Risqué Relics Inside Peru’s Erotic Art Gallery

There are plenty of museums around the world dedicated to sex. Besides the now familiar Museum of Sex in New York, the Czech Republic has a museum centered solely on sex machines and Iceland has one concentrating on the study of phallology (complete with hundreds of… ahem… male specimens). In Peru, however, an archaeological museum shows that our fascination with sex is far from a modern phenomenon.

One third of the exhibition space at Museo Larco in Lima is devoted to showcasing the world’s largest collection of ancient erotic artifacts, an aspect of pre-Columbian life that many people might turn a blind eye to. Spread throughout two rooms, the artwork is so explicit that no one under the age of 18 is allowed to enter the halls. The Moche civilization, who flourished from 100 A.D. to 800 A.D., represented pretty much every aspect of their lives in ceramics, and the ways in which they made love (and, as the exhibit shows, self love) were not exempt from being embodied in clay.

As you’ll see in the gallery below, not much of what happens behind closed doors has changed over the ages. What the erotic art gallery really teaches us is sex is a part of life, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of – although, admittedly, it is something many of the museumgoers couldn’t help but giggle at.

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