Handmade and Homemade: Vernacular Expressions of American Sexual History

A wooden carving from a Maine logging camp features a naked woman nuzzling into a large, upward-pointing index finger attached to a hand.¹ The figure stands on a pile of books, raising herself up to better grasp the finger the way one might grasp a lover, pulling it between her legs and breasts. In essence, the woman fingers herself while proving that books are clearly good for masturbation. The artist who carved the figure merged two equally effective jokes: one visual and one in words. That’s not bad for a bit of sly humor from a backwoods logging camp. The piece, carved and painted in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, treats digital stimulation with a mocking humor that is at odds with most published records on the practice; exposés, medical investigations, and pornographic novels published in the nineteenth century tend to treat sex with great seriousness.² In contrast, this object displays an emotional register ignored in more traditional sources for the history of sexuality.

I want to suggest that if we recognize the diversity of pornographic expressions—from commercial products to local and homemade objects like the one carved in the backwoods of Maine—then we can begin to sketch out the hidden corners of the American pornographic tradition and their influence on the history of sexuality. While it is true, as Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz explains, that the destruction of erotic materials has contributed to a “deficit or silence that has distorted our understanding of the past,” she and other historians have focused on the large-scale destruction of commercial pornography by antivice crusaders and have overlooked handmade and homemade objects that those crusaders never found.³ These objects reveal the continued existence of a robust, noisy, vernacular tradition that has been frequently overlooked.

The historiography on pornography has been shaped by a number of errors and omissions. Although many scholars recognize the way that new technologies have created a body of amateur pornography—inexpensive video cameras and computers have allowed people to generate, upload, and exchange masses of pornographic materials worldwide—historians have not entered into the discussion of amateur works.⁴ In fact, historians have only relatively recently turned from the examination of censorship and obscenity to the examination of pornography; what they have found has not been well integrated into current understandings of the genre or the broader understanding of the history of sexuality.⁵ Further compounding the confusion, historians have not clearly differentiated demand from supply and have instead assumed that the pornography people bought was the pornography they wanted.⁶ But without letters, memoirs, autobiographies, and other documents, how can historians detail reader demand in the past?⁷ Gaps in the archival record make it impossible for scholars to answer basic questions about the history of pornography users. Who read pornography? Were they male or female, rich or poor? How did they read? Did they identify with the male characters, the female characters, or both? Did individuals choose pornographic materials to meet their fancy, or did they make do with what they found? Did the motifs in what they found shape their desires, or did the motifs articulate desires that already existed? How did readers understand the materials? Did they treat them as fictions, or did they milk them for sexual know-how? If we can answer these questions, we can more fully understand the history of people’s sexual fantasies.

To approach the issue of demand, this article begins an exploration of the history of homemade and handmade pornography, a vernacular culture that has not been examined by scholars who look instead at the history of commercial pornography or the sociology of more current amateur pornography produced with Polaroids, video cameras, and computers. The methodological payoff of this move is profound, because these objects allow us to consider the desires of their creators, rather than the domain of the marketplace. Because there is no intermediary between the creator and the object, amateur materials provide a more unmediated view of personal sexual desire—complete with...