Education in European Erotics
By Sissel Marie Tonn-Peterson
When I was around the age when fucking the pillow still was pretty interesting, I came across this book on my aunts dusty bookshelves. It was supposedly written by “The only registered witch in Denmark”, a handbook on modern witchcraft. And it had this awesome chapter on how to make a man interested: Involving muffins with period blood, hair-stuffed voodoo dolls, sleeping with apple peel in your armpit and sending it as a gift – and other interesting recipes. Now in Europe being a witch was a pretty risky business, I later learned in school, when wincing over copperplates from the 16th century witch-hunts and torture methods. I turned to more contemporary methods of catching the attention of the pimpled, skinny boys in class: Pushup bra with cotton pads over mosquito-bite tits, white eyeliner and belly-exposing Spice Girls tee. These misbegotten attempts to boost my sex appeal were also a part of this confusing pre-pubertal state of development. It was when secretly sneaking out the erotic novels of Anaïs Nin or the Italian graphic novels by Milo Manara from my dad’s bookshelf that any concept of sexual instinct within my own body began to dawn. Stumbling upon that certain TV channel showing hardcore porn after 12, or the pictures of oversized dicks that giggling boys put up as screensavers at the computer lab basically just scared me off. Today I still loathe porn. But I love Henry Miller and his vivid descriptions of Boho whores of Champs-Elysees. I love Vito Acconti’s 70s performance work where he was masturbating under a ramp in a gallery for 8 days straight. And The Perfumed Garden – Arabian erotic literature from the 16th century. Or a semi old/chubby Marlon Brando smearing butter in the asshole of Maria Schneider in “Last Tango In Paris”.
Back to period muffins: So why am I even talking about this? Obviously it’s really fucking gross. Well, the exploration of eroticism and sexuality in any aspect of culture and religion that usually stands in such a crystal clear opposition to present times’ understanding of sex is important. Its an understanding that is manipulated by the industry of porn and the materialization of sexuality as a tool for selling more products. I could go on and on, but would probably be cut off and labeled as a lunatic feminist guerilla stuck in a 70s gender-war of bra-burning and public display of pubic hair. Yugoslavian artist Marina Abramovic would like to draw our attention to the erotic culture of pagan Balkan. In her recommendable video-piece Balkan.Erotic.Epic she explains, with the dignity of a scientist, how sexual acts and male and female genitals had an important and pragmatic function in the fertility and agricultural rites of the Balkans, and how sexual parts of the human body were used as a tool against evil forces and weaknesses. These are examples: If the horse could not carry the heavy load, it was believed that if the driver rubbed his genitals with his right hand and touched the animal afterwards, it would gain some of his masculinity (power). If a woman in the Balkans wanted her husband to love her, she would take a small fish, hide it in her vagina over night and the next day make a powder of it, and put it in his coffee. Then, it was believed that he would never leave her for another woman. If the rain were heavy and destroying the crops, the women of the village would all run out in the field and expose their crotch to scare off the evil forces. To make the crops grow, the men would masturbate into the earth. And so on. Through this lexical examination of erotic rituals she reveals a view of sexuality that does not have anything to do with the exploitative nature of the pornographic image (of the female body):” it looks so different because if you show sex in connection with spiritual aspects the entire banality and vulgarity disappear.” (Quote: Marina Abramovic).
Sex as art is an important counterpart to the market that attempts to use one of the most basic of our instincts to manipulate us into either buying or creating over-exaggerated sexualities. Work as that of Abramovic displays a universalism and naturalism within the understanding of sexuality that is important to discover and remember. End of european erotic education.
