The Female Nude: Pornography, Art, and Sexuality

Author(s): Lynda Nead

Source: Signs, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Winter, 1990), pp. 323-335
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174488
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 THE FEMALE NUDE: PORNOGRAPHY,
ART, AND SEXUALITY

LYNDA NEAD

To my mind art exists in the realm of contemplation, and is

bound by some sort of imaginative transposition. The mo
ment art becomes an incentive to action it loses its true
character. This is my objection to painting with a communist
programme, and it would also apply to pornography. [KEN-
NETH CLARK, testimony to the Lord Longford committee on
pornography]

The evidence given by Kenneth Clark, one of the world's leading

art historians, to Lord Longford's committee on pornography in
Britain, in 1972 is just one fragment of a vast body of discourses that
has been produced on the subject of pornography over the last few
decades.' The Longford committee was a privately sponsored
investigation that claimed to represent public opinion. Its report,
published in the form of a mass-market paperback and launched in
a blaze of publicity, fueled the pornography debate in Britain in the
1970s. From the seventies onward, feminists, moral crusaders,
governments, and various other pressure groups have presented
their views on the issue, with the result that pornography has
become one of the most fiercely and publicly contested areas
within contemporary cultural production.2

1 Quoted in Lord Longford, Pornography: The Longford Report (London: Coro-

net, 1972), 99-100.
2 The published material on pornography is extensive so it is difficult to extract a
handful of texts that accurately represent the debate. A very useful selection of British

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1990, vol. 15, no. 2]
? 1990 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/90/1502-0008$01.00

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Perhaps one of the most disabling limitations of much of this

public debate has been the attempt to look at pornography-as a
discrete realm of representation, cut off and clearly distinct from
other forms of cultural production. This perspective is frequently
attended by the view that the pornographic resides in the image,
that it is a question of content rather than form, of production rather
than consumption. Even when pornography is defined in terms of
its circulation, as a matter of audience expectations, markets, and
institutions, it is still separated off as though it exists in isolation
and can be understood outside of its points of contact with the
wider domain of cultural representation.
To suggest that pornography needs to be examined in relation
to other forms of cultural production, however, is not to move
toward the position that claims that all of patriarchal culture is
therefore pornographic. It is simply to argue that we need to
specify the ways in which pornography is defined and held in
place. We need to get behind the commonsense notions of
pornography in order to uncover the processes by which the term
has been defined and the historical changes in the term's meaning.
At any particular moment there is no one unified category of the
pornographic but rather a struggle between several competing
definitions of decency and indecency. As John Ellis has written,
"These definitions will work within a context defined by several
forces, the current form of the pornography industry and its
particular attempts at legitimisation; the particular forms of the
laws relating to obscenity and censorship; and the general
mobilisation of various moral and philosophical positions and
themes that characterise a particular social moment."3 Ellis's
comments begin to move the debate toward a model of the
discursive formation of pornography; a formation that includes its
operations as an industry, its forms of distribution and consump-
tion, its visual codings, and its very status as the illicit.
One of the most significant ways in which pornography is
historically defined is in relation to other forms of cultural produc-
tion; we know the pornographic in terms of its difference, in terms
of what it is not. The most commonplace opposition to pornography
is art. If art is a reflection of the highest social values, then
pornography is a symptom of a rotten society; if art stands for

feminist writings is reprinted in Rosemary Betterton, ed., Looking On: Images of

Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media (London and New York: Pandora, 1987),
143-202.
3 John Ellis, "Photography/Pornography/Art/Pornography," Screen 21, n
(Spring 1980): 81-108, quote on 83.

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 Winter 1990 / SIGNS

lasting, universal values, then pornography represents disposabil-

ity, trash. Art is a sign of cleanliness and licit morality, whereas
pornography symbolizes filth and the illicit. In this cultural system,
aesthetic values readily communicate sexual and moral values. This
is the basis of Kenneth Clark's testimony in which art and pornog-
raphy are defined in terms of their effects on the spectator. Art is
pacifying and contemplative, whereas communist painting and
pornography incite the viewer to action and therefore cannot
belong to the realm of high artistic culture.4
Although conventionally art and pornography are set up in this
oppositional relationship, they can be seen instead as two terms
within a greater signifying system that is continually being rede-
fined and that includes other categories, such as obscenity, the
erotic, and the sensual. All of these terms occupy particular sexual
and cultural spaces; none of them can be understood in isolation
since each depends on the other for its meaning. From this position
we can begin to examine the changing historical relationships
between the terms and the ways in which the boundaries between
these categories have been and continue to be policed in order to
maintain the aesthetic and the pornographic as a necessary ideo-
logical polarity in patriarchal society.

The female nude: Policing the boundaries

It is often at the very edge of social categories that the work of

definition takes place most energetically and that meaning is
anchored most forcefully. For art history, the female nude is both at
the center and at the margins of high culture. It is at the center
because within art historical discourse paintings of the nude are
seen as the visual culmination of Renaissance idealism and human-
ism. This authority is nevertheless always under threat, for the
nude also stands at the edge of the art category, where it risks losing
its respectability and spilling out and over into the pornographic. It
is the vagueness and instability of such cultural definitions that
make these marginal areas so open and precarious. Since pornog-
raphy may be defined as any representation that achieves a certain
degree of sexual explicitness, art has to be protected from being
engulfed by pornography in order to maintain its position as the

4 It is Kant's theory of the self-contained aesthetic experience that is at the bottom

of all this, but in Clark's usage it becomes simplified and popularized, an accessible
formula for cultural definition (see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judge-
ment, trans. J. C. Meredith [Oxford: Clarendon, 1911]).

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opposition to pornography. In other words, through a process of mutual

definition, the two categories keep each other and the whole system in
place. Categories such as the erotic and the sensual play an important
role as middle terms in the system-defining what can or cannot be
seen, differentiating allowable and illicit representations of the female
body, and categorizing respectable and nonrespectable forms of cul-
tural consumption.
Within the history of art, the female nude is not simply one subject
among others, one form among many, it is the subject, the form. It is a
paradigm of Western high culture with its network of contingent val-
ues: civilization, edification, and aesthetic pleasure. The female nude
is also a sign of those other, more hidden properties of patriarchal
culture, that is, possession, power, and subordination. The female nude
works both as a sexual and a cultural category, but this is not simply a
matter of content or some intrinsic meaning. The signification of the
female nude cannot be separated from the historical discourses of
culture, that is, the representation of the nude by critics and art his-
torians. These texts do not simply analyze an already constituted area
of cultural knowledge, rather, they actively define cultural knowledge.
The nude is always organized into a particular cultural industry and
thus circulates new definitions of class, gender, and morality. More-
over, representations of the female nude created by male artists testify
not only to patriarchal understandings of female sexuality and femi-
ninity, but they also endorse certain definitions of male sexuality and
masculinity.
In Britain in the 1970s, the discourse of critics and art historians
was implicated in a radical redefinition of sexuality. In the art
world, there were renewed efforts to pin down the female nude in
high art so as to free it from debasing associations with the sexual.
These efforts were countered by other attempts to implicate the
images of high culture in the pornographic. In the 1980s context
created by AIDS, political conservatism, and religious revivalism,
the debate regarding sexuality and representation that took place in
the 1970s has taken on a renewed significance. The boundaries
between art and pornography continue to shift and to raise complex
issues for feminist cultural and sexual politics.
The decade of the sixties in Britain was characterized by a series
of legislative reforms in the sphere of moral and sexual conduct.
Stuart Hall has described the general tendency of British national
legislation in the 1960s as the shift toward "increased regulation
coupled with selective privatisation through contract or consent."5

5 Stuart Hall, "Reformism and the Legislation of Consent," in Permissiveness and

Control: The Fate of the Sixties Legislation, ed. National Deviancy Conference
(London: Macmillan, 1980), 1-43, quote on 18.

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 Winter 1990 / SIGNS

The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 changed the laws on male

homosexuality, decriminalizing private sexual relations between
adult males. In the same year, the Abortion Act extended the
grounds for a lawful termination of pregnancy, and the Family
Planning Act introduced wider provision of contraceptives by local
authorities. Other legislation made divorce more accessible (1969)
and introduced the defense of literary merit into trials charging
publications with obscenity (1959 and 1964). At the same time,
modification of cinema and theater censorship allowed more ex-
plicit portrayals of sexuality in film and on the stage. This series of
legislative reforms represents a shift in the style of moral regula-
tion. Although collectively the British legislation shifted toward the
general direction of a more relaxed, permissive moral code, the
reforms of the sixties should be recognized as a revision of an older
conservative moralism and an attempt to create a liberal form of
morality at a moment when the main political and economic
tendencies were also in the direction of a more libertarian form of
capitalism.
Beginning in the late 1960s, the notion of permissiveness began
to take on a particular symbolic importance. With signs of a
breakdown in the old order, a growing sense of social crisis gave
way, by the early 1970s, to a generalized moral panic-a moral
backlash against the permissive legislation of the 1960s. On the
Left, the women's movement and the emerging gay liberation
movement challenged the extent of the liberalism of the reforms,
while on the Right, there was a revival of moral traditionalism, led,
with evangelical fervor, by individuals such as Malcolm Mug-
geridge, Mary Whitehouse, and Lord Longford. According to this
new authoritarian morality, the sixties legislation had been the final
nail in the coffin of traditional values and Christian morality. The
faction's leaders called for a return to family values and retrench-
ment behind the institutions of law and order. The focus for this
moral panic was the issue of pornography. Obscene and blasphe-
mous material was seen to be the source of social and moral decay,
undermining the family and corrupting both the public and the
private spheres. As Jeffrey Weeks has commented, pornography
became for the moral crusaders of the 1970s what prostitution had
been for the social puritans of the 1880s-a symbol of decay and
social breakdown.7
The new moralism of the 1970s focused on the image and the
word. In the early 1970s there was a cluster of prosecutions for
6 See Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since
1800 (London and New York: Longman, 1981), 273-88, on which this discussion of
seventies moralism is based.
7 Ibid., 280.

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obscenity: the National Viewers and Listeners Association orga-

nized a popular campaign against immorality in broadcasting, and
in 1972 Lord Longford published his report on pornography. The
Longford report concluded that exposure to pornography adversely
affected social behavior and morality. The state, it seemed, could
not be relied on to maintain sexual standards, and the report cited
the Danish and American situations as examples of the state either
failing to cohere and reflect public attitudes or adopting a radically
libertarian position.8 The most important point to be made about all
these tactics is that moral regulation in the 1970s took the form of
the regulation of representations of sexuality as opposed to regu-
lation of sexual behavior. Indeed, representation was at the center
of discourses on sexuality during the period.
In the context of this public debate, cultural classification
became particularly significant, and the differentiation of terms
such as the erotic and the obscene took on a heightened impor-
tance. The aesthetic had to be distinguished from the titillating; art
had to be sealed off from pornography.
Historically, high culture has provided a space for a viable form
of sexual representation: that which is aestheticized, contained, and
allowed. In the 1970s this site had to be reinforced and shored up.
The differences between paintings of the female nude and "pin-
ups," glamour photography, soft- and hard-core porn had to be
redefined. During this period the British Library cataloged the
1976 edition of Kenneth Clark's high art survey, The Nude, in the
general stacks but relegated Arthur Goldsmith's The Nude in
Photography and Michael Busselle's Nude and Glamour Photog-
raphy to the special locked cases.9 The special cases are reserved
for books that are prone to theft or damage and that include
commercial or titillating representations of sex, in other words,
books that are regarded as an incitement to action rather than
contemplative reading. In the 1970s, photographs of the female
nude clearly were seen to fall within these guidelines; but the
images included in Clark's text escaped the contaminating associ-
ations of pornography and could be consulted without fearful
8 See Longford, pt. 1, chap. 7. Longford discusses the American congressional
"Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, September 1970"
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, September 30, 1970), which re-
jected any clear correlation between pornography and acts of sexual violence and
advocated a liberalizing of sex education in order to foster "healthy" sexual
development. The report resulted in a split between members of the commission
and was rejected by the Senate and president.
9 Kenneth Clark, The Nude (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976); Arthur Goldsmith,
The Nude in Photography (London: Octopus, 1976); Michael Busselle, Nude and
Glamour Photography (London: Macdonald, 1981).

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 Winter 1990 / SIGNS

consequences to either the book or the reader. In this way the

classifications of the British Library map on to the conventional
opposition of high and low culture, of fine art versus mass media.
Within traditional aesthetics, the painting has a peculiar status.
Valued as an authentic and unique object, the singular product of a
special act of creativity, the painting is, as Victor Burgin writes,
"part holy relic, part gilt-edged security."'? In contrast, the material
and cultural value of the photograph is reduced by its reproducibil-
ity, and the photograph carries none of the connotations of human
agency and cultural dignity. Unlike the connoisseur of high art, the
consumer of photographic art does not possess a unique object, and
within the polarity of high and low art, the photograph is devalued
as the product of mass technology, popular and vulgar.
Thus, paintings of the female nude such as those illustrated in
Clark's book were set apart physically as well as symbolically from
photographic images of the female nude. With obscenity as the
focus of sexual regulation, high art had to be maintained as an
edifying, moral, and privileged form of cultural consumption.
Emphasis was placed on the nude as an ideal form that embodies
perfection, universality, and unity. These conventions were in
opposition to the codes and functions of pornography-
fragmentation, particularity, titillation. Above all else, paintings of
the female nude had to be closed off from any associations with
commercialism or sexual arousal. Refusing the connotation of
commodity, the discourse of high art retreated into a vocabulary of
contemplation and aesthetic response. As Kenneth Clark explained
to the Longford committee:

In a picture like Correggio's Danae the sexual feelings have

been transformed, and although we undoubtedly enjoy it all
the more because of its sensuality, we are still in the realm of
contemplation. The pornographic wall-paintings in Pompeii
are documentaries and have nothing to do with art. There are
one or two doubtful cases-a small picture of copulation by
Gericault and a Rodin bronze of the same subject. Although
each of these is a true work of art, I personally feel that the
subject comes between me and complete aesthetic enjoy-
ment. It is like too strong a flavour added to a dish. There
remains the extraordinary example of Rembrandt's etching of
a couple on a bed, where I do not find the subject at all
disturbing because it is seen entirely in human terms and is

10 Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (London:
Macmillan, 1986), 42.

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not intended to promote action. But it is, I believe, unique,

and only Rembrandt could have done it.1

In the end, Clark comes up with an extremely personal and

idiosyncratic set of distinctions. Indeed, it is the very obscurity of
his criteria that is most striking. His definition rests on a precarious
differentiation between a sensuality that can be incorporated
within aesthetic contemplation and a sexuality that disrupts this
response and becomes an incitement to behavior. Sensuality thus
performs an essential role, signifying a form of sexual representa-
tion that remains within the permissible limits of art.
But other art historians during the 1970s did not seek to keep
high art as a discrete, desexualized category. In fact, they deliber-
ately sought to break open and redefine the category's boundaries
and to address directly the representation of the sexual within
paintings of the female nude. Far from being a separate plane of
activity, art, they claimed, participates in the social definition of
male and female sexuality. Three of these texts, all of which were
produced outside of the mainstream of art history, reveal the
competing definitions that were thrown up by the issue of cultural
representation and sexuality during this period.
John Berger's Ways of Seeing, first published in 1972, estab-
lished a fundamental distinction between female nakedness and
nudity. Whereas the nude is always subjected to pictorial conven-
tions, "To be naked," he writes, "is to be oneself."'2 In this
framework, Berger juxtaposes European oil paintings with photo-
graphs from soft porn magazines, identifying the same range of
poses, gestures, and looks in both mediums. The particularity of the
medium and cultural form is not important. What matters is the
repertoire of conventions that all nudes are believed to deploy,
irrespective of historical or cultural specificity. But according to
Berger there are a few valuable exceptions to the voyeurism that is
constructed through the European high art tradition.

They are no longer nudes-they break the norms of the

art-form; they are paintings of loved women, more or less
naked. Among the hundreds of thousands of nudes which
make up the tradition there are perhaps a hundred of these
exceptions. In each case the painter's personal vision of the
particular women he is painting is so strong that it makes no
allowance for the spectator.... The spectator can witness

11 Quoted in Longford (n. 1 above), 100.

12 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC & Penguin, 1972), 54.

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 Winter 1990 / SIGNS

their relationship-but he can do no more; he is forced to

recognise himself as the outsider he is. He cannot deceive
himself into believing that she is naked for him. He cannot
turn her into a nude.13

Berger's evocation of the hundred or so exceptions to the

tradition of the female nude in European art assumes that the
relationship between the male artist and the female model, a
heterosexual relationship, is inherently natural and good. Power,
for Berger, is constituted as public. Private relationships lie outside
the domain of power; love transforms the nude into a naked woman
and prevents the male spectator, the outsider, from turning the
female figure into a voyeuristic spectacle. This interpretation, of
course, is entirely based on a naive, humanist faith in the honesty
and equality of private heterosexual relationships. It also assumes a
familiarity with artistic biography; the spectator needs to know the
nature of the relationship between a particular artist and his model
in order to make this reading of the picture. Significantly, both
Berger and Lord Clark, in his statement to the Longford committee,
invoke paintings by Rembrandt as unique representations of sex.
Great artists, apparently, produce exceptional images regardless of
subject-matter, and cultural value is thus a safe index of moral
worth.
Linda Nochlin's feminist essay, "Eroticism and Female Imagery
in Nineteenth-Century Art," also published in 1972, represents one
voice from the women's movement, which during this period
addressed the construction of patriarchy in high culture.14 Nochlin
shares Berger's analysis of the female nude as a patriarchal image
for male consumption, but she goes much further, rejecting the idea
of the personal erotic imagery of individual male artists in favor of
a social basis for the sexual definitions established in images of the
female nude. She also points to the absence of any public imagery
for women's desires and calls for an available language to express
women's erotic needs. This call for female erotica was part of a
much wider demand by members of the women's movement during
the early 1970s. Unfortunately, Nochlin's argument was recast by
the publisher's dust jacket to once again present female erotica

13 Ibid., 57.
14 Linda Nochlin, "Eroticism and Female Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Art," in
Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art, 1730-1970, ed. Thomas B. Hess and
Linda Nochlin (London and New York: Allen Lane, 1972), 8-15. For a detailed
discussion of this collection of essays, see Lise Vogel, "Fine Arts and Feminism: The
Awakening Conscience," Feminist Studies 2, no. 1 (1974): 3-37.

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Nead / THE FEMALE NUDE

from a male perspective. "The book is superbly illustrated and

combines the pleasures of a rich catalogue of esoteric erotica, with
the satisfaction of a penetrating and original study."
Another effort to redefine sexuality and sexual pleasure in
relation to the visual arts can be seen in Peter Webb's The Erotic
Arts, first published in 1975. The book is a paradigm of the sexual
libertarianism that emerged in the late 1960s and continued into
the 1970s, particularly within certain sections of the gay liberation
movement. For Webb, sexual freedom was synonymous with social
freedom, and sexual liberation was the first step toward social
revolution. Webb challenged directly the antipornography lobby
and obscenity trials of the early 1970s, which set up liberation in
opposition to the authoritarian morality of censorship. Webb, how-
ever, was also keen to isolate a category of erotic art from that of
pornography. "Pornography is related to obscenity rather than
erotica and this is a vital distinction. Although some people may
find a pornographic picture erotic, most people associate eroticism
with love, rather than sex alone, and love has little or no part to play
in pornography. . .. Eroticism, therefore, has none of the pejorative
associations of pornography; it concerns something vital to us, the
passion of love. Erotic art is art on a sexual theme related specifi-
cally to emotions rather than merely actions, and sexual depictions
which are justifiable on aesthetic grounds."'5 Webb assumes an
essentialist model of human sexuality, conceiving of it as a driving,
instinctive force that must find expression through either legitimate
or illegitimate channels. In his attempt to distinguish erotic art and
pornography, he relies on a familiar set of oppositions: love versus
sex, aesthetic value versus bad art, and feeling or emotion versus
action. Again, as with the arguments of Clark and Berger, there is a
juggling of aesthetic and moral criteria in order to justify one
category of representation and to invalidate another.'6

The female nude and sexual metaphor

In the three examples considered above, the authors directly

address the issue of sexual definition in cultural representation, but
they do so from different political and moral standpoints. In the
15 Peter Webb, The Erotic Arts (London: Secker & Warburg, 1975), 2.
16 Interestingly, both Webb and Berger argue that Oriental art offers honest and
frank representations of sex as opposed to the repressed and unhealthy sexuality of
Western bourgeois art. In this way, they support the racist mythology of the
unrestrained sexuality of non-European races and perpetuate the particular art
historical version of the ideology of primitivism.

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 Winter 1990 / SIGNS

mainstream of art history, however, the approach is more indirect;

sex has to be implicit rather than explicit in order to keep the
art/contemplation coupling intact and to maintain the conventional
polarity of art and pornography. Within traditional aesthetics, the
language of connoisseurship has developed as an expression of
aesthetic judgment, taste, and value. The way language is mobi-
lized in discussions of paintings of the female nude allows us to
assess the role of sexual metaphor in recent art criticism.
As cultural commodities, oil paintings have been relished by
critics and art historians, and the practice of applying paint to
canvas has been charged with sexual connotations. Light caresses
form, shapes become voluptuous, color is sensuous, and the paint
itself is luxuriously physical. This representation of artistic produc-
tion supports the dominant stereotype of the male artist as produc-
tive, active, controlling, a man whose sexuality is channeled
through his brush, who finds expression and satisfaction through
the act of painting.'7 The artist transmutes matter into form. The
canvas is the empty but receptive surface, empty of meaning-
naked-until it is inscribed and given meaning by him. Surface
texture is thus charged with significance; the marks on the canvas
are essential traces of human agency, evidence of art, and also signs
of sexual virility, a kind of masculine identity.
These phallic and sexual metaphors take on an astonishing
resonance when the painting is of a female nude. The artist
transmutes matter into the form of the female body-the nude,
ideal, perfect, the object of contemplation and delectation. Within
the discourse of art history, sex is written into descriptions of paint,
surface, and form. The category of art does not permit a sexuality
that is an obvious or provocative element, but such sexuality can be
articulated in the discussion of a particular painting's handling and
style. The sexual, then, is distanced from the subject represented
on the canvas and is defined instead through the metaphorical
language of connoisseurship. Lawrence Gowing, for example, de-
scribes a small female figure in a Matisse interior as "abandon(ing)
herself to the colour."'8 In Nude Painting, Michael Jacobs refers to
Titian's Nymph and Shepherd, in which "the dynamics of flesh and
blood are revealed in their rawest state, all distracting movement,
colour and meaning are stripped away by the rigorous harshness of
the artist's late style."'9 And Malcolm Cormack describes a Veronese

17 For an important discussion of the metaphor of penis-as-paintbrush, see Carol

Duncan, "The EstheticsofPowerin ModernErotic Art," Heresies, no. 1 (January 1977),
46-50.
18 Lawrence Gowing, Matisse (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979), 63.
19 Michael Jacobs, Nude Painting (Oxford: Phaidon, 1979), 24.

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Nead / THE FEMALE NUDE

in which "the whole is a riot of the senses where the sensuous

mode of expression emphasises the theme."20
However, the issue of the representation of the female nude is
not simply a question of the male artist or viewer imposing order on
and controlling the canvas or the female body. There is another
relationship at stake. The mythology of artistic genius proposes a
model of masculinity and male sexuality that is free-ranging,
unbounded, needing to be contained within forms.21 Woman and
femininity provide that cultural frame; woman controls and regu-
lates the impetuous and individualistic brush. In a review of an
exhibition of impressionist drawings at the Ashmolean in Oxford,
the art critic William Feaver considered the representation of the
female nude. "A Renoir drawing 'Nude Woman Seen from the
Back, in red chalk with touches of white, illustrates more clearly
than any painting the Impressionist concept of untrammelled
instinct: Renoir's caress, Monet's spontaneity. But drawing was the
basis. Without it Renoir would have been incoherent."22 Just what is
invoked by "the Impressionist concept of untrammelled instinct"?
What are we to make of "Renoir's caress" and "Monet's spontane-
ity"? Artists and lovers, paintings and sex are collapsed into each
other. Masculinity is defined as the site of unregulated instinct,
potentially anarchic and incoherent. But the discipline of drawing
and the form of the female nude-high culture and femininity-
give order to this incoherence; together they civilize and tame the
wild expressiveness of male sexuality.
Thus, pictures of the female nude are not about female sexuality
in any simplistic way; they also testify to a particular cultural
definition of male sexuality and are part of a wider debate around
representation and cultural value. The female nude is both a
cultural and a sexual category; it is part of a cultural industry whose
languages and institutions propose specific definitions of gender
and sexuality and particular forms of knowledge and pleasure.
The relationship between art and pornography as illustrated by
the British discourse explored here begins to reveal the ways in
which cultural and aesthetic designations are mapped onto the
moral and sexual values of Western patriarchal culture generally. To
date, the popular debate about pornography in both Britain and
America has focused on a limited and rather too familiar set of
issues. At the center is the issue of legal censorship. Debate about
censorship has become polarized between those who advocate
20 Malcolm Cormack, The Nude in Western Art (Oxford: Phaidon, 1976), 25.
21 On the mythology of male artistic genius, see G. Pollock, "Artists, Media,
Mythologies: Genius, Madness and Art History," Screen 21, no. 3 (1980): 57-96.
2 William Feaver, The Observer (March 25, 1986), 25.

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 Winter 1990 / SIGNS

state intervention to ban pornographic material and those who

invoke the right of individual freedom of choice, particularly as it is
reflected by the private consumption of pornography as opposed to
its public display. Supporters of state intervention argue that at
issue is the safety of women, that pornographic representations
incite violence against women. Yet, social investigation, empirical
research, statistics, and personal testimony have been used both to
endorse and to refute the links between pornography and acts of
sexual violence.23 Besides the ambiguities concerning these inves-
tigations and their conclusions, some of the social effects of por-
nography, such as women's fear, embarrassment, and anger, cannot
be measured and accounted for in any straightforward way.
The parallels between the poles of this debate and the poles of
the pornography/art debate are striking. Both debates focus on the
impetus to action as a criterion for classification of images of the
female nude. Art critics argue over the merits of sensual or erotic
images, and those who would either regulate or deregulate pornog-
raphy argue over the implications of a patriarchal representation of
female and male sexuality. These parallels suggest that the rela-
tionship between representation and reality, image and action, is
not going to be resolved by tugging empirical data backward and
forward between positions. Rather, the meanings of eroticism and
obscenity, sensuality and sexuality, art and pornography change
over time, their boundaries shaped by the forms and institutions of
culture and society. Thus, censorship is only a provisional strategy
by which to "contain" patriarchal culture; it is a categorization that
reflects pornography's present definition as outside the norm, as
deviant, hidden culture. Only by continuing to examine the com-
plexity with which such categorizations as pornography and art map
out broad cultural notions of the licit and the illicit and societal
notions of male and female sexuality will we come to a more subtle
understanding of the implications of images of the female nude.

Department of History of Art

Birkbeck College, University of London

23 In the social sciences there have been many publications on the relationship
between exposure to images and resulting action. Recently, the publication in
Britain of the Minneapolis public hearings on pornography (1983) has endorsed the
link between the use of pornographic material and acts of sexual violence; see
Pornography and Sexual Violence: Evidence of the Links: The Complete Transcript
of Public Hearings on Ordinances to Add Pornography as Discrimination against
Women: Minneapolis City Council, Government Operations Committee, December
12 and 13, 1983 (London: Everywoman, 1988).

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