Tracing the rise of extreme art cinema across films from Lars von Trier's 'The Idiots' to Michael Haneke's 'Cache', Asbjorn Gronstad revives the debate about the role of negation and aesthetics and reframes the concept of spectatorship in ethical terms.

The distinctly contemporary proliferation of pornography and hate speech poses a challenge to liberalism's traditional ideal of a 'marketplace of ideas' facilitated by state neutrality about the content of speech. This new study argues that the liberal state ought to depart from neutrality to meet this challenge.

"Juffer discusses how in recent years women have been more active in producing erotica for their own enjoyment and shows how this has affected the nature of erotica itself. She chronicles the rise of literary porn written by women for women, showing how books like Nancy Friday's collections of female fantasies helped pave the way . . . Juffer . . . is a sharp observer of the media."
--"Los Angeles Times Book Review"

"Illuminates the complex politics of sex in women's everyday lives. At Home with Pornography is an important contribution to a new model of cultural studies and an exciting and valuable addition to contemporary struggles over sexual politics."
--Lawrence Grossberg

Twenty-five years after the start of the feminist sex wars, pornography remains a flashpoint issue, with feminists locked in a familiar argument: Are women victims or agents? In At Home with Pornography, Jane Juffer exposes the fruitlessness of this debate and suggests that it has prevented us from realizing women's changing relationship to erotica and porn.

Over the course of these same twenty-five years, there has been a proliferation of sexually explicit materials geared toward women, made available in increasingly mainstream venues. In asking "what is the relationship of women to pornography?" Juffer maintains that we need to stop obsessing over pornography's transgressive aspects, and start focusing on the place of porn and erotica in women's everyday lives. Where, she asks, do women routinely find it, for how much, and how is it circulated and consumed within the home? How is this circulation and consumption shaped by the different marketing categories that attempt to distinguish eroticafrom porn, such as women's literary erotica and sexual self-help videos for couples?

At Home with Pornography responds to these questions by viewing women's erotica within the context of governmental regulation that attempts to counterpose a "dangerous" pornography with the sanctity of the home. Juffer explorers how women's consumption of erotica and porn for their own pleasure can be empowering, while still acting to reinforce conservative ideals. She shows how, for instance, the Victoria's Secret catalog is able to function as a kind of pornography whose circulation is facilitated both by its reliance on Victorian themes of secrecy and privacy and on its appeals to the selfish pleasures of modern career women. In her pursuit to understand what women like and how they get it, Juffer delves into adult cable channels, erotic literary anthologies, sex therapy guides, cyberporn, masturbation, and sex toys, showing the varying degrees to which these materials have been domesticated for home consumption.

Representing the next generation of scholarship on pornography, At Home with Pornography will transform our understanding of women's everyday sexuality.

A unique and important book. I have never read any work which analyzes the subject in such a manner. This book is more thorough and has a more liberated point of view than others which attempt to tackle this hot potato' of the 1980s. Men should read this book. Women should read this book.

"Karen DeCrow, former President, NOW"

This study slices like a laser through all the fog of rhetoric, disinformation, bias, and fear that has long enveloped all discussions of the subject of pornography in the US. No argument in favor of the censorship of such material can be considered valid unless the basic arguments of this study are answered. . . . This is a valuable resource for all academic libraries and could well become a fundamental weapon in the war to preserve the First Amendment. This book should be purchased by all but the smallest libraries; it may well be the most honest discussion of the subject ever written. "Choice"

In the continuing debate over pornography, two arguments stand out: that it is evil and should be censored, or that it is evil but censorship is a greater evil. F. M. Christensen presents the other side of this debate in what will surely be one of the most controversial books on the subject. Pornography: "The Other Side" convincingly argues that anti-pornography campaigns are themselves morally evil. The author defends this startling claim with a scientific persuasiveness. He successfully opens the pornography debate to include the whole picture, allowing the reader to grasp another side to this ongoing debate with concise, practical arguments. Students and scholars of all the social sciences, as well as the informed general reader, will find Pornography: The Other Side a source of stimulating ideas.

Christensen concludes that pornography itself is not the fundamental issue for those who oppose it. Vehement opposition to pornography, according to this book, is a symptom of tragically mistaken beliefs about sex. What this book is really about, writes the author, is sex--and the evil effects on the lives of all of us which irrational attitudes toward that subject continue to have.

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.

Art or Porn? The popular media will often choose this heading when reviewing the latest sexually explicit novel, film, or art exhibition. The underlying assumption seems to be that the work under discussion has to be one or the other, and cannot be both. But is this not a false dilemma? Can one really draw a sharp line between the pornographic and the artistic? Isn't it time to make room for pornographic art and for an aesthetic investigation of pornography? In answering these questions this book will draw on insights from many different disciplines, including philosophy, feminist theory, aesthetics, art history, film studies, theatre studies, as well as on the experience of people who are actually operating in the art world and porn industry. By offering a variety of theoretical approaches and examples taken from a wide range of art forms and historical periods, the reader will gain a fuller and deeper comprehension of the relations and frictions between art and pornography.

In this unabashed defense of pornography from a utilitarian-hedonist perspective, philosopher Alan Soble strongly rebuts both feminist and conservative critics. Soble demonstrates that neither conservative nor feminist critics of pornography show much acquaintance with the genre they criticize. This suggests that purely political motives underlie their critiques instead of reasoned, objective arguments based on thorough empirical research.
Soble also faults critics of pornography for their failure of empathy: they refuse to see pornographic images from the various perspectives of their viewers. In approaching these images literally, detractors promulgate the worst possible interpretation of pornography. Further, they do not do justice to the social and psychological research about pornography and its purported harms. Conservatives and feminists manufacture their case against pornography and its consumers based on oversimplified interpretations of the images and a poor understanding of scientific studies.
This sardonic and well-reasoned critique of feminist and conservative moral outrage over pornography is sure to be controversial.

This is the hardback version. Golden Goddesses vibrantly casts light upon twenty-five significant women involved in the erotic film industry during its Golden Era, between the years 1968-1985 when participation in adult productions was illegal. Profiling performers, directors, scriptwriters and costumers, Golden Goddesses is a palate of insights, intimacy, vulnerability and strength, as it immerses readers into the lives of these celebrated and audacious females. Featuring the author's own interviews with Marilyn Chambers, Seka, Kay Parker, Rhonda Jo Petty, Serena, Georgina Spelvin, Juliet Anderson, Candida Royalle, Sharon Mitchell, Gloria Leonard, Annie Sprinkle, Ann Perry, Jody Maxwell, Barbara Mills, Veronica Hart, Kelly Nichols, Ginger Lynn, Kitten Natividad, Amber Lynn, Laurie Holmes, Christy Canyon, Julia St. Vincent, Roberta Findlay, Nina Hartley and Raven Touchstone, Golden Goddesses also includes film highlights and more than 300 photos. These fascinating women of classic adult film are presented with depth, sensitivity, and historical scope while capturing the quintessence of a rebellious spirit from days gone by.

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of figures like James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts twentieth century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and The Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. Judgments about obscenity, which hinged on understanding how texts were circulated and read, were often proxies for the changing place of literature in an age of new technological media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how "literary value" was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of obscenity in order to discover a history of technological media behind debates about moral corruption and sexual explicitness. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective "end of obscenity" for literature at the middle of the century, it argues, is not simply a product of cultural liberalization but of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity and novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism's obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (like T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (like Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.

Anti-porn feminism is back. Countering the ongoing 'pornification' of Western culture and society, with lads' mags on the middle shelf and lap-dancing clubs in residential areas, anti-porn movements are re-emerging among a new generation of feminist activists worldwide. This essential new guide to the problems with porn starts with a history of modern pro and anti political stances before examining the ways in which the new arguments and campaigns around pornography are articulated, deployed and received. Drawing on original ethnographic research, it provides an in-depth analysis of the groups campaigning against the pornography industry today, as well as some eye-opening facts about the damage porn can do to women and society as a whole. This unique and inspiring book explains the powerful comeback of anti-porn feminism, and it controversially challenges liberal perspectives and the mainstreaming of a porn culture that threatens to change the very nature of our intimate relationships.

Before Pornography explores the relationship between erotic writing, masculinity, and national identity in Renaissance England. Dealing with printed and manuscript texts, drawing on feminist theory and queer studies, it argues that pornography is a historical phenomenon, and although representation of sexual activity may exist in all cultures, pornography does not. It addresses the social significance of eroticism in such canonical texts as Sidney's Defense of Poesy and Spenser's Faerie Queene.

Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, debates over pornography have raged, and the explosive spread in recent years of sexually explicit images across the Internet has only added more urgency to these disagreements. Politicians, judges, clergy, citizen activists, and academics have weighed in on the issues for decades, complicating notions about what precisely is at stake, and who stands to benefit or be harmed by pornography. This volume takes an unusual but radical approach by analyzing pornography philosophically. Philosophers Andrew Altman and Lori Watson recalibrate debates by viewing pornography from distinctly ethical platforms - namely, does a person's right to produce and consume pornography supersede a person's right to protect herself from something often violent and deeply misogynistic? In a for-and-against format, Altman first argues that there is an individual right to create and view pornographic images, rooted in a basic right to sexual autonomy. Watson counteracts Altman's position by arguing that pornography inherently undermines women's equal status. Central to their disagreement is the question of whether pornography truly harms women enough to justify laws aimed at restricting the production and circulation of such material. Through this debate, the authors address key questions that have dogged both those who support and oppose pornography: What is pornography? What is the difference between the material widely perceived as objectionable and material that is merely erotic or suggestive? Do people have a right to sexual arousal? Does pornography, or some types of it, cause violence against women? How should rights be weighed against consequentialist considerations in deciding what laws and policies ought to be adopted? Bolstered by insights from philosophy and law, the two authors engage in a reasoned examination of questions that cannot be ignored by anyone who takes seriously the values of freedom and equality.

Rae Langton here draws together her ground-breaking work on pornography and objectification, and shows how both involve a kind of solipsism, a failure to treat women as fully human. She argues that pornography is a speech act that subordinates and silences women, and that, given certain liberal principles, women have rights against it. She explores the traditional Kantian idea that there is something wrong with treating a person as a thing, and highlights an additional epistemological dimension to objectification: it is through a kind of self-fulfilling projection of beliefs about women as subordinate that women are treated as things. These controversial essays include three new pieces written especially for the volume. They will make stimulating reading for anyone interested in feminism's dialogue with moral and political philosophy.

This book starts from the discussion of a pornography, but does not end with pornography. Rather, it suggests that a pornographic star can be treated as a cultural product which obtains rich cultural meanings. It contributes to the debate between the global homogenization paradigm and the creolization paradigm which predominates in multiple disciplines, through a thorough examination of the entire process of the cross-cultural migration of Aoi Sola, a Japanese adult video (AV) actress who has achieved amazing popularity in mainland China since 2010. Through fifteen-month participant observation inside the two Chinese agencies of Sola, this study reveals that the transformative intermediaries play a significant role in the transformation of the cultural product in the Chinese context, even though their operations are usually invisible to outsiders. The findings challenge the conventional scholarly assumption that foreign products produced by global producers are consumed "directly" by local consumers or that the significance of these intermediaries can be ignored. This study further extends the participant observation inside the realistic field to the virtual space of media in different countries, which can be called the second field. It demonstrates that multiple local groups, including intermediaries, Chinese commercial news portals, Party media, and Chinese Internet users, respond to the dominant ideologies in Chinese society by reinterpreting Sola in different, even contradictory, ways. Thus, this research refutes the presumption that a local society is a coherent monolith in the acceptance of foreign cultural products. The book also deepens the reader's understanding of Chinese Internet usage.

This book presents an innovative cross-disciplinary report on research across the humanities and social sciences about the relationship between pornography and its consumers. For policy makers and the wider public it can be difficult to obtain a clear understanding of the current state of knowledge on pornography and its relationships with audiences, due to the often-contradictory nature of research spanning the various and politically diverse academic disciplines. The cross-disciplinary expertise of the author team has engaged in an extensive examination of the findings of academic research in the area in order to explain, in a clear and accessible style, the most important conclusions about the relationship of pornography to Healthy Sexual Development. This short and accessible overview is suitable for students and scholars in Psychology, Sexual Health, Film Studies, Sex Education, Queer Theory, Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, Sociology, Media Studies and Cultural Studies.

Bradford Mudge's book looks at the origins of literary pornography in English, presenting a comprehensive overview of the complex issues surrounding pornography in the eighteenth century, as it appears in fiction, poetry, criticism, medical manuals, and illustrations. Mudge frames these battles in the context of contemporary feminine argument, while closely reading the moment in which the lines of battle were first drawn.