All English comprehensive school desks must by law be engraved, somewhere on their surfaces, with stylized representations of human primary or secondary sexual organs. Why is it whenever some new prehistoric cave art is uncovered it’s always men with spears pursuing unfortunate savannah ungulates? Why do they never find badly-drawn pictures of genitals or breasts on the walls, even though, for example, early Britons were happy to carve enormous erections on hillsides?
Here’s a picture of a cloud.
Archaeologists and anthropologists suspect that such things were drawn on cave walls but that the tribal leaders went around afterwards cleaning them up. It is believed also that other crude pictures and so-called “tags” were drawn and that, for a time, the “artists” who drew them were venerated by certain sections of primitive society. No-one can figure out why this is. In any event they were quickly forgotten.
I’ve long reckoned the first communication from an alien life form will be in the from of a drawing of its extra-terrestrial willy.
Early Britons may have been happy carving enormous erections on hillsides (who wouldn’t be?) but I doubt they were responsible for the Cerne Abbas Giant.
I heard it was a satirical poke at Oliver Cromwell by a 17th century landowner.
Joking aside, that’s actually a very good question. Why no ancient equivalent of the desktop pornography?
It’s not just a matter of what has survived and what hasn’t. I remember my dad showing me his old school desk, when he took me around his old place in the seventies – it was a mass of carving, but all initials etc. and nothing despicable or unclean. Much old graffitti was actually chalked – if you watch the Mitchell and Kenyon Edwardian films closely, you can spot examples on the wall, some of them figurative. But, again, clean as a whistle.
I suppose if you wanted to get all sociological about it, you might point at schools as being in contrast to the sexualisation of the rest of society, and sexual graffitti being a response to that contrast. But if my school was anything to go by, only two factors were involved – one, you could get away with it (you didn’t sit at the same desk all the time, even in the same class) and two, it was what would get the biggest rise, I mean provoke the most annoyance, out of the teachers. RE books suffered disproportionately.
I remember my schooldays and filthy graffiti were everywhere. Along with basic sexual instruction.
I expect hunting, ie knowing where the next meal was coming from, seemed a lot more vital than getting your leg over. All you needed for that was a bit of strong-arming. Why would elders rub out dirty bits? They didn’t see anything wrong with sex or sexual characteristics in those days. Even if they were Britons.
Behind the door of one of the cubicles in the gents toilet in Bristol University Medical School is carved (well it was 20 years ago, must still be there unless they’ve taken the door away) two lists: on one side “Words for PENIS” on the other “Words for VAGINA”. The variety of trems was breathtaking and very imaginative but curiously, words for the male member outnumbered those for the female pudenda by about 3 to 1.
Not sure what it means.