Talk:History of erotic depictions

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Bad source for the 18th century.

This article's treatment of 18th century erotic work is quite shoddy. Its sole source is a sort of highbrow 'zine called Libido magazine. Despite Libido's subtitle (The Journal of Sex and Sensibility), this publication is not an academic journal and is unaffiliated with any institution of higher learning. Seemingly defunct and with many dead links, this publication does not seek to present itself as scholarly (see here). The short article "The Roots of Western Pornography" from this publication cited in "History of erotic depictions" contains no citations whatsoever, even though it is obviously a low-quality vulgarisation of pre-existing scholarship (one thinks of Lynn Hunt and Robert Darnton). Unsurprisingly, the article in Libido has several serious failings. First of all, it takes some of these erotic publications at their word and asserts that they were published in Amsterdam. Darnton, as well as Chartier have produced studies showing this to be false -- in France, books destined to arouse the censor's ire were often printed in that country but claimed to have been printed in Amsterdam -- in order to confuse the censor. This is common knowledge among historians of 18th century publishing. Consequently, I have removed any refrences to Amsterdam.

The Libido article also leads to some other conceptually warped statements. "The market for the mass-produced, inexpensive pamphlets soon became the bourgeoisie, making the upper class worry." Does the author mean "nobility" by "upper class"? In France, nobles and grands bourgeois intermarried, (See Chaussinand-Nogaret) and the latter also bought royal offices that confered nobility. Worries about "philosophical" books were not confined to "upper classes". I could go on, but we essentially have an unrelilable, completely unscholarly source (Libido) being taken (1) at face value and (2) used as the sole source for the history of the beginnings of printed erotic matter. This section needs to be re-written. There are plenty of sources -- there's a growing body litterature on the history of pornography, the history of the book and publishing, the history of sex and gender. But these essential sources are generally books or (scholarly!) journal articles -- and necessitate going to a good library, rather than just googling. Until reliable sources are cited, the cleanup tag should remain in place. --Zantastik talk 00:47, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Further discussion is at Wikipedia:Featured article review/History of erotic depictions. Samsara (talk • contribs) 18:07, 18 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

disambiguation

tryst needs disambig Randomblue (talk) 14:20, 15 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]