Erotic Art of the Masters by Bradley Smith

“The world’s churches, whether Christian, Mohammedan, Hebrew or Buddhist, blindly refused to accept sex as pleasure. Even in the 19th century the sexual organs were considered too repulsive to be associated with the birth of the Buddha, who was invariably shown as being born from his mother’s armpit. In the Christian church there were theological attempts to promulgate the idea that not only was Christ’s mother a virgin but that Mary’s mother was a virgin as well, and there were even occasional attempts to explain that Christ was born through the navel of his mother or sprang from her breast. The rigid religious wall that had been built around sex and the sexual organs was slow in crumbling. As for sex education, with the exception of some of the bride’s and pillow books of Japan and China (and these had gone underground) it was only through the erotic painters that the joys of sex were visualized, and only through erotic writers that the foundations of psychology and sex education were established.”

-Bradley Smith