note: Depending on where you work you may wish to save this for after hours.
I will be adding a lot of tasty titbits from BDSM/Fetish history to BED’s Visual Library this summer, with many more 20th century illustrations, magazines already waiting to be posted.
Today’s Visual Library build is very different because it takes us back to some of the earliest roots of Western Civilization. I focused on Greco-Roman art (a period that covers, roughly, the 8th century BC to 476 AD, or almost 13 centuries of human history) to give visitors a better understanding of how sexual diversity was a norm in ancient times. Visit it now.
The rise of Christianity brought the erasure and suppression of vast historical evidence that people enjoyed sex in myriad ways and with myriad partners. One of the goals of Judeo-Islamo-Christian religions has been to control the sex lives of their adherents by establishing what kind of sex they are allowed to have. There are specific requirements that adults only have the kind of sex most likely to produce children who will be trained to follow the same religious beliefs. Those children would grow up to abide by the same rules about sex in obedience to religious dictates, growing the religion’s base of followers.
Ironically, because the ancients did not scientifically understand reproduction, they believed that the man had to be on top to get his partner pregnant. So what began as a religious myth drenched in ignorance that missionary position sex between man and woman is the only acceptable type of sex has since become a wide-spread belief that man-on-top intercourse is a superior type of sex or the only “real” or legitimate expression of eroticism.
The Greco-Roman eras held to different beliefs about sex. Yes, there were religions and religious cults but there were few official laws or rules that prohibited adults from enjoying partners of any gender, hosting private orgies, or going to brothels to live out their sexual fantasies. The enormity of the Catholic Church’s suppression of the truth about human beings (i.e., that we enjoy sex/gender diversity as a species) was an effort to erase the real history of human desire and replace it with religious propaganda. We all feel its effects in our lives, whether it’s the laws against sex-work, anti-gay propaganda, or believing it’s “abnormal” to enjoy non-reproductive sex.
It’s important to remember who we authentically are as human beings. It is a joy that a small but invaluable trove of images of ancient erotic works was preserved. The lusts of the ancients are an affirmative lesson to all BDSM educators and students. They prove, through art, that the human fascination with kink, poly, swinging, fetish, and same-sex pleasure is as old as documented history.
