Well, look up Larco Museum Moche erotic pottery. Either this was some serious fertility cult or somebody unearthed the civilization’s sex shop.
If I may be allowed a speculative digression – Was just thinking, absent proper context, it may be that we are engaging in a sort of “Motel of the Mysteries” scenario with the ancient cultures. We call something a ritual object by default. For some reason “it’s an allegorical representation of the unity of life-giving forces of nature personified in the gods Og and Mog and the goddesses Oga and Uga” sounds more plausible than “it’s a scene of a fourway orgy, with teabagging, and check out the rack on Uga”.
With finding later erotic-content material from “civilized” times, you may face another issue: succeeding periods of different regimes taking over/cultures moving in/new religions arising, deciding that they would rather do away with the “savage”/“heathen”/“sinful”/“vulgar, not really art, not worth enduring” materials from another time and actively seek their destruction (and that’s not counting just common vandalism from succeeding conflicts). That then leaves more “blanks”. Ocassionally you get a site that is buried as-was, such as Pompeii, and there then you find some evidence of material that was of more prurient nature.
I believe it would be expected that with the adoption of pulp paper and the printing press you would then get the expansion of properly pornographic (i.e. clearly wank fodder) materials: after all having to hand-copy your smut into expensive parchment or paint it in fresco on the walls of your boudoir would make it kind of scarce. Turn it into mass print and forsooth, hast thou checked out this pamphlet about randy Court ladies?
Even in the secular side of things there was almost ot our day an overlap at times between the purely erotic and that with recognized serious literary value. Several of the chapters in the Decameron would fit right in in Dear Penthouse Forum if you switched some of the fancy language for blunt modern terms.
I can’t say I find either of those much of a turn on. Actually, I don’t know WTF the Swedish one is even meant to be. It is certainly not obvious that it is anything sexual, or even that it represents humans.
There’s some doubt as whether their intention were pornographic at all. A recent article made a very strong case was that they were self-portraits (the proportions would indicate a vantage point from a woman’s eyes).
The Venus of Willendorf, one of the most famous of these, was made of rock that had to come from hundreds of miles away, giving the possibility that they were made by a traveling worker’s mate as a remembrance.
There’s also a bit of presentism in the interpretation of the relics. Just because large breasts are sexually arousing today does not necessarily mean the paleolithic people thought of them as such.
My train of thought, exactly. “Oh come now, they must have known they didn’t look like fat little pumpkins with humongous gazongas, right ? :smack: Oh right, no mirrors ! They couldn’t know what they looked like at all ! :eek:… Waaaait a minute, they never saw what *other *women looked like either ? :dubious:”
I’ll carry on what JRDelerious points out - that it took a lot of work to form some art, especially rock sculptures (except maybe the clay ones). add to that the nomadic tribes would have to carry these as extra cargo. There are therefore more likely to be for communal use (“For this ceremony, we all sit in front of the figurine and use our imagination while we…”) than one person’s private porn stash.
Bjorn Kurten’s book How to Deep-Freeze a Mommoth contains a chapter where he makes the case for Venus figures being Caveman Porn. The book’s almost 30 years old:
Plus, was the hunting that good all the time? There aren’t too many hunter-gatherer groups where the women look like they’ve been munching chocolates while sitting on the sofa watching soap operas all day. Between difficulty finding food, and the amount of work it takes just to survive as a nomad, I imagine thin was more common than globular millennia ago.
Maybe it was their ideal, the cave-man equivalent of Playboy models with giant breasts. “If she says she has a headache, we can toss her into the cooking pot and eat well for a week!”
Standards of art have changed considerably over the years, even within historical times. Nowadays, we tend to favor art that duplicates certain aspects of reality faithfully, but in the culture that produced the Venus of Willendorf, maybe they valued duplicating other aspects, or maybe they didn’t consider exact duplication to be something aspired to. Maybe they were depicting an unattainable ideal: Fat is better than thin, and so pumpkin-shaped (even though that’s impossible) is best of all. Maybe they liked reddish skin, so skin colored with ocher was best of all. And even in our “realistic” art culture, we still have things like Barbie dolls, which are no more realistically proportioned than these carved figures.
For what it’s worth, once upon a time being all pudgy and having cankles and such was regarded as more beautiful than the opposite - witness Rubens or even Boticelli. In the same vein, back when the majority of the population was out there in the fields raking muck *not *having a tan was the beauty standard. The more pallid and corpsified the better.
Seems to me, whatever the exceptional is in a given time and place, that’s the one people crave to fuck. So in a hunter-gatherer society where the highest achievement is having a knapped flint that sort of cuts right if you put some elbow into it and everyone’s starving to not-quite-death-yet-but-one-wishes, I expect them as born with “glandular problems” were the celebutantes of the era.
Besides, if you look at some modern depictions of the female form (or Skyrim mods of dubious provenance) ridiculously huge, physics-defying ta-tas and thighs to strangle an elephant with are still very much “in” among a definite subset of the population. Possibly a strong caveman factor going on there, too ;).
I recall that whether it’s Reuben’s size 26, or Marilyn Monroe’s size 14, or the modern model’s size 2, the generally admired standard of beauty was the ratio of chest-waist-hips - basically a 2-to-3 ratio for waist to hips. The Skyrim mods maybe exaggerate this a bit(?) but the truly appreciated view is more moderate.
In general, “good form” indicated health. Proper proportions, symettry, and lack of blemishes are all celebrated in literature and art and also indicators of good health, which also indicates good breeding stock. One would expect then, a variety of figurine shapes, not a preponderance of BBW’s.
Also, I always associated “fertility godess” with agricultural societies. When you are preoccupied with all your seeds germinating and your goats popping out kids galore, you celebrate reproduction.
With a hunter society, fertility is not a preoccupation - normal practices probably produced more than enough replacements for the tribe; keeping numbers down was probably more of a preoccupation. Game appeared full-grown to the hunters, they did not spend time following and monitoring herd growth rates. Ditto for found plant foods - hey did not spend weeks fussing over planted seeds, they took them as they found them.
Yeaaah we’re not talking about the same thing. I’m talking about THAT kind of shit : NSFW two click rule http ://static1.nexusmods.com/15/images/110/1641837-1329840297.jpg.
And bear in mind that’s a mild, first Google Images result example. For I am not subjecting myself to the den of horror and depravity that is the Skyrim Nexus ever again. Not without NBC gear and a rapid course of antibiotics and enucleation.
It really is not the case that people who live in hunter-gatherer societies are on the verge of starvation all the time. They are usually quite well nourished. What is more, in some modern hunter-gatherer societies, the women do indeed tend to be “well covered”, and to have what, in other ethnic groups, would be considered unusually large buttocks and breasts.* I believe (though I can’t find a cite right now) that traditionally some of these women were deliberately kept fat so that they would be able to provide milk for the rest of the tribe in seasons of scarcity.
Well for one thing that is probably not how (most) people lived.
And very likely neither Thag nor Thagina were particularly hot, and anyway, people actually doing it is not not much like porn at all.
One of my best friends at university spent his first year sharing a bedroom with a guy who had a girlfriend who stayed over, a lot. My friend did not enjoy it. He certainly wasn’t happily wanking whilst they were having it off across the room.
