A museum of sexual culture is a facility that collects, preserves, and exhibits historical materials, artworks, folkloric remains, and commercial displays on love, sex, and sexual custom, a modern apparatus that makes sex visible as an object of study, tourism, and entertainment. The forms range from study-oriented archives attached to research institutions, through the tourist hihokan sited at leisure spots, to art-museum facilities that cross contemporary art with sexual representation.

Overview

The museum of sexual culture is a special type within museology. Because its holdings belong to the domain of social taboo, the design of exhibition intent, viewing conditions, age limits, and ethical rules involves particular difficulty. The character of such facilities falls broadly into four types. The study type, attached to universities and research institutions, collects materials from the standpoint of the history of sexuality, folklore, medical history, and anthropology, often centred on storage and research rather than display. The art-museum type treats shunga and erotic art in an art-historical context, connecting to contemporary art. The entertainment-tourism type, comprising Japanese hihokan and some European private museums, functions as a device drawing visitors to hot springs and tourist sites. The commercial-culture type treats the history of the sex industry, sex toys, and adult media, presenting the cultural phase of the sex business.

Terminology and types

The Japanese sei-fuzoku hakubutsukan corresponds in English to “sex museum,” “erotic museum,” or “museum of eroticism.” The widely known Japanese form, the hihokan, formed its own lineage with hot-spring and souvenir culture from the 1970s and is discussed in museology as the “tourist type.” Very few sex museums in Japan hold formal museum registration; most have operated as private display facilities that do not meet registration requirements.

History

The origin of the natural-historical collection of sex reaches to the rise of nineteenth-century European medicine, anthropology, and sexology. The Institute for Sexual Science founded by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin in 1919 is known as one of the first facilities holding a sexological archive, gathering anthropological and medical specimens and sexual folklore from around the world; it was attacked under the Nazi regime in 1933 and most of its holdings burned or destroyed, but it stands as the conceptual source of modern sex research and the museum of sexual culture. The “Secret Cabinet” (Gabinetto Segreto) of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, set up in the late eighteenth century to hold sexual objects excavated at Pompeii and Herculaneum, was long restricted from public view and finally opened permanently in 2000, a pioneering case of public-institutional display of sexual material.

After the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, the social visibility of sexual expression advanced in the West, and specialist sex museums were founded in succession. The Sexmuseum Amsterdam Venustempel, opened in 1985, claims to be among the oldest sex museums in the world and embodied the new cultural form of sexual representation as a tourism resource. The Museum of Sex (MoSex), opened in Manhattan in 2002, took a more clearly scholarly and art-museum stance, treating the history of sexual expression, the cultural history of sex toys, gender, the social history of HIV/AIDS, and contemporary art while conforming to museological standards.

Development in Japan: the rise and fall of the hihokan

The distinctive Japanese type is the hihokan developed at hot springs and tourist sites. Beginning with the “Original International Hihokan” opened near the Ise Grand Shrine in 1972, many opened at hot-spring resorts nationwide by the 1980s. They displayed wax figures, automata, models, shunga reproductions, and collections of sex toys from around the world in a jumbled manner, with group tourists, company trips, and honeymooners as their main clientele. The hihokan is studied as a representational apparatus peculiar to the tourism culture of the postwar Showa era. From the 1990s, with the decline of group travel, the move of honeymoons overseas, the individualisation of tourism, and the ageing of facilities, closures followed one after another, and by the late 2010s only a few, such as the Atami hihokan, continued in permanent operation. Systematic public museums collecting sexual material are rare in Japan, and shunga and ukiyo-e sexual-history materials are dispersed among general art museums, libraries, and university collections.

Holdings and exhibition

Typical holdings fall into several lines. The first is sexual sculpture and divine images: genital-form ritual objects, male and female deities, and fertility-prayer folk materials such as Japan’s roadside gods and konsei-sama, the Greek Priapus, and the Indian linga-yoni, important anthropological materials conveying the pre-modern bond of sex with religious and magical ritual. The second is sexual visual art: shunga, the “laughing pictures” within ukiyo-e, erotic prints, and modern sexual photography and painting. The third is sex toys and devices: historical sex toys, chastity belts, contraceptives, and modern vibrators and condoms shown in systematic series. The fourth is materials on the sex industry: furnishings of brothels, historical records of commercial sex, and material on the modern licensed prostitution system, Yoshiwara, and Shimabara. The fifth is modern media material: kasutori magazines, adult magazines, and material on adult video, treated from a media-history standpoint.

Scholarly foundation

The scholarly foundation of the museum of sexual culture lies in the sexology formed at the end of the nineteenth century, twentieth-century anthropological, folkloric, and sociological sex research, and gender and sexuality studies from the 1970s. Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976) provided the standpoint of critically objectifying the museum of sexual culture itself as “a modern apparatus that makes sex visible and discursive.” Museologically, the collection and display of sexual material carry special points: age-limited control of viewers, regard for the human rights of those depicted, the difference between modern ethical standards and the context of historical material, regard for regional cultural diversity, and the absolute exclusion of representations involving children. These ethical rules are designed individually by each facility in line with the codes of museum bodies such as ICOM.

Relation to law

The museum of sexual culture operates under each country’s obscenity law, youth-protection law, museum law, and related ordinances. In Japan, the obscenity-distribution offence of Penal Code Article 175, the prefectural youth-upbringing ordinances, and the business-control law (the fuei-ho) are relevant. Display for scholarly or educational purposes is a consideration in judging obscenity in case law but is not an absolute exemption. In the West, displays of artistic or scholarly value are broadly tolerated within freedom of expression, while age limits and viewing conditions follow each jurisdiction’s regulation; MoSex sets an eighteen-and-over admission limit.

Decline and present trends

In the twenty-first century, the traditional tourist-type hihokan is in worldwide decline, while the scholarly and art-museum types show new development. The building of digital archives, online exhibition, the scholarly maturation of sex research, the expansion of gender and sexuality studies, and the inclusion of LGBTQ+ materials shape the present tasks and direction. In Japan, the Meiji University Yonezawa Yoshihiro Memorial Library, the Ritsumeikan University Art Research Center, and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies advance scholarly collection and publication of shunga and sexual-history material, while the closure of tourist hihokan raises concern for the loss of their holdings, a structural problem in modern Japanese sexual-expression research.

See also

• Shunga
• Ukiyo-e
• Edo-period sexual culture
• Postwar sexual culture
• Kasutori magazines