Topless Turnabout Is Fair Play

I am delighted and tickled by the news out of Warsaw, Ohio, where for NINE LONG YEARS a strip club called the Foxhole North has been the subject of an ugly series of protests and harassments by a local church congregation. Fed up, the club’s owner and employees have finally decided to turn the tables, and have started picketing the church responsible during its Sunday morning services. And of course some of the dancers are picketing the church while topless:

According to the local newspaper:

A topless demonstration Sunday in Warsaw was conducted with little incident, though heated words were exchanged between parties and the incident could escalate next week.

At one point, six bare-breasted women walked in the right of way from the corner of Church and Railroad streets to the edge of New Beginnings Ministries’ parking lot. Per Ohio Revised Code, it is legal for men and women to be topless in public.

About 30 dancers, other staff, family and friends from the Foxhole North either marched with protest signs or sat in chairs across from the church. Church members have been protesting the private gentlemen’s club for nearly nine years. Two women were topless for about half of the four-hour protest.

After worship services ended, nine women exited the church and an argument ensued between them and the protestors. A couple of the church members also walked up and down the street with their own signs, declaring outrage at what they deemed was public indecency.

Pastor Bill Dunfee would not elaborate but said he is planning to directly confront the situation next Sunday starting with 9:30 a.m. Sunday school. Thomas George, who owns the Foxhole clubs in Warsaw and Zanesville, said his supporters plan to be at the church, with some of the women going topless, for the foreseeable future.

…

“We want to let (church members) know how it feels to be under scrutiny,” George said. “They come up every weekend. They’re very abusive and certainly not Christian-like, not what I read in my Bible. I have to point out the hypocrisy I see and not stand by and let this go on week in and week out.”

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The Ecstasy Of Saint Beauty

A few months ago I had the pleasure of an edifying correspondence with an old friend who had recommended to me a trilogy written by Anne Rice (she of the vampire books fame) in which Rice re-imagines the old fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty as an extended BDSM scenario. A very extended, quarter-million words-long scenario, as it happens. Many ErosBlog readers are doubtless familiar with this trilogy already, but for those that aren’t and who like that sort of thing, I’m happy to report that all three books appear to be still in print.

In the course of our discussion, my learned friend grumbled a bit about the fact that, as of late, Ms. Rice appears to have turned her back on such agreeably lurid and salacious content. Once a self-described atheist, she has returned to the Roman Catholicism of her childhood and sworn off writing about vampires, flagellation, etc.

Tish-tosh, I responded. It’s a free country, isn’t it?

Indeed it is, or at least ought to be, my liberty-loving comrade hastened to reply. But isn’t Rice dissing her fans a bit, when she disparages the themes those fans embraced so loyally and profitably?

I turned this thought over in my mind for a while.

What came up was something rather odd. A memory (or possibly confabulation) from childhood, of being a ten year-old faculty brat tagging along with a group of American college students on a tour of a church in Rome called Santa Maria della Vittoria. As you art lovers should be aware, this church contains a famous sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) called The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.

Ten year-old me didn’t really understand why the big kids were elbowing each other and trying not to snicker. Later in life I discovered that Teresa of Avila left us a rather vivid account of her ecstasy, which makes what’s going on here a little clearer.

Beside me on the left appeared an angel in bodily form … He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest ranks of angels, who seem to be all on fire … In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one can not possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul content with anything but God. This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it — even a considerable share.

But it’s spiritual pain, so that’s okay, I guess.

Still I couldn’t help thinking more along these lines. I also remembered seeing a lot of renderings of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. Pietro Perugino (1446-1524) is perhaps typical in his generous rendering of Sebastian’s arrow-violated flesh:

And one cannot help but notice what pretty flesh it is, too.

No one is safe from suffering in this grand artistic tradition, not even — especially not even — its central figure:

That’s by Caravaggio (1571-1610), a painter of genius who, for my money, would have extracted homoerotic interest from a still-life of a bed of gravel, had he chosen to paint one.

I’m not sure whether Albert von Keller (1844-1920) is mocking this tradition or part of it, but it’s pretty clear he was willing to take it a logical step forward in Mondschein (1894):

These are only four works, presented here only because they happened to catch my eye on a certain day. Other works of a similar inspiration and part of the same grand religio-visual narrative could easily be found by the truckload. I have no doubt that many ErosBlog readers can add their own favorites to the list. If you’re of a certain cast of mind, you will be led to the suspicion that an anthropologist from Alpha Centauri, given the record of humanity’s visual culture and tasked with identifying its largest and longest-lived fraternity of BDSM enthusiasts, might point to a certain institution headquartered in Rome.

For my part I shall confine myself to a more modest conjecture, in response to my friend, and addressed to any fan of Anne Rice who might be feeling dismayed by the current turn in her life. Without this particular grand narrative, in which Ms. Rice was reared, and back into which she has now written herself, there might never have been her own distinctive body of work at all.

Or to put it more simply: no Holy Mother Church, no Naughty Beauty Tales.

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Church On Sunday; Porn During The Week

Via Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution comes word that Harvard Business School professor Benjamin Edelman has gotten hold of a data set on the number of broadband subscribers per zip code who pay for adult content. Professor Edelman breaks down the numbers for us by state in a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

The porn-consumption winner in all categories is: Utah!

I was mildly surprised by this; perhaps I am too easily surprised.

Professor Edelman provides an analysis of what drives subscriptions, which gives me an opportunity to come up with an additional winner for most (unintentionally?) funny social science inference I’ve seen in a while:

The fourth column reports that in regions where more people report regularly attending religious services (per National Election Studies 2004), overall subscription rates are not statistically significantly different from subscriptions elsewhere (p=0.848). However, in such regions, a statistically significantly smaller proportion of subscriptions begin on Sundays, compared with other regions. In particular, a 1 percent increase in the proportion of people who report regularly attending religious services is associated with a 0.10 percent reduction in the proportion of purchases that occur on Sunday. This analysis suggests that, on the whole, those who attend religious services shift their consumption of adult entertainment to other days of the week, despite on average consuming the same amount of adult entertainment as others.

This competes for attention with:

Furthermore, I found no significant relationship between subscriptions to this adult entertainment service and presidential voting in 2004, based on poll data by congressional district. However, using individual-level data from a Hitwise sample of ten million anonymized U.S. Internet users, Tancer (2008), finds that adult escort sites are more popular in ‘blue’ states that voted for Gore in 2004, while visitors from the ‘red’ states that voted for Bush in 2004 are more likely to visit wife-swapping sites, adult webcams, and sites about voyeurism.

I’m afraid I have no idea what any of this means, really, but what are comments sections for if not interesting speculation? You can read the original paper in PDF format here, but remember, Faustus cheerfully reads academic papers so that you don’t have to!

Postscript: I can’t help also noting that the fourth paragraph of the paper contains a pleasing scholarly corroboration of my February 15th thesis that porn is an engine of progress.

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