Ready to Jacque?

Several fellows have contacted me outside of this Blog to discuss, and mainly defend, their Porn habits. I feel a need to say this: if you want to discuss this subject, please do it in the light of day, as I am not responding to anonymous emails any more.

And speaking of being in denial, or perhaps more kindly, "not being ready" for the truth, I am continually running up against porn influences in this little Comic Art backwater I'm currently in, and predictably also encountering even more fellows with their heads in the sand about it.

I confess that in the early 1990s, I did a good bit of work for SQP--for Sal Quartuccio Publishing.  In fact, they did my very first two art books titled "Sorceress" one and two.  They published many, many other titles, all with their own themes, like Vampire women, Warrior women, and so on.  The overriding theme was definitely, always, "women".

 What Publisher SQP has been up to lately, as if you couldn't guess.

The reason these books were so widely and wildly popular is that they are essentially "presentable" pornography.  In other words, because the figures are "drawn" the viewership can easily rationalize that the stuff is not Pornography but Art. The idea essentially is that if it's drawn, and doesn't actually show penetration, then it can't possibly be porn. You can keep it in the house and not irk the wife, and probably study it without being tempted to "jack".

And you can collect all the books in the series, with SQP, possibly hundreds of them, and not think it's any kind of "habit".

Other rationalizations cover more but different marshy ground, calling softer porn "Erotica", "Cheesecake", "Pinups" or "Nudity", or describing it otherwise as "Titillating" and so on, basically anything other than the big "P" when in fact it's all Pornography to one degree or another.

Bougereau: an "artistic" excuse for yards of exposed flesh. Do you care what these "people" think or feel, or who they are?

Not to say our culture has cornered the market,  or that it's all a case of living in some modern Sodom and Gomorrah, there's been porn in other cultures where folks had too much time on their hands and therefore are easily exploitable.

So how can Art portray nude or naked people, or handle subjects like sex, without becoming Pornographic?