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WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT-Victorian Sex Rebels and Atheists: How Brave Artists Shook Up Prudish Mores

Wednesday, February 16, 2011 20:12

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Victorian Sex Rebels and Atheists: How Brave Artists Shook Up Prudish Mores

Deborah Lutz Dishes the Dirt On Victorian Sex Rebels

How artists flouted religious fundamentalism, patriarchy, industrialism, and sexism with in-your-face challenges of eroticism and sexual identity.

Deborah Lutz, a renowned New York scholar and Professor of Victorian literature and culture at Long Island University, researched the work and lives of a group of Victorian freethinkers who blazed a trail for many current trends in modern art and literature.

Her new book, Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels And The New Eroticism (W.W. Norton & Company), will raise eyebrows with its frank approach of cultural and sexual expression.

“It really started with a collecting impulse, which is why I write about the Victorian love of collecting in the book,” says Lutz of the project, which took about two and a half years to complete. “I started collecting Victorian pornography when I was getting my Ph.D. I loved the curious oddities of Victorian porn with its really strange desires.”

Pleasure Bound examines two groups of Victorian sex rebels—the Cannibal Club and the Aesthetes—who dared to challenge the morality of the day with lives and art that shared an erotic outrageousness. Club members included such prominent names as explorer Richard Burton, artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, former clergyman Edward Carpenter, and socialist William Morris.

“They mostly wanted to cause trouble, for the sake of trouble,” Lutz explains. “Burton liked to offend people, just to see how they would react. He was a rabble-rouser. Morris, on the other hand, had deeply held ideas about social injustice and wanted to see a workers’ uprising. He figured out ways of bringing these political ideas into his art and design. Swinburne had strange sexual tastes. He liked to pay women to whip him and wanted to share these desires with others.”

Many of the rebels rejected the notion of God and the afterlife. They worshiped the concept of sex and death—for the two things, the freethinkers proposed, were linked. “The tie between sex and death is an old one,” says Lutz. “We see it in the French phrase, ‘petite mort,’ the orgasm as the little death.”

Vice, sin and depravity was widespread in 1860s London. Pleasure seekers could get buzzed on laudanum or opium, go to parties where bisexual or same-sex people frolicked, or went for one-on-one couplings in rooms reserved for that purpose.

While cunnilingus, fellatio and sodomy were forbidden except in these secret quarters, “fallen unfortunates,” of both sexes lined the streets, experienced to satisfy every whim or fancy, and such CONTINUED HERE

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