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Laurion

Dullahan
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Important NEWS for non-DeviantArt Members: DeviantArt has recently revamped its Mature Content policies a bit, in order to appease the prudes who want nothing more than to censor your internet and your art. Now, any deviation with just about any nudity in it seems to require a Mature Content filter now. This means that you, as a non-dA member, will be UNABLE to view the vast majority of the art in my Gallery. If you want to see the wallpapers and other art that contain partial or full-nudity, you must now join dA. Fortunately, it’s FREE and it’s EASY!

To JOIN dA for FREE, click here: Join DeviantArt NOW!

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Give me chastity and continence- but not yet! ~ Saint Augustine



At the beginning of this summer, I became involved in a most interesting forum discussion on the possibility of a new genre of art, which fuses unabashed eroticism with a Christian outlook on humanity and life. In short, I asked the DeviantArt community what it thought of the idea of producing Christian Erotica and Christian Pornography.

As you might expect, the reaction of people to this question was both highly volatile and very stimulating. If you are interested, you can read the original forum thread, here:

The Christian Erotica and Christian Porn Forum

Be forewarned, the thread is already rather lengthy, and you should probably not add anything to it unless you have a really striking or original thought! Also, be aware that the whole baby-sitting thing was pretty much a bit of impromptu role-playing by a number of bored deviants, to include myself … so don't get your panties in a knot over it!


I won't try to repeat the discussions and arguments that we enjoyed on that forum thread here in this journal. Rather, let me simply mention that I promised a number of people that I would explore this matter further in a series of deviations on the topic of Christian Erotica.

Toward an Aesthetic of Christian Erotica?

Over the next several months, I plan to do a series of deviations, mostly Political Wallpapers, that will explore the manner in which erotica and even pornography might take on a spiritual and especially a Christian voice in our modern society. Of course, these deviations will attempt to approach the question primarily by visualizing it as a matter of graphical images that, hopefully, will encourage the viewer to look at this matter from a new angle.

At first, I will attempt to visually look at the role that porn and erotica currently play in our society, for better or worse. While much erotica and all porn are, nominally at least, a product of secular society, it is a well-known fact that self-professed Christians are among the many eager consumers of such products. I certainly hope to explore the implications of that, as well.

Eventually, I will begin to ask the pointed question of whether an authentic aesthetic of Christian erotica might not emerge in our society. If so, what sorts of limits ought it to impose upon itself? What benefits might it yield to Christians, and especially to Christian couples? What dangers or threats might it pose as well?

I don't have the answers to these questions at the present time. If you have any thoughts on these matters, I would love it if you were to share them with me!

The culmination of this series, of course, should be a number of deviations that are, well, examples of genuine Christian erotica. Needless to say, the thematic limitations imposed by the anti-porn policies of DeviantArt will prevent me from actually exploring Christian Pornography on this site. But, in all honesty, that's quite alright with me, at this point in my life. As for just what form the anticipated Christian Erotica may take, I can only say that we will see what we shall see.

The Christian Erotica and Christian Porn Series:

This is where I shall list the deviations in this series, for your convenience:



Needless to say, we're just getting started on this series!

A Bit of a Retrospective

In the past, I have already explored some peripheral aspects of this theme in some of my wallpapers and other deviations, to include these:


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Mature Content

The Temptation of Ste. Antonia by Laurion

:thumb6392881:   Chthonian Erotika: First Fruit by Laurion


As you can see, none of these deviations actually probe the potential boundaries of Christian erotica as a discrete genre. Rather, they incorporate certain tropes of eroticism into my own expressions of spirituality. Not quite the same thing, then, but perhaps useful for beginning to think about how to envision this topic, especially if it is making your head hurt a bit?

Am I Just Baiting Christians and Other People of Faith?

Some people might see this topic, and sigh with a certain sense of world-weariness, assuming that I am just out to bait people of faith. This is not the case. I myself profess to be a Christian, and I am willing share some insights into my religious background with anyone who is truly interested and asks. I am fully aware that this topic may shock the sensibilities of some Christians, and it may offend others. But I am approaching the idea of Christian erotica, and even Christian porn, with an open mind, and with what I consider to be good-will.

Here's a thought for you: the Song of Songs is an amazingly erotic and even sexually-explicit collection of love songs and poetry … and yet it is a book of the Bible. If eroticism is good enough for the Bible, then it is surely good enough for me and you!

Maybe offensiveness lies in how we, as individuals, approach the idea of Christian erotica? Here's another thought, this time from the late Pope John Paul II:

Sexual modesty cannot then in any simple way be identified with the use of clothing, nor shamelessness with the absence of clothing and total or partial nakedness. There are circumstances in which total nakedness is not immodest....Nakedness as such is not to be equated with physical shamelessness. Immodesty is only present when nakedness plays a negative role with regard to the value of the person...The human body is not in itself shameful, nor for the same reasons are sensual reactions, and human sensuality in general. Shamelessness (just like shame and modesty) is a function of the interior of the individual.


If you are offended by this topic alone, then perhaps you need to look toward yourself for the cause and the cure, and not to me? Just a thought …



To hear many religious people talk, one would think God created the torso, head, legs and arms, but the devil slapped on the genitals. ~ Don Schrader


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Wow, I've been on DA for a year-and-a-half now, and I've never bothered to do a journal entry! Some of the comments I've received on my wallpapers lately make me think its time to change that, and explain my goals and intent.

This account started off as a venue for sharing some concept art for a game I was working on, then became a place to share my efforts at learning some new photo-manipulation techniques, and has most recently become a gallery for publishing the wallpapers I love to make. Many of the wallpapers that I share here feature attractive women, and sometimes semi-nude or even nude attractive women, largely because that seems to be the most popular category of wallpapers (surprise! surprise!), and if I bother to make a wallpaper, I would really like to see it get some use. That, and I am a huge admirer of the beauty of the human figure, so I enjoy working with it as a subject as well.

But wait a minute! Recently, I've received some very hostile comments on several of my wallpapers, and in particular these two wallpapers:



According to some of these comments, I'm nothing more than a dirty rotten pornographer! Well, I don't think so, and let me tell you why.

Art -- at least the sort of amateur art that I like to do -- can function in several modes. It starts as a mode of self-expression, whereby I explore things inside my psyche, by means of visual images, which may resist being reduced to mere words; I think doing art can expand a person's mind. Next, the moment I publish it here, it becomes a mode of communications between me and a lot of people that I have never met and do not know. As a medium of communication, this amateur art is horribly inefficient; I have no control over how other people receive and interpret the somewhat ambiguous, often ironic and multivalent signifiers that I throw their way. Hell, the given art work may not even really ~mean~ anything, but may be decorative piece or a technical study. Now, when I portray a potentially controversial subject matter, such as a female nude, I guess that's kind of like playing semiotic Russian roulette with the audience: in most cases, the art will be received innocuously, but in a few cases it will go off with a loud and nasty bang inside someone's head.

Here's the problem: we as humans are inherently sexual creatures, so there will ~always~ be an implicit and potential sexual meaning to nearly every human interaction, to include the simple act of viewing the human body -- clothed or unclothed -- of another person. We cannot change that fact, even though the ethical religions have often tried to suppress it. But for me, as an (amateur) artist, this means that a sexual meaning already exists in ~any~ portrayal of a sexually viable human body (and there're some special perversions for the non-viable bodies as well!), so I shouldn't be surprised when some people become sexually intrigued or even aroused by one of my images. Nor should I be surprised when their own response to becoming aroused is a flush of guilt or of personal shame, which results in them unjustly attacking me as a pornographer for having "tempted" them with the image of a sexually attractive person.

Finally, let me state quite clearly that I do not want to be associated with pornography, which I take to mean explicit depictions of sexual contact or the gratuitous display of sexual organs. But I guess that I don't mind my images titillating someone, so long as that titillation is done in a humorous or innocent way. I think again of those classic cheese-cake calendars you see all over the place, by artists like Buell and Armstrong and Elvgren, where titillation was fun, wholesome, and as American as apple-pie.

So, what do YOU think? Are my wallpapers the internet version of calendar art? Or am I a dirty rotten pornographer?
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Featured

Christian Erotica and Christian Porn? by Laurion, journal

A Dirty Rotten Pornographer?? by Laurion, journal