Editors’ Page: Why Publish Porn?

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About a year ago we ran a brief story on some statues from Pompeii, setting ablaze a firestorm of correspondence. The story reported on a new permanent exhibit at the Naples Archaeological Museum—an exhibit that for years had been locked away in a so-called Secret Chamber, to which only persons of “known morals” were permitted access. Why the Secret Chamber, and why the flurry of letters? Because this exhibit presents grotesque images of exposed manhood (see “Ancient Smut,” AO 03:05).

The first letters we received expressed anger and shame. We were “promoting pornography” and contributing to the delinquency of children. Then something interesting happened: A flood of letters arrived praising us for telling stories about the past honestly and directly. This second generation of letter-writers did not want the first generation to have undue influence on our editorial decisions. And the second generation was a much, much larger group, about five times as large.

Now we are about to run the gamut again. Our last issue, September/October 2001, included an article entitled “Eros in Egypt” by David O’Connor, a prominent art historian and Egyptologist at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Among the images discussed in the article—most of them involving conjugal love—is a 3,000-year-old, 8-foot-long papyrus document now in an archaeology museum in Turin, Italy. This papyrus bears extremely graphic scenes of exposed manhood being put to the use intended, though perhaps never imagined, by nature. We have received scores of letters taking us to task for publishing this ancient papyrus (we ran a photo of a detail from the badly damaged papyrus along with a reconstruction drawing).

You will be able to read many of these letters in our next issue (see The Forum, AO 05:01. But I already know the pattern. It’s happened before.

A decade ago our sister magazine BAR published photos of Greco-Roman oil lamps bearing graphic sexual images (Lawrence E. Stager, “Eroticism and Infanticide at Ashkelon,” BAR 17:04). The editors took the unusual step of running the images on a page with a clip-out renewal form on the back, so that readers could easily (and without desecrating the text) remove the offensive material if they wished.

Biblical Archaeology Review had earlier polled its readers to find out whether they thought pictures of the oil lamps should be published. A solid 80 percent of those who responded said “yes.” “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” responded Charles A. Logan of Redmond, Oregon, quoting from the Gospel of John (8:32). “The whole point of archaeology,” wrote Sandy Dean of Pensacola, Florida, “is to study life as it was lived.” Several people, including Morris Stern of Plainville, New York, made the telling point that the magazine published reports on child sacrifice, war, pillaging, rapine, drought, earthquakes—and on and on. Why is it that these obvious evils are all right but sexual images are taboo?

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There are more examples. A photo of Eve is cropped at the waist to avoid offense; the dangerous part of a photo of a Roman-period youth is digitally masked out. (Full disclosure: As associate editor at Biblical Archaeology Review, I helped make the decision to do the masking.) Our Victorian forebears referred to a man’s trousers as “unmentionables” so as to circumvent any possibility of reference to the nether world. Perhaps we at the Biblical Archaeology Society have been a little guilty of this sort of precious delicacy.

Why publish photos of the Turin erotic papyrus? The short answer is that it’s part of the deep past, and we feel an obligation to look with unblinkered eyes at that past—as David O’Connor did in his thoughtful discussion of Egyptian ideas concerning lovemaking.

Another short answer is that the papyrus’s images are not pornographic. My own opinion is that real pornography, which I find repulsive, requires an appeal to the appetites; it offers a kind of (false) invitation. The images on the Turin papyrus, on the other hand, are not at all titillating. They are grotesque. Their very distortions suggest that they are a satire meant to be amusing, not erotic.

The longer answer will come in the next issue, and in the one after that. I am confident that you, our readers, will examine this question from every imaginable angle: Did we go too far in publishing sexually graphic images? How are we to balance the sensibilities of some readers against our obligation to present the past truthfully and objectively? I look forward to this exchange, for I know that your letters will clarify my own thoughts.

About a year ago we ran a brief story on some statues from Pompeii, setting ablaze a firestorm of correspondence. The story reported on a new permanent exhibit at the Naples Archaeological Museum—an exhibit that for years had been locked away in a so-called Secret Chamber, to which only persons of “known morals” were permitted access. Why the Secret Chamber, and why the flurry of letters? Because this exhibit presents grotesque images of exposed manhood (see “Ancient Smut,” AO 03:05). The first letters we received expressed anger and shame. We were “promoting pornography” and contributing to the delinquency of […]