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Porn-the-Low-Slung-Engine-of-Progress-The-New-Y

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The erotic technological impulse dates back at least to some of the earliest works of art, the so-called Venus figurines of women with exaggerated breasts and buttocks, which were made by firing clay 27,000 years ago – 15 millenniums before ceramics technology was used for anything utilitarian like pots. Government regulation kept sex off radio and television airwaves, but eventually pornographers helped establish new audio and visual technologies for getting into the home. The feisty academic Camille Paglia has argued in her book “Sexual Personae” that developments in art and technology are related to the male sex drive: “Phallic aggression and projection are intrinsic to Western conceptualization. " Lynn Hunt, the editor of a recent book of essays, “The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800,” suggests another way of looking at the technology-pornography link: Not only do some men see technology in sexual terms, they see sex in technological terms. “Pornography attaches itself to a new technological medium partly because it’s a genre that’s very interested in technological means,” said Dr. Hunt, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. The Cyberfuture Virtual Sex, Virtually Alone If sex is always at the technological frontier, then today’s true pioneers of communications are to be found at Interotica, the CD-ROM company responsible for “The Interactive Adventures of Seymore Butts.” The most visible is Lisa Palac, editor of what is billed as “the only erotic magazine for women and men that combines the two most popular and powerful subjects of our time: sex and technology.”