Degradation: What the History of Obscenity Tells Us about Hate Speech. “The major distinction that I found between cultures that tolerated and even openly appreciated depictions of sex and those that found them somehow shameful was in their views of the nature of the divine. The Greek gods and goddesses were themselves highly sexual creatures.”
“Head of patron saint of genital diseases to be auctioned in Meath” Ireland. “Saint Vitalis of Assisi was an Italian hermit and monk who died in 1370 and became a saint despite an early life marked by licentiousness and immorality. In a bid to atone for his earlier sins, he went on pilgrimages to various sanctuaries and eventually became a Benedictine monk and later lived as a hermit, living in utter poverty near Assisi. After his death he became known as a patron against sicknesses and diseases affecting the genitals.”
Mind Hacks posted on erotic asphyxia. Here’s a review of the literature on autoerotic deaths between 1954 and 2004. Here’s a pdf of the first paper that I could find on this topic (in the British Medical Journal, 1960). After a gruesome description of the circumstances in which four men had died, the authors venture a Freudian hypothesis — somehow, the men wrapped themselves in plastic in order to simulate a return to the womb. (!) Then the authors make a more sensible claim: “A much less elegant and more superficial explanation is that these people were trying to achieve some undifferentiated thrill or excitement from partial suffocation or anoxia. This factor may have existed but it does not explain the transvestism, sexual arousal, or complete enclosure of the body. It is an interesting reflection that the sexual impulse in man is so protean in its manifestations that a technical advance resulting in a new packaging material can result in a new perverse manifestation.”
Back to a less depressing topic: You get a sense of the erotic nature of Scheherazade from this review of a perfomance by Anna Kisselgoff in the NY Times (Jan. 18, 1981). Kisselgoff summarizes part of the narrative as follows: “The wives bribe the chief eunuch to release the slaves who spring out to make love to the women. The leader of the orgy is Zobeide’s ‘golden slave’ …. It is common to think of ‘Scheherazade,’ with its frank acknowledgement of sexual passions, as an early expression of Freud’s century. To most Anglo-Saxon audiences at the time, it was inconceivable that a powerful queen would bother with a black slave. Russians brought up on tales of Tartar harems and white princesses had no trouble with the idea.” Here’s Yvonne de Carlo as she appeared in a 1947 movie called Song of Scheherazade.
