ANCIENT HISTORY
If you think that erotica is a modern invention, you’re in for a surprise. There are records of “ancient porn” as far back as the Mesopotamian empire. Depictions of sexual acts were widespread in the art of the Mesopotamians, and they’ve even used erotic objects in their religious rituals. If you’re a conservative, here’s a shocker – these folks had a goddess of prostitution!
Further to the east, India is famous for the Kama Sutra. If you’ve never heard about it, it is a kind of instruction manual on how to have good sex with illustrations and textual descriptions of various poses.
And even further eastward, there is the uncrowned king of erotic art – Japan. The Japanese created sexual illustrations called shunga, which go back to the tenth century. They were printed using wooden blocks, and the artists were able to reproduce them quickly. Along with this, a book called The Tale of Genji contains quite a bit of dirty talk.
In Europe, one of the earliest pieces of erotic art discovered so far is the Venus of Willendorf. This figurine has the shape of a woman with all of her sexually arousing features blown out of proportion. Of course, this figure probably wasn’t used for erotic purposes but was most likely a fertility symbol.
The Greeks and the Romans loved their erotica too! These civilizations had a great appreciation for all things sexual and viewed sexual imagery not as something obscene, but as a part of everyone’s daily life. Just browse the internet a bit, and you’ll come across photos of ancient vases with straight-up pornographic drawings.
THE MIDDLE AGES
Yes, even pious Christian Europe was no stranger to erotic art and pornographic imagery. You have to understand that, in the early days, it was no joke to get caught owning or, god forbid, producing such material. The church was very strict about this, and there were severe punishments for those found guilty of this crime.
Interestingly enough, the earliest examples of erotic art were created by none other than Christian monks. They were essentially doodles on the sides of pages in the books that they wrote and copied. However, things weren’t so bleak after all. The church turned a blind eye on art depicting old gods and their sexual acts. Some of Michelangelo’s works are an excellent example of this.These circumstances take a turn for the worse when Raimondi creates “I Mondi,” a series of sexually explicit engravings, and gets himself arrested by the Pope.
The printing press was a game-changer in every sense of the word. It made books more widely available, and with them, a lot of erotic material. It was around that time the Vatican created an official list of banned books and has kept doing that until the 1960s. No matter how hard the church tried to suppress erotic art, there was no stopping the printing press.
MODERN AGE
England produced the next great piece of (somewhat) erotica in the form of literature, called Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. This book was written by John Cleland in the mid 18th century, and although it was mainly a satire of people’s tastes and fashion at the time, its description of sexual intercourse caught the attention of its critics. The book was, naturally, banned in Britain up until very recently!
Aside from painting and writing, the Victorian era saw a new star come into town – photography. We can thank this medium for thousands of photos of women exposing their private parts because they were so easy to produce. As technology advanced, erotic photography experienced a boom, and although still illegal, pornographic material was to be found nearly anywhere in the West.
Alongside photography, film paved the way for the ultimate acceptance of erotic visuals in the 20th century. After WWII, magazines like Playboy and Penthouse popped up, and not long after, those quirky Scandinavians legalized pornography for the first time in history. We assume that you know how the story goes from then on.
Fast forward to now and we’ve got all kinds of things going on. Just take a look at the billions of porn videos, perfectly legal, available to everyone, and most importantly, enjoying it is as acceptable as reading the newspaper on the subway.
Then, we’ve got a whole universe of sex toys. Take our company for example, because our trade is perfectly acceptable today. We deal with human-like, realistic TPE sex dolls, and not only that, but we let you choose your preferred type of girl, for example asian sex doll, big booty sex doll, fat sex doll, and even a customized one! You couldn’t even imagine something like this fifty years ago, and not to even mention times before that.