Sex-Themed Visual Imagery as Regulated Representations

One of the ironies of explicit images that portray sexual scenes is that they are rooted in the religious experiences of most cultures. From the dawn of time, religion and sex have been intertwined. This is especially true of the civilizations of the peoples of the ancient Near East, the region of the world that covers parts of modern-day Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. Contemporary events in this part of the world remind us of this fact from time to time. In 2006, a court in Istanbul, Turkey, acquitted 92-year-old Turkish archeologist Muazzez Ilmiye Cig of the criminal charge of inciting religious hatred. The crime with which Cig had been charged was connected to her academic research. One of the foremost experts in ancient Near Eastern civilizations, and especially the civilization of Sumeria, Cig had written that the veil worn by millions of women in the Middle East—and by religious women in the Western world—was a religious and sexual artifact that predated both Christianity and Islam. She stated that five thousand years ago, the religious headscarf, or veil, was a symbolic garment that helped set sacred temple prostitutes or priestesses apart from other women (Arsu, 2006). She had written that these sacred prostitutes had sex with young men in the pagan temple as an act of worship and celebration of the goddess of love, sex, and fertility. Cig argued that wearing a headscarf in contemporary society should therefore not be taken as an expression of a woman’s morality or religiosity (Arsu, 2006).