h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

the holder.

Exactly right. Inside all of us are two warring instincts where sex is concerned. There's that fun urge and then there's the other one, mediated by a different set of genes, the one that makes us hate everything about sex. Don't you hate lovers? don't you hate that guy married to Britney Spears? Do you hate him because he's a talentless hack or do can you admit it's because he's shagging Ms Spears? A true instinct, it evolved as a way of controlling population in a limited environment. It's triggered by the sight of a woman in sexual display. Why does every culture have such prohibitions. Usually you hear religious reasons but even officially atheistic nations have these bans. Margaret Mead spent her shole carreer trying to show that prudery is a cultural artifact. The entry that prompted this exchange is just the latest formulation. We need to tell stories to explain why we do things even and especially when we feel most passionate. Dr. Mead failed because it's in our blood. There will never be a line between the erotic and the pornographic because, even in an individual, the line, tugged from two sources, shifts and blurrs

I remember a comment on a Japanese shunga print - 'That's the most beautiful porn I've ever seen'.

Eroticism is universal, whether it's regarded as porn depends on the particular taboos extant in a society at any particular time.