The Most Porn I've Ever Seen: 
Surveying the Ralph Whittington Collection at the Museum of Sex

Words By Kate Dundon

I knew I wanted to study pornography when I applied to graduate school. Like many archives students, I was interested in counterarchives of ephemeral material that challenge conventional archival practices and systems. If we understand pornography as a powerful mechanism for expressing and controlling sexuality and desire, then it seemed essential to interrogate how archives, libraries, and museums approach this complicated material. By collecting or not collecting specific pornographies, how do cultural heritage institutions shape knowledge of sex and sexuality?

I had the opportunity to examine these questions during an internship at the Museum of Sex in 2010. My assignment was to create a box-level inventory of a large collection of contemporary pornography. The Ralph Whittington Collection was purchased by the Museum in 2002 from Whittington, a former librarian at the Library of Congress. The over 1,000 box collection contains hundreds of films in a variety of formats; magazines, books, and other printed materials; and artifacts like sex toys and blow-up dolls.The collection is also full of weird mail addressed to Whittington, which documents his personal involvement in the sex industry. A box labeled “Swingers” contains correspondence (including some very personal photographs) between Whittington and other swingers club members, and directories of his favorite swinging communities.

Although his personal tastes are evident throughout the largely male heterosexual-oriented material, Whittington collected a variety of niche genres, such as adult baby, geriatric, and food. There is a surprising amount of material devoted to the concept of “shoe dangle,” when a pump dangles off one’s toe as if in the process of removal. He compiled small assemblages of films and publications featuring specific actors, as well as long runs of magazines and video series that broadly document the adult entertainment industry in the late 20th century. There are items that reveal the industry’s forays into early digital markets, such as an e-magazine produced by Private Magazine in the early 2000s “usable in all pocket PCs”, or print magazines with accompanying digital bonuses on DVD. The porn industry has always been on the cutting edge of media technology: photography, film, the internet. The collection thus provides a unique resource for both sexuality and media studies.

Whittington’s choice of material housing is kind of endearing. He stored much of his collection in flat cardboard bingo card boxes acquired through his mother’s church volunteer work. He organized materials by genre, director, production company, publisher, and actor, writing the organizational unit on the outside of the box, which the Museum considers an artifact in itself.

Whittington facilitated access to the material by creating inventories of each box, detailed subject indexes of magazines, and catalog cards for books, using repurposed Library of Congress catalog cards.

Whittington reasons, “all I did was use the same techniques that archivists use for other subjects on this subject.” ('King of Porn' Empties Out His Castle') He’s not an average porn consumer. A 1996 short documentary shows him wading through his collection in his bedroom holding a VHS tape and related advertisement in a plastic sleeve. “As an archivist, [I] try to keep as much information about the material as I can to make it make more sense in years to come.” His business card reads “Archivist of erotica.” “This isn’t brain surgery, but I’m not just a guy with a lot of big breast magazines.” Yet he distances himself from academia. “Some Ph.D. will read nine books on brothels and write the tenth one and never go to a brothel. I’m a hands-on archivist.” ('King of Porn')

The footage of Whittington’s home (shared with this mother) in Krulik's documentary is simultaneously creepy and charming. I’m rooting for him, but somehow when it comes to porn, I’m not ready for a collector to be so involved in the community he collects. His home was a repository for material that few individuals or cultural intuitions are willing to preserve. Pornography bears deeply charged moral and political implications about sex and sexuality. Like other collectors, porn collectors experience complex feelings of curiosity, desire, and affection for their subject, yet their assemblages face serious moral and political opposition when they enter the public sphere.

Whittington estimates that he spent $100,000 building his collection, but he also incorporated donations that would have otherwise been discarded.

“About every six months, I’ll get a call out of the blue. Usually somebody’s uncle Charlie died and the family were going through his stuff and found his porno. They can’t put it in a rummage sale, and they know that I’m going to keep it…People are surprised that so and so who just died had that up in their rooms, and they don’t want anything to do with it.” (The Librarian of Porn: At Least his Mother Knows Where he is)

Porn collections don’t make sense because they’re made of stuff that people prize, yet don’t hesitate to throw away. Porn is “trash” but the industry is worth billions.

Tim Dean articulates the ephemerality of porn in his introduction to Porn Studies. “Since porn is regarded as ephemera, the conditions that facilitate its archivization remain so contingent, often depending on the zeal of a particular individual, as to make its preservation seem miraculous.” So what kind of person collects porn? It turns out a lot of people collect it for different reasons, but few wish to be publicly associated with their project. Indeed, in surveying other sex-related archives I found that it was rare for a porn collection’s provenance to be as publicly known as Whittington’s. It seemed that this collection couldn’t be understood outside of the story of its creator, that his curatorial approach and organization systems were essential to interpreting the collection.

Going into the internship, I wanted to explore how porn tests the practices of acquisition, description, and access, and how cultural heritage institutions have to work around their systems to steward sexually explicit material. I wanted to illuminate the interplay between personal and professional collecting impulses that take place in the archive. I think I expected to uncover some kind of cool meaning in how the Museum of Sex approached description or provenance, but the thing that ultimately stuck with me was how emotionally challenging it can be to work with so much porn. Seemingly innocuous parts of the collection contained shocking images, such as a box labeled “Ugly.”

SO MUCH PORN

My supervisor was clear with me on my first day: everyone has a line, and the Museum does not expect you to expose yourself anything across it. I didn’t know my line, so she offered hers: crush fetish porn featuring small animals. I had never heard of this. But I assured her that I was a serious archives student who was capable of reviewing the material objectively. I could handle it. After a few days with the collection, I understood just how little I knew about porn.

Kate Dundon is the Supervisory Archivist for Special Collections & Archives at UC Santa Cruz. She received her MLIS and MA in Archives and Public History in 2011. She is interested in contemporary collecting cultures.