Always wanted to know what kind of porn we used to have? Then grab your chance now, because the exhibition 'Porn on paper' is open in Museum Meermanno. Never before had four centuries of porn been shown together.
Museum Meermanno in The Hague will be dominated by porn in the coming months. Porn on paper, that is, because we are talking about a collaboration between a book museum and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB). The KB is lending pornographic works for this exhibition, from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
Wave movements in prudishness
Climbing the stairs of the stately museum building does not expect exciting prints or naked leaves. Yet the breasts and cocks are flying around your ears at this exhibition. The five rooms are dark, the lights are dim and there is even a bed ready, but it is not flat. In addition to the display cases with books and magazines containing erotic stories and images, the (wall) texts outline the underlying story about the development of pornography in the Netherlands.
Curator Arno Kuipers of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek gives a tour and explains:“Just putting old books down in a nice way is of course not enough. We also want to provide explanation and context. What we want to show are the wave movements in the history of porn since its origin in the sixteenth century. You can conclude from that that we have not become more and more open about nudity and sex over time.”
Sex in public
Pornography is a term that came into use in the nineteenth century and refers to text or image that has the purpose of arousal. It doesn't mean there wasn't sex in books before that time. Historians regard the Italian Pietro Aretino as the patriarch of Western pornography, because he first wrote lustful texts in 1527 and had them printed with ditto images.
Pope banned Aretino's Sonetti lussuriosi (lustful sonnets) accompanied by prints depicting different positions. This only made the book more popular and imitation was inevitable, also outside Italy. The purpose behind this was not only the distribution of porn but also a protest against the pope's hypocrisy. The exhibition therefore starts with a translation of this book.
Hidden in Hell
In the first room, Kuipers leads me past a counterfeit bookcase with mesh for the books. “In the nineteenth century, as an elite institution in The Hague, the KB mainly collected foreign, especially French-language pornographic works. They were stored in a locked warehouse, covered with gauze, which was called 'The Hell'. The Hell of the KB no longer exists:everything is now in the Special Collections, but a valid scientific reason must still be given for access to pornography.”
In the next room we step into the seventeenth century. At that time, Amsterdam was first known as the sex capital of Europe:spicy books that had been banned elsewhere were printed and distributed here. The pornography served partly as moralistic or social criticism. Kuipers:“The novel D'Openhertige Miss, Or D'Discovered Disguise was a best seller. In this, a fictional Amsterdam whore takes the floor and exposes the hypocrisy (dissimulation) of her visitors.”
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After the loose seventeenth century, it was fairly quiet in the Netherlands with regard to pornographic works. We do not yet know why this is the case and further research is necessary. That it was not so chaste everywhere in Europe is apparent from spicy French literature. There, the eighteenth century is known as the age of erotica. In the second half of the eighteenth century, literature in the Netherlands became more explicit again, to which limits were set in the nineteenth:extensive sexual acts had to be expurgated and often disappeared underground.
The next part of the exhibition focuses on the recently acquired collection of Bert Sliggers, the former curator of the Teylers Museum. It mainly contains cheap porn magazines from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kuipers:“Especially the early porn is very interesting, because no other copies of it have survived. These booklets, called realistic novels, could be bought for 10 or 20 cents. The print runs were very high, but were easily thrown away because it was worth nothing.”
Strict morality laws
The confessional Christian political parties, led by Reverend Abraham Kuyper, ensured that a strict morality law was introduced in 1911. The hunt for pornography was on, but did it have an effect?
“Yes, but it does have the opposite effect,” says Kuipers with a laugh. “There was a lot of confiscation, but people also got very creative. For example, they started making stencils with stories and drawings themselves and distributed them among their circle of acquaintances. Despite strict laws, more porn was produced than you think.”
The government became increasingly strict. Anyone caught for trafficking or even possession risked jail time or a hefty fine. “Since there seemed to be no end to the flow of banned books, from 1934 onwards the police carefully distinguished between pornography and the less offensive realistic literature or 'stimulus reading'.”
Porn legal
The big turnaround took place in the 1960s, the time when the government and the church lost their power. The sexual revolution was unstoppable and the first naked magazines appeared in 1968. Relaxation of the law was desired and since 1970 pornography has no longer been banned, as well as adultery and contraceptives.
Then sexually tinted magazines shot up like mushrooms, with each sexual preference being served with its own magazine. The Sliggers Collection consists for the most part of these types of magazines and there is a whole range of naked leaves in the display cases. Anyone who takes offense at very explicit photos should therefore skip the last room.
Predecessor of Tinder
With this exhibition, the KB wants to show that it does not only preserve medieval manuscripts and elite books. Kuipers:“Pornography was and is part of our society, so we have that too. It's very special to have it all together now. It is precisely then that you can see clearly what we can and cannot find in the field of porn in Dutch history. And that changes quite a bit over time.”
Spilled blood leaves are now mostly gone. This is not just because of porn movies over the internet. Personal ads were an important part of the magazines and they too have been replaced. Kuipers:“The magazines clearly fulfilled a need. They were full of advertisements from men and women from all over the Netherlands who wanted to get in touch with people with the same sexual desires. There are now other options for that, such as Tinder. These leaves were actually the forerunner of that.”
In short:the means change, but the needs do not. With this enlightening insight into the human urges, I leave the cocks and breasts for what they are.