World Art Erotica: Virtual Museum of Sexuality by Mojo Mustapha The smell of food can make us hungry.

Should the sight of sex make us horny? In every culture in every time people have drawn or carved images of sexuality with a purpose to excite. Equally since the advent of civilization there has been an e qually strong desire to repress those images in the name of morality. Classical Greek Erotica: 1st Century BCWorld Art Erotica is the first project th at started me on the road to sexual equalism.I had begun my sophomore year at Yo rk University in Toronto, Canada. Young, idealistic and a Sociology major; I wan ted to save the world. I loved taking on assigments on controversial topics: Rec reational drugs, feminism, homosexuality, AIDS, prostitution, racism. One of my major essays as a student majoring in Sociology was called Pornography ; where do we draw the line? As part of this assignment I decided to go around c ampus showing female staff and students a series of sexually explicit pictures c ut from various mens magazines and then to ask them whether they felt these images were erotic or pornographic. (I was also hoping to meet a couple of open-minded girls. Thats why I chose this topic!) No such luck. Though it was only 1982, Political Correctness had already establi shed firm roots in this cold, dreary Canadian campus. Many of the females found the pictures degrading and exploitative with no redeeming features whatsoever. ( The horror was that I had personally picked the photos and I had grown quite fon d of some of them!) I was condemned to be a lonely young man for quite a long ti me after that survey. However, during the course of my assignment, I did notice the not too subtle dif ference between men and women when it came to their enjoyment of erotic\pornogra phic images. I read the feminists; Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, Gloria Ste inhem and so on. Give us Erotica they cried. Not Pornography. But then they often we nt all fuzzy when it came to defining exactly what was erotica. I surveyed femal es on campus and asked them to describe what they saw as erotica. No two answers w ere the same. Yet feminist writers and many females I spoke to were almost unive rsal in their condemnation of pornography per se and the male commercialization of sexuality in general. The male counter-reaction was often just as harsh. These women who want to ban se x films are just prudes who just cant face the sight of an erect penis; feminists a re anti-sex and anti-men; they see only lesbian depictions of sex as erotic; anyth ing else is pornographic; Some wimmin seem to think that if a guy reads Penthouse th en he has to go out right afterwards and rape. And so the war of the sexes raged on. For me doing that essay was a turning point in my life. This issue was just too interesting to let go. . . . Eleven years, two trips round the world, and after much more investigation into the subject . . . Over the years, I slowly began to build up a collection of erotic art and litera ture from the various countries of my travels. I would often show samples to my female friends. Almost without exception, they were fascinated by these decidedl y different interpretations of erotica. It was quite a difference from that firs t survey I did all those years ago at York U.! My curiosity was awakened. As an unemployed Sociology major I had the time to go deeper into my investigati ons. And so I did. I journeyed to the netherworld of the Netherlands, the notori ous city of Amsterdam. And there, near the infamous red light district, was my d

estination, The Venus Tempel Sex Museum. Though the name was rather tacky (as we re many of the exhibits), this museum was nonetheless quite an eye opener. It had one of the largest collections of historical and cultural erotica in the world a nd so, it was the perfect place to observe the reactions of visitors from around the world! I stood outside the museum for many long days in the cold, wet, dreary, (again!) Damstraat of central Amsterdam, feeling like a bedraggled voyeur but nobly purs uing my calling. With my damp, soggy notebook in hand I would collect statistics and observe the nuances of the visitors. I discovered that 42% of the visitors there were women. I thought this figure was especially impressive when I compare d it to the almost negligible number of women who frequent the more traditional sex shops and other sex oriented establishments. I saw some of the most surprising things: time after time when couples walked by the museum it was the female who dragged in her protesting boyfriend or husband by the arm! Many women also went in singly or in pairs. Once inside, they would gaze in open admiration at the exhibits and read most of the explanation captio ns with obvious interest. There was nothing furtive about their behavior. On the contrary, both the female and the male visitors would often giggle and laugh an d generally have a good time. It was the same in other museums of this kind: I found that The Museums of Eroti c Art in Munich, Hamburg, and Copenhagen and The Institute for the Advanced Stud y of Human Sexuality in San Francisco all have large proportions of women visiti ng their historical and cultural erotica sections. Eureka! I began to see that there was an alternative to the images of sexuality put out by the male dominated pornographic industry. Historical and cultural ero tica, whether art and philosophy from the Kama Sutra, statues and carvings of Di onysian revelry from Ancient Greece and Rome or sumptuous19th century erotic Fre nch paintings; they provide the depth, context and romance that male pornography often lacks. It was with this knowledge in mind that I founded World Art Erotica, a museum de dicated to historical and cultural erotic art and literature. Perhaps not surpri singly 39% of our customers are female. The times are changing again. After a lo ng period of decline because of AIDS, the Sexual Revolution is once again pickin g up steam!