Visual Desire: Love, Lust, and Virtual Reality

In nineteenth-century urban America, visual culture intertwined with and amplified a thriving sex industry. Long before the escapades of Civil War soldiers, the “wide-open” climate of gold rush California was prompting lawmakers to debate the merits of measures to suppress obscene pictures and texts. Forty years before the widespread application of the passport system, the first photographic archive of prospective immigrants was composed of Chinese women in the West. Before Anthony Comstock became a household name, San Francisco’s Custom House, police, and courts were struggling to suppress and prosecute a flood of “indecent materials” pouring through the port town from far-flung points like China, Japan, and France. Although San Francisco’s female population steadily increased from the late 1850s onward, commodified images and spectacles catering to male consumers’ lust—and female consumers’ curiosity, if not also lust—only became more popular and numerous in its urban culture.