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Erotic Engine: a salacious romp through our sexual history

from www.vancouversun.com – From 40,000-year-old anatomical cave drawings and 35,000-year-old female figures carved from ivory to the estimated $97-billion annual revenue of the globe’s pornography industry, no one doubts that naked body depiction has always been a preoccupation of our species.

This preoccupation clearly fascinates Toronto-based Patchen Barss, who stuffs The Erotic Engine with an eye-opening survey of our sexual history.

It’s the “Erotic” aspect of Barss’s book, where he plays an enthusiastic tour guide at a vast global museum of erotic imagery, that’s a brisk and non-scholarly but enjoyable success.

The note-taking author visits an artifact-filled ballroom in Toronto for a lecture on ancient Chinese sex legends, the pan-European Barcelona Summit for adult-site webmasters, and the massive Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas.

He takes detours to arcane corners — explaining the ins and outs of obsolete computer technologies, early Victorian photography processes and coin-operated stand-alone booths (a.k.a. peeps) that mushroomed in the late 1960s. He also interviews dozens of insiders, from salty late-’70s cable TV porn pioneer George Urban and pornography magnate Ilan Bunimovitz to former Playboy Enterprises executive Reena Patel and Danni Ashe, an early online entrepreneur (and founder of Danni’s Hard Drive). Throughout the tour, Barss conjures up a wide miscellany of statistics: child pornography takes in $3 billion annually, 40.5 per cent of the 417 photographs for sale in Paris in 1853 were artists’ studies (of typically nude females), by 1920 hard-core stag films had become a cultural institution in the U.S and so forth. Edifying, the countless details might also make for fun, if salacious, cocktail party trivia.

Barss has considerably less success with the “Engine” part of his title. Seeking to prove that pornography has powered mass communication for centuries, he inadvertently proves that argument is not his forte.

Overly fond of including digressions and conversations that are only tenuously relevant to his claim, his casual approach coupled with his evident curiosity about all things pornographic frequently undermine his stated goal.

More troubling, his claim that “sexual representation has been at the heart of advances in communication” is frequently suggested rather than proven; this is especially true with his brief and anecdotal discussions of cave drawings, film, and the early printing press. And in his examination of recent decades, he mostly shows that pornography merchants have been early adopters of already existing technology. Elsewhere, he states that the desire for sexual depiction influences media, and that’s not much of a claim; words like ‘gossip’ or ‘storytelling’ or ‘love’ could easily stand in the stead of ‘sexual depiction.’

Lastly, in making explicit reference to scholarly work like Peter Johnson’s essay Pornography Drives Technology, Barss suggests that his goal is not to develop and prove an original thesis so much as to popularize ideas published and consumed in an ivory tower context.

Taken for what it is — an enthused see-Europe-in-six-days-style wander through our sexual history — The Erotic Engine is a pleasant, unchallenging book. Anyone reading the daring subtitle, How Pornography has Powered Mass Communication, from Gutenberg to Google, and expecting more is likely to feel disgruntled.

Doubleday, 292 pages, $32.95

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