“there’s nothing more human than handmade pornography”

December 14, 2020 8:50 AM

America’s hidden world of handmade pornography (The Conversation): But one type that has been largely hidden and forgotten is the pornography people make for themselves. Unlike pornography for profit, handmade pornography is crude and funny and subtle. It, too, contains multitudes. The Pleasure Crafts: A new history of pornography before it became commercial (NY Review of Books paywall): “These objects—in all their incoherent, libidinal, confusing strangeness—remain acts of individual testimony that can and should be entered into the historical record,” she writes. “They tell us about how people understood sexuality through what they could visualize.” Poking Fun (History Today): An archive of handmade erotic objects made over two centuries of American history tells a story of hidden desire that has often been overlooked.
posted by not_the_water (18 comments total)

Not dead yet darling
posted by not_the_water at 8:50 AM on December 14, 2020 [2 favorites]

Needs fewer words.
posted by cjorgensen at 10:00 AM on December 14, 2020 [5 favorites]

this reminds me of a place that once hosted a Bavarian style brunch.. the owner/operator had recreated a traditional Bavarian farm and the brunch was worth the drive and the price, and then some. Guests would leave the dining area (outdoors in the summer) and walk a short distance to the restrooms (separate buildings, one designated 'Mens' and the other 'Womens' though I'm sure the signs were in German).

The women's restroom featured a mural of David on the one wall, and a projecting fig leaf over David's unmentionables was rather invitingly added, fastened to the wall but clearly just begging to be moved aside.. a piece of wood cut to resemble a big leaf and painted accordingly, if memory serves. You can see the joke coming a mile away in hindsight but surprise: when you moved the leaf aside to get a look at David's package, you set off a loud bell in the dining area (connected by rope) and everyone was alerted to your prurience.

The place was absolutely crawling with little jokes similar to the "Not Dead Yet, Darling" contribution from not_the_water. I do not know many Bavarians, but is that a thing? Maybe generational.
posted by elkevelvet at 10:38 AM on December 14, 2020 [9 favorites]

There was a restaurant like that in Baltimore but it was a statue of David in the restroom so maybe that was a thing.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 10:44 AM on December 14, 2020

Distinctions between ‘porn’ and ‘erotica’ are fraught with assumptions about taste and class

I thought that it was always pretty clear: porn is what you like and erotica is what I like.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:48 AM on December 14, 2020 [11 favorites]

pub in FL had restroom door signs...on the left

MEN ->

on the right

<- WOMEN

but the arrows were super tiny and blended in with the door color. you could easily identify tables that were anxiously waiting for their embarrassed friend to return from the loo for the first time.

not cool.
posted by j_curiouser at 11:56 AM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

McVeigh’s is a storied Irish pub in downtown Toronto. In this country we assume a degree of bilingualism and most Canadians, regardless of mother tongue, can sort out between MEN and WOMEN or between FEMMES and HOMMES. McVeigh’s ups the stakes by eschewing both official languages and presenting its possibly intoxicated patrons with the choice of FIR and MNÁ.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:02 PM on December 14, 2020 [4 favorites]

cjorgensen: "Needs fewer words."

Hey now, some people get off on words.
posted by chavenet at 12:20 PM on December 14, 2020 [3 favorites]

ricochet biscuit there was a pub in Buffalo, NY that did the same-- and no cutesy images of ladies in skirts or guys with hats to help anyone out. New people generally waited to see who came out of which doors to see where they needed to go.
posted by oflinkey at 12:22 PM on December 14, 2020

→ the choice of FIR and MNÁ.

See, that one's easy: evergreen coniferous trees to the left, muppets to the right.
posted by scruss at 1:40 PM on December 14, 2020 [5 favorites]

Mod note: Comment removed - don't Godwin this out of the gate please.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 2:15 PM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

The article seems to be using a pretty broad definition of pornography--I've always defined it as sexual/erotic material that is intended to get someone off. Although I'm sure there are people who have masturbated to (as opposed to with) a potholder, those seem more related to the penis crowns you see at hen parties.
posted by betweenthebars at 2:39 PM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

there was a pub in Buffalo, NY that did the same
Pretty much every Irish Pub^TM I've ever been in does this. IIRC, even the one in Shanghai.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 2:47 PM on December 14, 2020

This article seems to be exclusively concerned with pornographic "outsider" art, but I feel like there is a lot to say about how this sort of thing has adapted to the internet, from the crude scribblings of someone who cannot adequately explain why they are incredibly excited by the idea of Naruto being transformed into Sasuke's underthings, to the bespoke drawings by professional artists that can be found on the same site.

The world of cartoon porn on the internet is a very strange place, with some very very strange niches, and no small number of artists who pay the rent drawing some pretty crazy things.
posted by egypturnash at 3:13 PM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

Elkevelvet, Marijane Meaker(M E Kerr, Vin Packer) describes frat boys pulling a similar "lift and look" prank on their female party guests in her memoir Me Me Me Me Me and lesbian pulp Spring Fire. These happened/were set during the Truman presidency.
posted by brujita at 3:52 PM on December 14, 2020

Perhaps we can safely assume that a pair of oven gloves, adorned with hidden pockets containing a felt erection and a nest of real pubic hair was simply intended to provoke surprised laughter.

This is a level of dedication (or craft or authenticity or of something anyway) that I certainly wasn't expecting.

~25 years of surfing the Weird Wide Web has trained me to expect that there exists, somewhere, an expansive photo gallery of (or even a minor subculture devoted to the collecting of) obscene home-made potholders that go back a century or more. My, uh, friend looked around a little bit for such a thing and couldn't find any such, though.
posted by Western Infidels at 6:09 AM on December 15, 2020

~Distinctions between ‘porn’ and ‘erotica’ are fraught with assumptions about taste and class
~I thought that it was always pretty clear: porn is what you like and erotica is what I like.

The difference between porn and erotica? Lighting.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:56 AM on December 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

Love it. I’ve had Milton Simpson’s Folk Erotica
on my bookshelf for years. Will run right out and get this one!
posted by Sublimity at 4:12 PM on December 15, 2020