The unprecedented mainstreaming of the global pornography industry is transforming the sexual politics of intimate and public life, popularising new forms of hardcore misogyny, and strongly contributing to the sexualisation of children. Yet challenges to the pornography industry continue to be dismissed as uncool, anti-sex and moral panics. With contributions from leading world experts and activists, "Big Porn Inc" offers a cutting edge expose of the hidden realities of a multi-billion dollar global industry that promotes itself as a fashionable life-style choice. Unmasking the lies behind the selling of porn as 'just a bit of fun' this book reveals the shocking truths of an industry that trades in violence, crime and degradation. This fearless book will change the way you think about pornography forever. Contributors include: Abigail Bray; Anna van Heeswijk; Anne Mayne; Asja Armanda; Betty McLellan; Caroline Norma; Caroline Taylor; Catharine A MacKinnon; Christopher Kendall; Chyng Sun; Diana Russell; Diane L Rosenfeld; Gail Dines; Helen Pringle; Hiroshi Nakasatomi; Jeffrey Masson; Julia Long; Linda Thompson; Maggie Hamilton; Matt McCormack Evans.; Meagan Tyler; Melinda Liszewski; Melinda Tankard Reist; Melissa Farley; Natalie Nenadic; Nina Funnell; Renate Klein; Robert Jensen; Robi Sonderegger; Ruchira Gupta; Sheila Jeffreys; and, Susan Hawthorne.

While sexually explicit writing and art have been around for millennia, pornography--as an aesthetic, moral, and juridical category--is a modern invention. The contributors to "Porn Archives" explore how the production and proliferation of pornography has been intertwined with the emergence of the archive as a conceptual and physical site for preserving, cataloguing, and transmitting documents and artifacts. By segregating and regulating access to sexually explicit material, archives have helped constitute pornography as a distinct genre. As a result, porn has become a site for the production of knowledge, as well as the production of pleasure.
The essays in this collection address the historically and culturally varied interactions between porn and the archive. Topics range from library policies governing access to sexually explicit material to the growing digital archive of "war porn," or eroticized combat imagery; and from same-sex amputee porn to gay black comic book superhero porn. Together the pieces trace pornography as it crosses borders, transforms technologies, consolidates sexual identities, and challenges notions of what counts as legitimate forms of knowledge. The collection concludes with a valuable resource for scholars: a list of pornography archives held by institutions around the world.
"Contributors." Jennifer Burns Bright, Eugenie Brinkema, Joseph Bristow, Robert Caserio, Ronan Crowley, Tim Dean, Robert Dewhurst, Lisa Downing, Frances Ferguson, Loren Glass, Harri Kahla, Marcia Klotz, Prabha Manuratne, Mireille Miller-Young, Nguyen Tan Hoang, John Paul Ricco, Steven Ruszczycky, Melissa Schindler, Darieck Scott, Caitlin Shanley, Ramon Soto-Crespo, David Squires, Linda Williams

Hotbeds of Licentiousness is the first substantial critical engagement with British pornography on film across the 1970s, including the "Summer of Love," the rise and fall of the Permissive Society, the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, and beyond. By focusing on a series of colorful filmmakers whose work, while omnipresent during the 1970s, now remains critically ignored, author Benjamin Halligan discusses pornography in terms of lifestyle aspirations and opportunities which point to radical changes in British society. In this way, pornography is approached as a crucial optic with which to consider recent cultural and social history.

Astonishingly, the average age of first viewing porn is now 11.5 years for boys, and with the advent of the Internet, it's no surprise that young people are consuming more porn than ever. And, as Gail Dines shows, today's porn is strikingly different from yesterday's "Playboy." As porn culture has become absorbed into pop culture, a new wave of entrepreneurs are creating porn that is even more hard-core, violent, sexist, and racist. Proving that porn desensitizes and actually limits our sexual freedom, Dines argues its omnipresence is a public health concern we can no longer ignore.

With full-frontal genitalia, erections, even actual sex featuring increasingly in films, this explicitness in presentation has caused critical consternation and accusations that such film narratives are pornographic. This book explores how, rather than being pornographic, explicit sex can be an essential element of cinematic storytelling today. Offering detailed analysis of how choices are made in the presentation of explicit sex in often very controversial films, such as "Shame", "Baise-Moi", "Antichrist", "Dogtooth" and "Lust, Caution", the expert contributors - including Barbara Creed, Jacob Held and Linda Ruth Williams - show how sexual content can aid characterisation, highlight themes, and provide events that serve to develop plot. The impact of explicit sex as an element of a film's narrative is also revealed to be assisted by effective, nuanced performances and the incisive deployment of directorial technique. Together they detail through the fundamentals of cinema the shot by shot, moment by moment manner in which explicit sex can be an essential component of a dramatically powerful narrative.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER FROM THE CULT-HIT TRUE CRIME PODCAST, MY FAVORITE MURDER In STAY SEXY & DON'T GET MURDERED, Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, hosts of true crime comedy podcast 'My Favorite Murder,' open up about their lives more intimately than ever in their confessionally honest and hilarious debut book, titled after their podcast sign-off. Sharing never-before-heard stories ranging from their struggles with depression, eating disorders, and addiction, Karen and Georgia irreverently recount their biggest mistakes and deepest fears, reflecting on the formative life events that shaped them into two of the most followed voices in the podcasting world.

After the "digital turn," sexual representations have been increasing both quantitatively (thanks to the multiplication of production and distribution channels) and qualitatively (giving rise to a plurality of new representational forms). In this context, several social groups - including women and non-normative sexual subcultures - have obtained full citizenship rights within the "pornosphere," moving beyond their traditional marginalization or, indeed, exclusion. These "nonconventional" pornographies exist in a dialectical relationship with mainstream production insofar as they are at the same time a development and a repudiation of the latter (on an aesthetic, economic and political level). This volume investigates the emergences of alternative pornographies, highlighting their discursive heterogeneity, their cultural status and connections to identities and non-normative practices, as well as their role in redefining the very idea of pornography. This publication will map the main areas relating to alternative pornographies, such as alt porn, queer pornography, indie porn, post porn, feminist pornography, and amateur porn. With a foreword by Feona Attwood.

The Classic Maya collapse has engendered a great deal of debate over the last decades. This collapse was a highly variable phenomenon that did not affect the whole Maya zone, so the specific events and processes taking place in different regions affected by this "transition" need further exploration. This volume examines the economic parameters of the collapse in the Petexbatun region from the eighth through the eleventh centuries A.D. through the lens of ceramic manufacture, production, consumption, and exchange. It explores this critical time period through ceramic analysis, including type: variety classification, standardization studies, and chemical provenance research.

These ceramic data are then used to reevaluate different models explaining the Classic Maya collapse--the foreign invasion theory, the commercialization hypothesis, and the internal warfare model. The authors conclude that the internal warfare model has the most support.
VIMA Series #7