unbending orthodoxies of the moment, “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” Let the mass of free persons judge for themselves whether they shall be governed by the oldest of professions and its attendant devices, rather than pretending that “communities” maintain “standards” which there is no evidence any but a minority hold.
Your most prideful and disobedient servant,
The Curator
