Yet More Erotica

Eros and Thanatos (1999)  Klaus Bottger

Forbidden Erotica (2000) Mark Lee Rotenberg

Tom Poulton: The Secret Art of an English Gentleman (2006) Editor - Dian Hanson

The ostensible purpose of Eros and Thanatos is to give us the work of Klaus Bottger, a German artist (1942-1992) whose ouevre of erotic prints has been picked up by the Erotic Prints Society in 1999 and padded out with an introduction and two pornographic short stories (by English writers) with a German theme - one set amongst the free love German student community of cliche and the other providing a mock psycho-analytic case study in which a brutal Freikorps soldier learns gemutlichkeit and leaves his bourgeois analyst in something of a disturbed erotic state.

Bottger has talent but the work goes nowhere. While the stories have some some interest, they do not have great interest while the Germanic link between sex and death is laboured. It would have been far better to produce a slimmer book of prints with some sort of intelligent thematic ordering or to have embedded Bottger in other 'erotic' artistic work of the period - as it is, you can knock off the whole book in under an hour and not feel you have gained a great deal. Not inspiring.

Forbidden Erotica is either for very mentally sound historians of sexuality or for very very sad men who really need to get a life. My interest is quite definitely the former and, from that perspective, it is a reference text - in essence it represents the 'cream' of the Rotenberg collection of pornography (no, not erotica, just downright pornography) from the 1860s through to the 1950s. But, really, it is, despite the intelligent and sensitive introduction from Laura Mirsky who does not mince words on the exploitation often involved in these photographs, not recommended for your library. If you have any sensitivity at all, male or female, it will just depress you.

We have written before on the sexual culture of the West in fairly disparaging terms. While we must be mindful that this material, though extensive, was only available and of interest to a relatively small number of males, the sheer joylessness of the raw basic hardcore sex in this book, its studied exposures of aroused genitalia without charm or grace and its determined comic attitude to sexuality (like one perpetual dirty joke) show that social repression certainly encouraged repressed minds to see sex as a sad, dirty and underhand business.

On balance, I think Rotenberg has done history a favour in preserving these photographs. The dispassionate adult observer should be interested in such representation because of what it tells us about a culture that we hope is confined now to the margins of the West. Even swinging and dogging culture in the contemporary West attempts to show some 'joie de vivre' and certainly mutual pleasure between equals.

The interview with Rotenberg is also interesting as an insight into the mind of the collector qua collector. It is clear that his initial fascination may have been quite definitely sexual but that the obsessive drive for more material, even the minor risks taken in meeting strange types in parking lots, has more in common with the mind of the determined stamp collector or trainspotter than that of the libertine. This is 'fetishism' of a strangely harmless type.

Much is made of the lack of perfection in the models. They are decidely podgy up until the 1920s (or so) and then relatively scrawny. But this is overplayed. The production of hardcore pornography was a very underground matter in which 'image' was less important than delivery of the basics under the counter and with fairly captive customers who could not 'surf' the net for fantasies that might force entrepreneurs to compete for high-paid models or trawl Eastern Europe for hungry young beauties. The market gave little incentive for producers to refine their product beyond the basic because the market was small and at the harder end.

The only time that this material moves an edge above the brutal, boring and trite is when, very occasionally, it apes high art. The late nineteenth century seemed to like bulky Rubenesque older women. A very few shots are like watching the Belgian master come to life. More interesting is the political sub-text of anti-clerical pornography where nuns and priests engage in fellatio and other sexual conduct in photography that self-evidently apes the Spanish tradition of sacred painting that so influenced the tacky religious pictures that would be found in churches, schools and hospitals across Catholic Europe.

This sexual anticlericalism is an ancient feature of European culture with an immensely long pedigree. It is really about resentment of hypocrisy and of the comfortable lives (as others saw it) of the oppressive moral guides who told late Victorian men and women what was right and what was wrong in sexual matters. However, this material is exceptional in its cultural meaning. Most of the material has no meaning - it says very little more than that hardcore sexuality was not about liberation as it has been to some extent since the 1970s but about something else, almost certainly aggression and even (somewhere in there) hatred.

I am not convinced that this hatred was as simplistically misogynistic as feminist theorists like to think. I think it was self-hatred amongst men for their own entrapment, of what they had become under a repressive morality that gave no space for sexual self-expression except in terms of the whore observed or copulated with in secret. The aggressive gaze is rarely directed at the woman and actual 'violence' appears to be formalised and very limited. Instead the aggressive gaze is directed outwards at the voyeur as if to say: 'See, I am doing what you would like to do. I have the power even though I am the low-life with the whore. I have freedom in my degradation and you have slavery in your respectability."

Maybe I am reading too much into pictures that have (for me) no erotic content whatsoever. It is not just technological weaknesses in the media being used nor the fact that the women are overweight, the costumes ridiculous and the 'jokes' deeply unfunny (and I am no prude) but the overwhelming sense that these people are scarcely more interesting than performing animals at a circus.

And perhaps I have hit on a point here. Today, few of us feel comfortable watching animals at a circus. We know animals are not humans but we have long since granted them some sort of rights and one right is not observing them perform unnatural tricks. These photographs come from the age of circuses - they are for respectable but ignorant people who want to watch creatures alien to their everyday world perform 'tricks'. A surprising number of these photographs (at least before the 1920s) involve improbable gymnastics and angles designed to show 'how it is done' - the analogy with the seal with a ball on its nose or the bear dancing is apposite.

One day historians will see the Victorian and Catholic eras in industrial Europe as a quintessential age of cruelty and, although I would not labour the point, it was certainly an era of appalling working conditions for the majority, militarism and eventual mass slaughter and the almost forgetful destruction of indigenous peoples as empire expanded. The cruelty of existence under enormous pressure to conform to certain cold ethical standards (of respectability, of compliance and conscription and of hard struggle to build lives in dull pioneer settlements under the eye of the preacher) created the same callousness that gave us circuses, easy patriotism, imperialism and an objectifying attitude to sexual pleasure.

The hard core material does become much more humane and easier to understand as persons engaged in pleasure as the 1920s moves towards the 1950s. It is no less dull but the gaze does seem to be directed to the other participant rather than be a performance for the voyeur. We are moving towards the modern age. It is as if people are slowly learning to empathise with one another - just! One may speculate whether Hollywood was critical in shifting the visual mind (as opposed to the literary sensibility) from cold observation as an aid to masturbation and obsession to one of imaginative engagement in what was being seen. A grim book. Reading it is an experience you might undertake in order to know better the human condition but it is not one to ennoble the human spirit.

Taschen publishes erotica with Germanic efficiency. Tom Poulton: The Secret Art of a Gentleman is a bedroom coffee table portfolio of drawings from a minor figure, Tom Poulton, who produced a small body of work that illustrated the 'seedy' side of London life in the 1950s and the early 1960s.It is fairly hard core stuff (certainly only for the very open-minded). It cannot really be considered particularly vicious or misogynistic today (certainly not by the sometimes hateful standards of its own day) although, naturally, had it been available and published rather than existing as a sort of sexual 'samizdat', it would have been so regarded by feminists between its time and ours. 

Still, everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. The tone is minxish and playful with what appears to be something close to a small cast of characters including an elfin 'little tart' who clearly represents Poulton's private fantasy. He seems to like 'sets' where a little narrative is implied - older men and young women, students, navy lesbians surreptiously making out in the bulkheads, couples being caught out by one of their partners. The work is not worth too much analysis but the themes represent the reality of their times - pleasures are naughty and hidden, undertaken in defiance of authority (teachers, managers, officers) or implicit trades across the authority boundary (perhaps abusive but perhaps just transgressive).

It is hard not to see English post-war sex as naughty rather than vicious in this work - sexual behaviour is wanton but defiant of convention behind closed doors. But remember that this was the age in which Alan Turing was hounded to death for his sexual 'deviancy' by the security services. It is not over-imaginative to see sexual repression by authority as reaching the same intensity of cruelty in contemporary Britain as Soviet repression of political freedom. The net result was ignorance on both sides with immense courage or foolhardiness being shown by both political and sexual 'deviants' in their respective cultures.

It seems no accident that the security elements in the British and Soviet Establishments would both tend to see sexual deviance amongst the ruling elite as a possible sign of political betrayal (not wholly without reason, given that highly educated and cynical homosexuals were so alienated from society that a few British examples did, in the end, find themselves acting for the other side). The imagery should be understood in precisely that context of public sexual repression and private vice. It is not unduly exploitative - but, at the end of the day, this is just a lonely male's masturbatory fantasy of loose women, seduction, service lesbianism, swingers 'avant la lettre' and (we may assume) prostitution.

The drawing is fine but it is not remarkable. Few drawings can be called finished. Many appear to be little more than doodles. The erotic drive in it is unsophisticated and the effect transient. It is just a footnote in the history of erotica. However, the book is a useful contemporary source document for any study of sexual attitudes in the London middle classes before the swinging sixties. Enough time has now passed to look a bit more objectively at that curious and disturbed culture, built on scarcity and memories of war. It was to be blown apart by the pill, sexual and then women's 'liberation' and AIDS and now by sex-positive feminism and a highly sexualised celebrity culture. As was said by L.P.Hartley, "The past is another country."