Censorship of Sexual and Erotic Material
When Images Become Dangerous
What makes an image dangerous?
Installment A of the Essay Series
Installment A of the Essay Series
We live in a time when explicit content is everywhere. But linger too long on the wrong kind of naked body, and suddenly you’re not just a viewer—you’re a voyeur. You’ve crossed some invisible line. You’ve reacted. You’ve felt something. And that, apparently, is the problem, the danger.
This series explores the blurry, combustible territory where art, desire, censorship, and labeling collide.
It’s about erotica. It’s about pornography.
It’s about the people—religious, political, algorithmic—who still believe they have the right to decide what the rest of us are allowed to see.
It’s also about the baggage we inherit—usually without realizing it—that shapes how we see the naked body.
And the shame doesn’t stop at the museum doors. It follows us home. It distorts how we see our own bodies—what we show, what we hide, what we tolerate in ourselves and others. Eventually, it finds its way into the bedroom, where it silences desires, blunts pleasure, and teaches us to second-guess what we want.
And it’s not just theoretical. These judgments show up in real moments – in galleries, in glances, in the flicker of reaction we try to hide.
If you’ve ever stood in front of a painting and thought, “How would I categorize this?”, this essay is for you. Maybe you weren’t sure if it was erotic or pornographic. Maybe you looked around to see if anyone noticed your reaction—only to realize you were the only one standing there. The others had kept their distance. Not because they didn’t see it. But because they didn’t want to be seen seeing it.
The discomfort isn’t only in the image—which might not even be explicit, as the one below shows. It’s in the fear of being caught responding. These kinds of images stir something: curiosity, confusion, unease. But the reaction isn’t just about the artwork.
It’s about the programming behind the gaze.
That’s how shame takes root: quietly, and often without question.
Sometimes the image isn’t even of a body.
Take Edward Weston’s “Pepper No. 30”—a black-and-white photograph of a curled bell pepper, elegantly lit and deeply suggestive. At a glance, it’s just a vegetable. But to many viewers, it suggests curves, creases, softness. Something sensual. Weston never intended it that way. But interpretation doesn’t come from the pepper. It comes from us.
The arousal isn’t in the object. It’s in the projection.
This is where perception becomes revelation.
We respond not just to what we see—but to what we’ve been conditioned to see. Conditioned by religion, media, school, family, culture. And that conditioning? It’s not neutral. It drags in shame, silence, bias, and desire—and ties them in a bow we’re supposed to call “appropriate.”
Carl Jung believed that images speak directly to the unconscious. They don’t just reflect the world—we bring the world to them. Inside us are archetypes: the mother, the lover, the shadow, the sinner. These embedded patterns shape what we see and how we feel when we see it. A photograph might stir something unexpected not because of its content, but because it touches something primal within the viewer.
That’s why the same image can be seen as erotic, offensive, or meaningless—depending not just on the viewer, but on the conditioning they carry with them.
And biologically, we’re built to feel it. Visuals aren’t decoration—they’re hardwired into how we process the world. Researchers estimate 30–50% of our brain is devoted to visual processing. Perkins School for the Blind
More than for touch. More than for hearing. More than for language. The visual doesn’t just matter—it dominates.
That’s why images are often the first thing to be censored.
They reach us before reason. They short-circuit the filters. They slip under the surface and touch something we didn’t plan on revealing.
Religious authorities once painted robes over nude frescoes. Today, we let algorithms decide what’s “too much.” They blur nipples, ban intimacy, and pretend it’s about morality—not marketability.
The tools have changed. The instinct hasn’t.
Control the image, and you control the feeling.
Censorship doesn’t just hide content. It rewrites meaning. It tells us what not to feel. It reshapes how we see nudity, desire, gender, power. It whispers, “You’re being watched.” And worse: “You should be ashamed of what you feel.”
Even inside churches and sacred spaces, the image has always been contested. In Sacred Art or Pornography?, Simon Carrington writes about his surprise at seeing bare-breasted allegories of love and chastity throughout St. Peter’s Basilica—nude, unapologetic, and exalted.
Pope John Paul II, in reflecting on this tension, introduced a distinction that still matters:
There’s the ethos of the image—what the artist intends.
And the **ethos of the viewer**—what we bring to it.
A painting might honor the beauty of the body. But even that can be seen as obscene—depending on how deeply the viewer has been trained to mistrust their own gaze.
So before we ask, “What is this image?”
We might ask, “What shaped the way I feel about this image?”
That’s the heart of this series: how visual art, nudity, desire, censorship, and shame intersect.
We’ll look at cultures that once revered the naked body. How we got from that to content warnings and Not Safe for Work tags.
We’ll track how visual discomfort gets weaponized—and what that does to our sexuality, our relationships, and our ability to live in our own skin.
And we’ll return often to the viewer.
To you.
Because in the end, this series isn’t just about what we see.
It’s about what we’ve been told not to feel—and what it might mean to feel anyway.
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Installment B:
When the Body Was Divine — exploring how ancient cultures once revered nudity, and what was lost when the sacred body became a source of shame.
Send your experiences with censorship to susanamayer3@gmail.com, place censorship in subject line. Indicate whether you wish to remain anonymous or provide a name/pseudonym to be credited.