Pornography Studies

As pornography use becomes more commonplace in the United States, and increasingly so among younger cohorts, a growing literature is considering its potential connection to key social and cultural institutions. The current study examines the relationship between pornography use and one such institution—marriage. We draw on three-wave longitudinal data from 2006-2014 General Social Survey panel studies to determine whether married Americans' pornography use predicts their likelihood of divorce over time and under what social conditions. We employ a doubly robust strategy that combines entropy balancing with logistic regression models. We find that the probability of divorce roughly doubles for married Americans who begin pornography use between survey waves (N = 2,125; Odds Ratio = 2.20), and that this relationship holds for both women and men. Conversely, discontinuing pornography use between survey waves is associated with a lower probability of divorce, but only for women. Additional analyses also show that the association between beginning pornography use and the probability of divorce is particularly strong among younger Americans, those who are less religious, and those who report greater initial marital happiness. We conclude by discussing data limitations, considering potential intervening mechanisms and the possibility of reverse-causation, and outlining implications for future research.

Pornography, like "high" art and popular culture-for that matter, like conservative, liberal, and radical spectators, men and women, people of color and people that pass as white-engages in overt and implicit, complex if not always explicit, forms of racism. Indeed, when it comes to the representation of race-black, brown, red, white, yellow; gay, straight; transsexual-pornography today is very much about yesterday's ideology of hate. The hate involving racialized pornography online is both similar to and different from the hate involving pornographic films, videos, and Hollywood in general. Online pornographers often upload to servers material from sources originally produced in magazines and video, thereby turning the libraries of dirty scenes and images into an international interactive mass medium. Their old images and videos facilitate meaning production in cyberspace. These images also form the stylistic model for new material, pornography made especially for the rich Internet market.

This article considers the creation and circulation Peter De Rome 1971 pornographic short film Hot Pants and its use of James Brown’s then recently released track of the same name. De Rome’s film drew from footage of his own sexual and social relationships with black men and were scored with records he had in his own apartment, demonstrating the potential of erotics to create bonds across dominant racial, gendered, and sexual boundaries. In this way, I argue that the film and it soundtrack captures intersectional tensions that emerge from his everyday sexual ethics, presenting what Kobena Mercer calls “the ambivalence of the identifications we actually inhabit in living with difference.”  By exploring the simultaneously liberatory and oppressive power dynamics enabled by the visual design and soundtrack of Hot Pants, I argue that this ambivalence does not lead to a political aloofness on behalf of viewers but instead begs critical interrogation of how de Rome’s specific location and historical moment shape the film’s erotics and how these compare with contemporary sensibilities and political projects. Key to this comparison is the way that James Brown’s song functions as a soundtrack for both de Rome’s individual erotic encounter and the larger moment of gay and black liberation. Thus my consideration of Hot Pants moves beyond an evaluation of a strictly good or bad representation of black male sexuality or of interracial erotics to question what contemporary audiences can learn about the circulation of racialized power through the film’s connection of image and sound with erotic pleasure. While I maintain that Hot Pants produces an erotics that is ambivalent to the specific demands of equality by black and gay liberation, I assert it is an ambivalence that is critically productive, just as much titillating as it is pedagogical.

This chapter positions pornography as an important media genre for both questioning normative expectations and exploring forms of resistance to intersectional subjugations. Media literacy provides tools for critically analyzing the gender and sexual politics that infuse our culture.

The essays collected in this book focus on unusual relations and marginal objects, with the purpose to draw a portrait of Luchino Visconti less fossilized than that resulting from canonical authorial perspectives, and more vividly connected to both ideological clashes and the secular interests of cultural industry. These ten essays (five of which previously unpublished) cover neglected aspects (and the reasons of their removal) surfacing in sometimes extravagant aesthetic contrasts (between Hollywood and Thomas Mann, Greek theater and avant-garde, political commitment and popular cinema); in harmonies and dissonances in the collaborations with Marcello Mastroianni, Nino Rota and Helmut Berger; in the often gross comments of the extreme right-wing press; in the hostility of the Venice Film Festival; in the distortions produced by the lens of popular culture through political or even porn parodies, post-1968 ironies, and unexpected affinities with popular genres. What come out are new readings of films such as "White Nights", "Rocco and His Brothers", “Sandra", “Ludwig" and "Conversation Piece", but also a general revision of Visconti’s career.

Polyamory. Loving More than One A biographical portrait of non-monogamous relationship cultures In the mainstream of academic Psychology, the concept of the monogamous relationship between two people is rarely called into question. The work at hand will fill a gap in this respect and should be understood as a contribution toward establishing academic openness to the concerns of polyamorous human beings. Interviews were conducted over Skype as the method of compiling data and their phenomenological premises as well as those of interaction and communication theories were reconstructed according to the narrative data analysis of Schutze (1983). The biographies of one woman and one man stand in the forefront. It holds true for both interview partners that they oriented themselves toward a monogamous relationship model and processed the same during biographically significant phases of their early adulthoods. In both cases – more noticeably in the man’s than the woman’s – the biographical...

This article examines young women’s common ‘orientations’
towards pornography as they appear across a range of qualitative
research. These orientations, which I define as ‘learner’, ‘laugher’,
‘lover’ and ‘critic’, reflect both common understandings of
pornography as a problematic object as well as normative
constructions of ‘good’ female sexuality. I outline the features of
these orientations and draw on them to make sense of a set of
pornography-related narratives shared by young female
participants within a focus group study. I argue that while these
young women generally oriented themselves in normative ways
towards porn as reflected in other qualitative studies, they also at
times broke from those orientations to situate themselves as
unashamed viewers of pornography, suggesting a potential shift
in the terrain of contemporary femininity that allows some young
women to express a more banal relationship to porn, sex and
sexuality

We may know pornography when we see it, but the business of pornography is a surprisingly elusive subject. Reliable figures about the industry are difficult to come by and widely disputed, but one matter that is hardly debatable is that pornography is a major and ubiquitous enterprise. Porn allegedly accounts for one-third of all internet traffic currently, though the data about actual consumption is unclear. Reports in recent years have suggested that 70 million individuals visit porn sites every week; that among viewers aged 18-24, women watch more porn than men; and that among middle-aged, white-collar workers, three-quarters of men and half of women have admitted to looking at pornography websites while at work.

While debates and emotions around porn can run high, there is a crucial need for reliable information and rational conversation. In this book, Shira Tarrant parses the wide range of statistics that we have on the pornography industry, sorting myth from reality in an objective, fascinating and knowledgeable fashion. She looks at ongoing political controversies around the industry, the feminist porn wars, the views of the religious right, the history of pornography, landmark legal cases, and the latest in medical research. The Pornography Industry also explains the industry basics -who works in porn, why people become performers, how much they earn, and what happens on a porn set. It further delves into important questions such as: how many teenagers watch porn and should we worry about it? What is porn piracy and can it be stopped? What can the industry do about sexist and racist pornography? Does porn cause violence against women? Can people become addicted to porn? Is watching porn the same as infidelity? By presenting competing perspectives in an even-handed way, The Pornography Industry will enable readers to explore these provocative issues and make their own best decisions about the debates.

Labelled as ‘new extreme’, 'Ett hål i mitt hjärta' ('A Hole in My Heart') (Moodysson, 2004) controversially straddles the boundaries of art and pornography, challenging the supposed eroticism of pornography with disgusting re-enactments and rethinkings of the violence of pornography. It is transgressive but not excessively so; it is recognizably both artistic and pornographic but hardly representative of either genre. In this article, I show that Paul Ardenne’s theory of extremity is a good means for understanding the play with boundaries that takes place in 'A Hole in My Heart' as well as in Jacques Derrida’s analysis of genre labels. Through an analysis of 'A Hole in My Heart’'s relation to art and  pornography, I propose an account that allows for multiple permutations of genre affiliation and suggest that it could advance thinking about new extreme films and genre more broadly.

This volume contains in-depth essays in English by the ethicist Thomas Schirrmacher, who is known for representing Christian-ethical standards. He is actively engaged in pastoral counseling in German churches and the Third World and in the fight against abortion and pornography. His treatises are not only profound in thought, but propagate practical consequences that are understandable for every Christian.

Included is the well-known section “National Socialism as Religion” with prayers to Hitler and other unknown sources.

Sex work was not a prominent public issue in the USA a generation ago. Law and law enforcement were fairly settled. Over the past two decades, however, a robust campaign has sought to intensify the stigmatization and criminalization of the participants involved in all types of sex work, which are now conflated with human trafficking. These efforts have been remarkably successful in reshaping government policy and legal norms and in enhancing penalties for existing offenses. The article analyzes these developments within the framework of a modernized version of moral crusade theory that includes both instrumental and expressive arguments against sex work.

O livro O olhar pornô: a representação do obsceno no cinema e no vídeo, de Nuno Cesar Pereira de Abreu, nasceu da dissertação de mestrado (de mesmo título) do autor, defendida no ano de 1994, pelo Programa de Pós-Graduação em Artes da Universidade de São Paulo (USP). A obra nos traz um panorama da produção e do consumo da pornografia em imagens em movimento. Ou, como o próprio título apresenta, no cinema e no vídeo. Por palavras dele próprio o livro pretende indagar sobre "a evolução da representação cinematográfica da sexualidade até a sua formatação no videocassete pornográfico, processo que se inscreve no universo da comunicação, da indústria cultural e da história social" (12). O livro foi lançado em 1996 e, é importante frisar, esta resenha é sobre sua segunda edição, publicada em 2012. Tomando como gancho o primeiro parágrafo, começarei a falar do que difere entre as edições: o cyberporn. Como o livro foi lançado em 1996, muita coisa mudou no universo da pornografia em movimento. Nesses quase 20 anos de intervalo entre as edições a internet adentrou em lares do mundo inteiro se popularizando de uma forma quase que democrática e universal, além de facilitar sua difusão e consumo, fazendo com que públicos que antes tinham

The field of audience studies has undergone something of a change in the last twenty years. From considering film and television viewers to be passive consumers, scholars now recognise the active role that audiences play in the construction and reception of texts. This work has been fuelled by the development of fan studies, with academics like Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills and Jonathan Gray arguing that fans not only read a text in different ways depending on their social, political and cultural backgrounds, but actively work with the text and change its meaning through the creation of fanfiction, fan videos and fan art. Much work on porn, however, has retained the image of the porn viewer as a mere consumer: Zabet Patterson notes that the ‘cyberporn addict’ is a recent figure in contemporary accounts of porn audiences, while Feona Attwood writes that “Actual porn consumers are absent from public debate and are represented by figures which stand for consumption and sexuality” (2004).

This paper problematises the notion of the passive consumer of porn adopting Ritzer and Jurgenson's 2010 concept of productive consumption, or ‘prosumption’. Ritzer and Jurgenson suggest that prosumption is the simultaneous role of being a producer of what one consumes, and argue that Web 2.0 facilitates its implosion. I suggest that prosumption is a useful means by which we can understand the dual role of porn audiences as producers and consumers, and draw on fan studies to analyse this. I examine fanfiction written by viewers of porn as well as the fan communities that have risen around the porn star James Deen. I argue that both these fanfic writers and 'Deenagers' are engaged in more fannish activities than previously recognised in porn viewership, and that each are engaged in practices that complicate current understandings of porn audiences.

Las prácticas culturales en su conjunto están enmarcadas en y atravesadas por un contexto informacional que traza el camino por el que transita el siglo XXI. Pero ¿cuál es la entidad de este ser al que llamamos información? ¿Bajo qué rostros se muestra? Pensar la información hoy es pensar en las tecnologías digitales y el lugar que ocupan en la organización de las sociedades actuales, pero también es pensar en el sentido común que la asocia a las noticias, transmitidas diariamente por los medios de comunicación, e incluso en las implicancias que se desprenden de su propio nombre: in-formación, proceso que in-forma o que da forma.
Nosotros comenzaremos con el que creemos el primer aporte teórico/práctico de peso para comprender la sociedad de la segunda mitad del siglo XX, lo que se conoce como la Teoría Cibernética de la Información. Weiner y Shannon constituyen los primeros investigadores que elaboran un plan en el que el ser humano funciona como una variable regulatoria de los medios de información y comunicación, y no como el actor de peso en el espectro mediático. El filósofo Marshall McLuhan tomará la posta y construirá, a su manera ecléctica, la primera Teoría Auténtica de los Medios de Vinculación de Masas.
Aquí, en este punto de partida, se abren una gran cantidad de sendas por donde recorrer el devenir mediático de la sociedad postmoderna (la llamamos postmoderna, pero podríamos denominarla de diferentes maneras: tardocapitalista, postdisciplinaria, postfordista o postindustrial, de la comunicación, de la información, líquida, etcétera). Nosotros elegimos la que creemos central, porque su “objeto” había sido el Objeto privilegiado del siglo XX: el sexo y la sexualidad. La liberación de la representación de la sexualidad —que no es lo mismo que la liberación del sexo: más bien podría interpretarse como la inauguración de un nuevo tipo de sexualidad, y con él de un nuevo tipo de ser humano, de un ser post o transhumano— da cuenta de la transformación social y política radical que estaba viviendo en esos años. Nosotros consideramos a todas estas transformaciones o liberaciones como signos de un acontecimiento incluso más importante. Hace más de un siglo Friedrich Nietzsche sentenciaba en una famosa fórmula “la muerte de dios”. Para nosotros el fin de la era metafísica, que él también anunció y tantos otros tomaron la antorcha, recién se concretó con el traspaso del código de registro analógico al digital. El siglo XX fue el siglo del programa de desmontaje no sólo de la metafísica sino de la sociedad y la estructura mental que la metafísica traía consigo. La trampa reside en que todavía debemos recurrir a esa estructura para poder reflexionar sobre las condiciones de existencia en la sociedad de masas postmetafísica.
Con el fin de la metafísica termina una era demasiada humana de por lo menos dos mil quinientos años, pero no termina el régimen capitalista. Termina una estructura mental cuyo medio hegemónico era el libro, pero no termina ni la producción masiva de libros (más bien ésta se multiplica exponencialmente) ni las condiciones económicas y sociales que la producción de libros en particular, y la producción de cualquier mercancía en general, implican. Sólo que esas condiciones de producción, circulación y consumo también cambian. A este estadio del capitalismo nosotros le damos el nombre de Capitalismo Afectivo, porque hace del afecto la última mercancía a producirse masivamente. La afectación del capital toma formas diversas, siendo la mediación audiovisual uno de los modos más efectivos de pregnancia. Si bien la lógica de lo audio-visual está atravesada de pantallas, no es sólo el sentido de la vista el que se afecta ni la percepción visual la que se trastoca; también el entorno sonoro y la percepción auditiva entran hoy en manifiesto disloque: desde el sonido móvil de los reproductores portátiles hasta la ubicuidad del uso de la música como fondo de un sinfín de actividades cotidianas, el escenario info-comunicacional forja un nuevo mapa de la cultura sonora, re-estructurando el sentido -del oído en particular y del cuerpo en general.
El Capitalismo Afectivo o postmetafísico, cuyo modo de vincularse es a través de alguna modalidad del código digital, conoce un despliegue de vinculación y registro sólo limitado por la capacidad tecnológica, es decir ninguna ética ni ninguna intencionalidad humana parecen jugar algún rol más o menos relevante a la hora de decidir el destino de la deriva tecnológica. En este sentido habría que considerar al ser humano una plataforma de despegue o de aceleración de la vinculación mediática que se está llevando adelante. Ésta es la hipótesis que de algún modo el presente Seminario tratará de poner a prueba y someter a discusión.

In this paper, I suggest that the notion of consent acts as the basis for sexual health protocol in mainstream straight porn production. I further suggest that this is problematic, and demonstrate alternative policy visions offered by gay and queer production procedures. After a brief description of my methods, I sketch the porn industries with which my research deals. I then evoke the controversial figure of the “crossover” performer (cismen working in both gay and straight porn) to illustrate the role played by choice and bodily autonomy in conversations about porn health protocol. An emphasis on informed consent, I argue, presupposes three questionable interrelated assertions: that workers’ bodies are discrete, individualized, immunological entities; that some form of asymmetry between these workers is required to determine occupational health and safety rights and responsibilities; and that in the absence of some other asymmetry, the ableist protection of a “clean” (i.e. pathogen-negative) body is imposed, with discriminatory implications. I then look to differences in how gay and queer porn productions operate to suggest other approaches.

Gender, Sex, and Politics: In the Streets and Between the Sheets in the 21st Century includes twenty-seven chapters organized into five sections: Gender, Sexuality and Social Control; Pornography; Sex and Social Media; Dating, Desire, and the Politics of Hooking Up; and Issues in Sexual Pleasure and Safety. This anthology presents these topics using a point-counterpoint-different point framework. Its arguments and perspectives do not pit writers against each other in a binary pro/con debate format. Instead, a variety of views are juxtaposed to encourage critical thinking and robust conversation. This framework enables readers to assess the strengths and shortcomings of conflicting ideas. The chapters are organized in a way that will challenge cherished beliefs and hone both academic and personal insight. Gender, Sex, and Politics is ideal for sparking debates in intro to women’s and gender studies, sexuality, and gender courses.

This paper explores the surprising historical connections between philosophical and pornographic writing (such as pornography written by or about philosophers, and works that are both philosophical and pornographic). Examples discussed include Diderot's Les Bijoux Indiscrets, Argens's Therésè Philosophe, Aretino's Ragionamenti, Andeli's Lai d'Aristote and the Gor novels of John Norman (aka John Lange). It observes that these works frequently dramatize a tension between reason and emotion, and concludes that their existence poses a problem for philosophical arguments against pornography.

Keywords: French appetite for clandestine literature - risky endeavor, lucrative for the determined and ingenious; enlightenment classics or disreputable libertine smut - improbable marriages of philosophy and pornography; pornography and philosophy, connections exploring their shared history; historical “pornography” - similar effects on consumers; L'Ecole des filles, pretensions to philosophy - explicit in its subtitle, La Philosophie des dames; device of a young woman receiving sexual education - from more experienced women; Thérèse philosophe and La Philosophie dans le boudoir; Aristotle and Phyllis story, and its comic denouement - subjects of medieval and Renaissance art.

Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings proposes a theory of sexual politics that works in the interstices between radical queer desires and the urgency of transforming public policy, between utopian longings and everyday failures. Considering the ways in which bodily movement is assigned cultural meaning, Juana María Rodríguez takes the stereotypes of the hyperbolically gestural queer Latina femme body as a starting point from which to discuss how gestures and forms of embodiment inform sexual pleasures and practices in the social realm.

Centered on the sexuality of racialized queer female subjects, the book’s varied archive—which includes burlesque border crossings, daddy play, pornography, sodomy laws, and sovereignty claims—seeks to bring to the fore alternative sexual practices and machinations that exist outside the sightlines of mainstream cosmopolitan gay male culture. Situating articulations of sexual subjectivity between the interpretive poles of law and performance, Rodríguez argues that forms of agency continually mediate among these various structures of legibility—the rigid confines of the law and the imaginative possibilities of the performative. She reads the strategies of Puerto Rican activists working toward self-determination alongside sexual performances on stage, in commercial pornography, in multi-media installations, on the dance floor, and in the bedroom. Rodríguez examines not only how projections of racialized sex erupt onto various discursive mediums but also how the confluence of racial and gendered anxieties seeps into the gestures and utterances of sexual acts, kinship structures, and activist practices.

Ultimately, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings reveals ­—in lyrical style and explicit detail­—how sex has been deployed in contemporary queer communities in order to radically reconceptualize sexual politics.

A copy of the Introduction is available for download here.