What we may think of today as "flipping off" is of very old origin,
about 2,500 years old in fact. Known to the Romans as the digitus infamis
("notorious finger"), its meaning hasn't changed at all in the intervening
years. Aristophanes uses it in The Clouds (423 BC) as a literary device.
In the following excerpt, Strepsiades, while talking to Socrates, deliberately
confuses the obscene daktylos (Greek for "finger") with the poetic
dactyl:
SOCRATES: Polite
society will accept you if you can discriminate, say, between the anapest
and common dactylic—sometimes vulgarly called "finger rhythm." STREPSIADES: Finger
rhythm. I know that. SOCRATES: Define
it then. STREPSIADES [Extending
his middle finger in an obscene gesture]: Why, it's tapping time
with this finger. Of course, when I was a boy [holding up
his penis], I used to make rhythm with this one.
That Strep, what a character. Biblical scholars point to Isaiah 58:9-10,
which seems to indicate that the gesture was known to the ancient Israelites:
"If you remove the yoke from your midst, the point of the finger,
and speaking wickedness….then your light will rise in darkness, and your
gloom will become like midday." Either way, it's a rich testament
to the adage that actions speak louder than words.
Pornography
Largest Collection
The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality (a fully accredited
graduate school, let me assure you) holds the largest pornography collection
ever. The institute is packed, floor to ceiling, with sundry erogenous
wares: erotic posters, dirty playing cards, 80,000 books, and at least
150,000 films—enough to fill eight warehouses throughout San Francisco.
Ted McIlvenna, founder and president of the institute, has been trying
to unload the collection on some archive for years, and has since been
turned down by the Library of Congress.
Runner ups: the Kinsey Institute possesses the second largest
library of erotica in the world, comprised of 12,000 books, 50,000 photographs,
25,000 pieces of flat art, 3,700 films and 1,300 art objects. The British
Museum in London once held 20,000 volumes in its famous "Private
Case" collection, but theft, vandalism, and other causes have reduced
it to somewhere between 1,800 and 5,000 volumes.
Largest Producer (National) It may come as no surprise that pornography is Big Business in America,
though you may be amazed at the scope of the industry. Some amazing
factoids on the world's leading producer of smut, from Adult Video
News, a trade publication:
In 1999, Americans spent an estimated 10 billion dollars on hard-core
videos, computer porn, sex magazines, live sex acts, and adult cable
programming, an amount much larger than all of Hollywood's domestic
box-office receipts combined.
A survey of 5,000 video stores showed a total of 686 million rentals
of adult tapes in 1998, up from 75 million in 1985. That represents
an average growth of about 19% a year.
American churns out an estimated estimated 10,000 adult videos every
year, three quarters of which are produced in California.
The enormity of all of these films has had a measurable impact on other
industries. Mail order and related shipping in California generates
so much revenue that following the UPS strike, the U.S. Postal Service
assigned a special sales staff to encourage the adult industry to keep
using the USPS system.
Erotic Films
Oldest In the late 1880s, when Thomas Edison was struggling to perfect a
method to record and project action, he bought a series of 90 sequential-action
photographic plates from rogue photographer Eadweard Muybridge. A scruffy,
otherwise affable man with an apparent weakness for polysyllabic names,
Muybridge was instrumental in his early pioneering work with sequential
photographs. Starting in 1883 he began a study of animal locomotion as
part of scientific research conducted under the auspices of the University
of Pennsylvania. Amid Disneyesque scenes of trotting deer and flying eagles
were images of completely nude men and women in a variety of activities.
As Rober