You’d think that with today’s proliferation
of readily accessible nude pictures, adult films
and sex toys, the world of erotica is disposable;
there’s always something new just a click away,
so why bother to save anything?
Reproduction of the original one-sheet movie poster, now worth some $5,000 among collectors.
The depiction of sex has been a part of human culture
for thousands of years. While it’s easy to think the
pornography industry is an invention of the last three
or four decades, erotic expression reaches as far back as the 8th century BC.
Historically, collectors of this niche field have remained
underground, afraid that showing an interest in the world
of sex would bring shame and mockery to them or their families.
That’s still often the case, but as porn becomes more mainstream
— due in part to its near inescapable presence online — more people
are becoming comfortable in owning a part of its history, which
is driving up the value of those collectibles.
Retro Porn Collectors
It’s the factory-like production of much of today’s porn that has made some collectors appreciate items of the past.
A lot of the films people are rediscovering is happening because so much of the stuff they’re making now is fast and furious,” says Ted McIlvenna, Ph.D., president of The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco and curator of the Erotic Heritage Museum in Las Vegas.
McIlvenna may quite possibly possess the largest collection of erotic memorabilia in the world. The 80-year old former theological professor claims to have over 3 million items, filling 34 warehouses.
If you can think of it, he has it, as well as all sorts of things that would likely never cross your mind.
While he readily admits to being a collector and not a dealer of this sort of memorabilia, he’s noted an increased interest among people in the one-sheet movie posters and press books (promotional kits with photos and press releases) for porn films from the 1970s and early 1980s.
Movie Classics
Most collectibles hover in the $200 to $500 range, but rare items, such as the original poster for 1972’s legendary film “Deep Throat,” sell for up to $5,000.
Perhaps more incredibly, as McIlvenna has explored the items donated to his collection, he has found prints done by well-known artists, including Thomas Rowlandson, that are quite erotic in nature but were previously undiscovered, since the artists didn’t want to risk damaging their reputations. He estimates the value of these prints to be worth thousands of dollars each.
Naomi Wilzig knows a few things about erotic art. As the founder and president of the World Erotic Art Museum in Miami Beach, she has spent the last 20 years collecting these sorts of objects, gathering roughly 4,000.
The most valuable in Wilzig’s collection, on which she declines to put a price tag but others have valued at up to $30 million, is a toss up: Either the phallic murder weapon prop used in film adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel “A Clockwork Orange,” or a German-made four-poster bed where the posts are tree trunks carved to resemble the male sex organ, and 136 Kama Sutra images are carved into the sideboard and rails.
“It’s definitely a new market, but it’s an evolving market,” she says. “People are realizing how important erotic art is to both own and display. People used to cast it aside as sordid, but are now realizing it’s important. There’s no doubt it’s escalating.”
Shameless Sex
Sexual guilt or shame refers to feelings
of grave responsibility and deep remorse
associated with participation in or even
thoughts and fantasies about sexual activity.
Individuals who feel guilt related
to sex or particular sexual activities
generally believe sex (or a specific
sex act) is immoral, sinful or unclean.
The understanding of guilt associated
with sexual activities began with the
work of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
While many people, including psychologists
and psychiatrists, reject a Freudian approach,
his ideas are of interest as a starting point
for understanding sexual guilt.
Freud maintained that libido, or the sexual
instinct, is one of the core drives in human
behavior and personality formation.
So Many of Us Are Disgusted by Sex
While we can publicly talk about sex in all its thrilling messiness with a little more candor than we could a few generations back, we still live most of our lives within an invisible envelope of politeness.
But we’re letting go of old, stale shame. There’s a lot more of it there than even the most liberated among us realize. As I rummage through my own sex closet … My God, it’s that old brochure my mom gave me when I was, what? 13, maybe? It was called “Confidentially, Fellows.”
The Lutherans published it. It advised against masturbation because the act was usually accompanied, so the brochure warned, by smutty thoughts (which God didn’t approve of), but guess what? Masturbation didn’t make you blind!
I dig a little deeper into the closet and it gets crowded with awkward, R-rated memorabilia. Actually, some of the memorabilia is G-rated. Women in bathing suits! In the late 1950s, that was about the best a boy could get.
I secreted old Life magazines up to my room and tore through them looking for exposed female thighs and bellies, bedeviled by what they did to me. And once I found an actual dirty magazine out by the railroad tracks.
I was so enthralled and mortified I didn’t dare bring it home. I had it out in the garage for a while, then, to be on the safe side, buried it in a secret place, to be dug up only on special occasions.
I’m ready to shut the closet door, but, wait, groan. I can’t avoid leafing through this next memory: the first sex mag I actually purchased with my own allowance money. I think I was 12 and the transaction had to be illegal, right?
Semi-naked women! I can even recall some of the pictures: for instance, there was an artist’s model sitting demurely next to a table. The caption read: “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou. Wow!”
Oh, yeah, we have sex ed classes. The best such classes are straightforward, judgment-neutral and science-based, but my guess is that they’re still as weird as they used to be, because sexuality is not judgment-neutral and science-based.
We lack a level of societal honesty in which it would be possible to create a class for junior high students called Beginning Masturbation.
That means we’re stuck in a world in which kids teach themselves about sex — or they learn it from their peers, the media or, horrifically, their abusers.
We’ve figured out how to use sex to sell every product imaginable. Being able to talk about it honestly, in all its complexity, still eludes us.
