Zoroastrianism and sexuality

Dear Dino

To begin with, the whole concept of "pornography" is a western and modern concept.
The idea that material which is deemed unsuitable for public viewing needs a category all its own, which is what pornography is, needs a Christian or Post-Christian or Islamic culture deeming such material as immoral (all pictures of humans are immoral in Islam) to have a category called pornography to begin with.
Consequently, in Indo-European cultures, where you have lingams in just about every temple, the whole point with this separation of decent and indecent pictures becomes irrelevant. To my knowledge, Zoroastrians have never had any problem with such material, many Zoroastrians are perfectly comfortable for example visiting lingam temples in India. So any values in terms of opposition to pornography have little or no Zoroastrian origin, but should rather be regarded as "petit-bourgeois morality" imported from westerners or from Islam.
Basically, categories like "art", "poetry", "literature", and even "pornography" (whatever that is) are regarded as secular expressions of culture with little or no effect on religion or philosophy. And this counts for all cultures east of "The Abrahamic Domain". China and Japan as much as India or Iran. But THAT is of course sociologically interesting in itself.
For example: It was the British colonizers who introduced "sexual taboos" in India (with the 19th century invention of the category of pornography being the sexual taboo for visual material), this was not a morality inherent to a Hindu culture full of sexually explicit visualisations.

Ushta
Alexander

2009/12/15 Special Kain

Dear friends,

I watched Bill Condon's film «Kinsey» about the American zoologist Albert C. Kinsey (played by Liam Neeson) last night. One statement made by the actor (as Dr. Kinsey) was quite interesting: We can study different cultures through their pornography. So is there anything known about Zoroastrian pornography or sexual ethics?
Sociology has ignored pornography, because it's sort of stigmatizing to conduct research on how pornography has changed over time and how it has affected societies and their members. There has been some research on how media content (sex on TV, YouPorn, online dating websites etc.) affects teenagers and adults when it comes to their attitude towards sexuality and romance and their behaviors.

Ushta, Dino