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By Jack Mauro
MenSexHistoryandtheInternet
...A Debriefing
Opening PullQuote
“Seth caused his phallus to become stiff and inserted it between Horus’s
thighs. Then Horus placed his hands between his thighs and received Seth’s
semen…”
- Translated from Papyrus I, Chester Beatty Library, Dublin
There was porn in ancient Egypt. Some
of it survives, on incalculably valuable parchment. There was
porn circulating all over the place in ancient Rome. The hallmark
of that particular empire’s
smut was—not too surprisingly, given the world-eating nature
of the populace—a decided leaning toward domination, if not
outright sadism. There was, too, what we would consider quite a
lot of gay porn passed around in ancient Greece. Much of it decorated
vases, much of it was gay, and some of it—as in Aristophanes’ 411
BC comedy, Lysistrata—took place on the stage, albeit softly
and in the garb of political satire.
Then, in the late 1400s, a man named Guttenberg retooled an olive
press and changed the world. Printed matter was born, and mass
distribution was soon yapping at its heels.
Some things are just meant to go together, even if it takes a very,
very long while. Dirty pictures and dirty stories were, in short
order, a hot commodity. While they may not have taken pride-of-place
in the stalls on market day, it’s not much of a leap to speculate
that, under the table loaded with bootleg copies of Marco Polo’s
Journal, transactions of a different nature were made between the
farmer and the printer/seller. It wasn’t exactly the Information
Age, yet it matters not. Homemade printing presses in a lot of
stables and cellars were beginning to supply a voluminous demand.
Most history books demurely bypass this unattractive branch of
the printing revolution. The day of mass-produced pornography,
however, was dawning.
(Note: pornography, as such, is a Christian concept and therefore
not truly applicable to the doodlings and scribblings of the ancients.
Nor does the tag apply to even all modern Western societies. Call
it what you will, though, the fact remains: a great deal of evidence
exists pointing to an age-old predilection of mankind to witness
people having sex. That said, we go on, connecting the dots.)
Wherever and whenever there is pornographic material to be had,
there will be men. Women find it as well, in all fairness. But
not in such herds, and their involvement calls for gargantuan sidebars
we must, at least for now, set aside. Be it a dirty movie house,
adult book store, or ‘mature’ section in the rear of
the local video rental, gay men and their straight brethren alike
will beat a path to porn’s door. It is as well safe to assume
that the man wishing to get some material 500 years ago had the
same two options available to the man of 20 years ago: sneak it
home, or take advantage of its uplifting content while on the dealer’s
premises. Some took it home. But a lot more didn’t.
Connecting, connecting…
When men are exposed to pornography, they are customarily in a
state open to arousal, if not fully aroused. They are, too, somewhat
protected in the environment displaying it: an advantage to enter
a ‘shameful’ place is that shame—or its evil
twin, exposure—does not exist within. These places have always
been a haven of sorts to the gay man, a room where the outside
world’s problems with his inclinations mean very little,
and where he can happily expect to run into like-minded gentlemen.
Something else goes on in such dens, something to fuel the gay
man’s journey to them: the straightest of straight men go
a little crazed with lust in adult bookstores. More than a few
then entertain alleviating that need in ways they would normally
not deem decent, if even possible. Yes, they have sex with other
men. This is no gay agitprop, nor is it wishful thinking. It is
what happens.
Thus, for quite a long time, from the Thebes residence where erotic
drawings could be had for a secret knock on the door and a drachma,
to Sal’s Discount XXX Warehouse off I-95, all kinds of men
have traveled a little ways or many miles to get some relief. Some
come in gay and leave gayer; some are purely heterosexually driven
and exit unchanged; and some set out straight and take a turn in
the video booth. Some attend to their own business, while others
look for a little clandestine assistance. But the object has always
been the same, and the means to this end, Mr. Guttenberg’s
dazzling invention notwithstanding, has always necessitated going
out. Until relatively recently.
Only two or three dots remain. But they are fat ones.
In the 1980s, the home PC and the internet begin to shake the ground
under everyone’s feet. By the ’90s, the amount of smut
online is a joke too tired for the Tonight Show. It is a revolution,
to be sure. Experts who charge fat fees have told us that
preoccupations with pornography and sex online are responsible
for failed marriages, lost jobs, variously exacerbated and sometimes
crippling disorders, and bankruptcies far and wide. We shake our
heads at these things. All that misery, all that upheaval, from
a box, a screen and a keyboard?
And the fear is that there is more underfoot, for it is still too
early in the reign of the modern internet to gauge what the long-term
damage will be. We can’t yet know just how many brand-spanking
new, communication-oriented and social/behavioral interaction disorders
we’ll see crop up, when the teens currently uploading naked
images of themselves get a little older. But the harvest, citizens,
will be plentiful.
Which brings us back to the last, big-ass dot. We have, in fact,
just passed it.
Setting to the side everything the internet has brought to the
world and stripped from it, an indisputable fact remains, and one
highly pertinent to our purposes here: it allows virtually any
man to access, from his home, what for thousands of years had to
be walked to, arrived at by mule cart, or driven to. The married
guy merely has to close the door to the den and tell the family
he’s checking his emails; the single man can turn the speakers
way up and lie to no one. And, just as in the brick-and-mortar
porn shops, the smut is the milder of the enticements offered.
Because, just as in the brick-and-mortar porn shops, real men are
occupying the same space at the same time. The gay men found in
this arena are just as eager to make it real as are the boys in
the downtown porno arcade—with one another or with an adventurous
straight soul, and within the hour. As has been noted, straight
often gets less straight in this territory. In such a climate,
and under such omnipresent circumstances, the unthinkable gets,
well, thought about.
Exponentially then, today’s gay male traffic utterly dwarfs
yesterday’s cruising. So too does the graph line indicating
the curious element spike off the chart. A lusty fellow of 1977,
straight as can be, may have paused once or twice when seeing those
explicit offers from other men scrawled on the walls of the video
arcade. But he’s got those walls in front of him every day,
now. Moreover, it appears that a multitude of his pals are wondering
about sex with other men. And why not? They are perfectly free
to, as free as the completely out gay man messaging them in the
chat rooms; the wonderful anonymity provided by the net encourages
exploration previously too dangerous to venture.
Thousands and thousands of men, every hour, in every city. In every
country. It is a bonanza for the gay man. It is too much for the
persuadable straight man. No adult palace was ever this busy. A
drastic change in quantity alters quality. The morality shifts;
it is all thinkable.
... And the straight women of America used to make noises about
their men bringing home Playboy.
Article provided by GayLinkContent.com
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