From early twentieth-century stag films to 1960s sexploitation pictures to the boom in 1970s "porno chic," adult cinema's vintage forms are now being reappraised by a new generation of historians, fans, preservationists, and home video entrepreneurs-all of whom depend on and help shape the archive of film history. But what is the present-day allure of these artifacts that have since become eroticized more for their "pastness" than the explicit acts they show? And what are the political implications of recovering these rare but still-visceral films from a less "enlightened," pre-feminist past? Drawing on media industry analysis, archival theory, and interviews with adult video personnel, David Church argues that vintage pornography retains its retrospective fascination precisely because these culturally denigrated texts have been so poorly preserved on political and aesthetic grounds. Through these films' ongoing moves from cultural emergence to concealment to rediscovery, the archive itself performs a "striptease," permitting tangible contact with these corporeally stimulating forms at a moment when the overall physicality of media objects is undergoing rapid transformation. Disposable Passions explores the historiographic lessons that vintage pornography can teach us about which materials our society chooses to keep, and how a long-neglected genre is primed for serious rediscovery as more than mere autoerotic fodder.

This volume assembles hundreds of cases and studies to provide the most accurate and comprehensive picture of the status of pornography in the criminal justice system. Presenting high-level research in an accessible and organized manner, it explores a range of topics, including investigating and prosecuting a case, arguments favoring and opposing decriminalization of pornography, and relationships between pornography, mental disorders, and crime. It also examines criminal justice responses and international laws, policies, attitudes, and definitions of pornography in comparison to those of the United States.

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.

Netporn delves into the aesthetics and politics of sexuality in the era of do-it-yourself (DIY) Internet pornography. Katrien Jacobs, drawing on digital media theory and interviews with Web porn producers and consumers, offers an unprecedented critical analysis of Web culture as digital artistry and of the corresponding heightened government surveillance and censorship of the Internet. Netporn features Web users who question the goals of global commercial porn industries-whether they are engaged in Usenet fringes, video blogging, peer-to-peer distribution, porn art collectives, or decadent amateurism. Emphasizing gender and cultural differences, Jacobs shows how the creative uses of netporn images and services are important ways of exploring or redefining the 'network body' and indispensable ingredients of a maturing network society.

In this gracefully written, accessible and entertaining volume, John Semonche surveys censorship for reasons of sex from the nineteenth century up to the present. He covers the various forms of American media-books and periodicals, pictorial art, motion pictures, music and dance, and radio, television, and the Internet. The tale is varied and interesting, replete with a stock of colorful characters such as Anthony Comstock, Mae West, Theodore Dreiser, Marcel Duchamp, Opie and Anthony, Judy Blume, Jerry Falwell, Alfred Kinsey, Hugh Hefner, and the Guerilla Girls. Covering the history of censorship of sexual ideas and images is one way of telling the story of modern America, and Semonche tells that tale with insight and flair. Despite the varieties of censorship, running from self-censorship to government bans, a common story is told. Censorship, whether undertaken to ward off government regulation, to help preserve the social order, or to protect the weak and vulnerable, proceeds on the assumption that the censor knows best and that limiting the choices of media consumers is justified. At various times all of the following groups were perceived as needing protection from sexually explicit materials: children, women, the lower classes, and foreigners. As social and political conditions changed, however, the simple fact that someone was a woman or a day laborer did not support stereotyping that person as weak or impressionable. What would remain as the only acceptable rationale for censorship of sexual materials was the protection of children and unconsenting adults. For each mode of media, Semonche explains via abundant examples how and why censorship took place in America. Censoring Sex also traces the story of how the cultural territory contested by those advocating and opposing censorship has diminished over the course of the last two centuries. Yet, Semonche argues, the censorship of sexual materials that continues in the United States poses a challenge to the free speech that is part of the f

Pornography is a volatile issue in the United States-depending on the source of opinion, it can be viewed as either demeaning or empowering. Global Perspectives on Social Issues: Pornography asks whether the issue is similarly contentious around the world. Richard Procida and Rita Simon collect in this volume a wealth of data on laws, regulations, and public opinion regarding pornography in a wide sample of countries in both the West and the East. The authors pose and discuss the following questions: Is censorship of pornography correlated with authoritarianism? Does the censorship of pornography lead to the censorship of other more valuable speech, such as political or artistic speech? How much of a factor is pornography in violence against women and the sexual abuse of children? Is the United States more, or less, prudish than other nations around the world, particularly other Western democratic nations? The book reveals a variety of approaches to the treatment of pornography, providing sociologists, legal scholars, and women's rights activists with a valuable reference tool.

With tourism accounting for approximately thirty percent of the Caribbean's GDP and twenty-four percent of employment, a link between the sex trade and the tourism industry has gained recent attention. Shifts in global production, an increase of disposable income for pleasure and recreation, and a desire by North Americans and Europeans for an experience of 'exotic' cultures, are often claimed to be the cause. This volume explores the connections between the global economy and sex work, focusing on the experiences and views of women, men, and children who sell sex. Apart from attention to sex tourism in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Barbados, and Jamaica, the book also examines sex work in the gold mining industry in the hinterlands of Suriname and Guyana, and in the entertainment sector in Belize and the Dutch Antilles. It presents new insights into the Caribbean sex trade and provides proposals and strategies for addressing the situation in the twenty-first century.

?Private sexual fantasy can preoccupy vast areas of a person's mental life, ? notes David Powlison. ?As explicit sexual images proliferate in films and magazines, on television, and over the Internet, the temptations increase and the bondage seems unbreakable. Even Christians can find that their lives have become a push-pull stuggle between indulging in fantasy and resisting it.? ?Is it really possible to slay the dragon of pornography and fantasy once it has gained control of your life?? asks Powlison. The answer is yes, as you will see from this interview with a man called Bob, who experienced Christ's deliverance in this part of his life.

In a book that completely changes the terms of the pornography debate, Laura Kipnis challenges the position that porn perpetuates misogyny and sex crimes. First published in 1996, Bound and Gagged opens with the chilling case of Daniel DePew, a man convicted-in the first computer bulletin board entrapment case-of conspiring to make a snuff film and sentenced to thirty-three years in prison for merely trading kinky fantasies with two undercover cops. Using this textbook example of social hysteria as a springboard, Kipnis argues that criminalizing fantasy-even perverse and unacceptable fantasy-has dire social consequences. Exploring the entire spectrum of pornography, she declares that porn isn't just about gender and that fantasy doesn't necessarily constitute intent. She reveals Larry Flynt's Hustler to be one of the most politically outspoken and class-antagonistic magazine in the country and shows how fetishes such as fat admiration challenge our aesthetic prejudices and socially sanctioned disgust. Kipnis demonstrates that the porn industry-whose multibillion-dollar annual revenues rival those of the three major television networks combined-know precisely how to tap into our culture's deepest anxieties and desires, and that this knowledge, more than all the naked bodies, is what guarantees its vast popularity. Bound and Gagged challenges our most basic assumptions about America's relationship with pornography and questions what the calls to eliminate it are really attempting to protect.

Diana E. H. Russell, well-known for her pioneer research on the prevalence of rape and child sexual abuse, the reality of wife rape, the trauma of incestuous abuse, and the misogynist killing of women (femicide), breaks new ground once again in her analysis of pornography and its relationship with misogyny and rape. In this unflinching and uncompromising volume, Diana E. H. Russell examines the relationships between pornography, misogyny, and rape. As the title implies, Russell contends that these relationships are in fact dangerous to women. Dangerous Relationships begins by dealing with the vexing and thorny issue of defining pornography and considers the various types of pornographic materials that are commonly available. Russell turns to the notion that hatred of women is a predominate aspect of pornography and that racist undercurrents are often exploited in visual pornography of all types. She examines the conception of pornography as a cause of rape and provides a rich body of statistical evidence supporting the relationship. Dangerous Relationships argues forcefully that pornography indeed has victims and is a call to arms against the misogyny it engenders. Because pornography is increasingly accessible through the Internet, CD ROMs, digital cameras, and new technology, Dangerous Relationships will be important to scholars in the fields of violence against women, child abuse, interpersonal violence, deviant psychology, sociology, and criminal justice.

This book contains the oral testimony of victims of pornography, spoken on the record for the first time in history.

Speaking at hearings on a groundbreaking antipornography civil rights law, women offer eloquent witness to the devastation pornography has caused in their lives. Supported by social science experts and authorities on rape, battery, and prostitution, discounted and opposed by free speech advocates and absolutists, their riveting testimony articulates the centrality of pornography to sexual abuse and inequity today.

At issue in these hearings is a law conceived and drafted by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon that defines harm done through pornography as a legal injury of sex discrimination warranting civil redress. From the first set of hearings in Minneapolis in 1983 through those before the Massachusetts state legislature in 1992, the witnesses heard here expose the commonplace reality of denigration and sexual subordination due to pornography and refute the widespread notion that pornography is harmless expression that must be protected by the state.

Introduced with powerful essays by MacKinnon and Dworkin, these hearings--unabridged and with each word scrupulously verified--constitute a unique record of a conflict over the meaning of democracy itself--a major civil rights struggle for our time and a fundamental crisis in United States constitutional law: Can we sacrifice the lives of women and children to a pornographer's right to free "speech"? Can we allow the First Amendment to shield sexual exploitation and predatory sexual violence? These pages contain all the arguments for protecting pornography--and dramatically document its human cost.

So serious are the topics of rape and sexual assault that the mere discussion of them is often avoided. In this book, Mary Odem and Jody Clay-Warner examine the complex and painful issue of sexual violence from various perspectives, including sociology, criminology, anthropology, public health, and women's studies. The inclusion of personal accounts from women who have been raped or threatened by rape makes this collection particularly accessible, compelling, and powerful. An essay details one woman's long struggle as a rape survivor, a poem describes the fear of rape and society's treatment of the victim, and a sonnet traces the journey from victim to survivor. Not only does this invaluable collection define and examine the prevalence of rape and sexual assault, but it analyzes social and institutional factors that contribute to their occurrence and provides strategies for prevention and change.

In this pioneering study in religion and culture, Mielke acknowledges the power that pornographic images continue to assert in a culture whose conscious intention is to deny their attraction. Despite efforts by Christians and feminists alike to radically alter the sexual agenda in the direction of a more tender and respectful eroticism, much of contemporary America continues its sexual odyssey with unrepentant enthusiasm and with an increasing interest in overt sexual imagery. Mielke's unique analysis brings together a wide range of sources contemporary as well as historical Christianity, sex therapy, secular feminism, contemporary psychoanalysis, and behavioral science research studies in an attempt to explain the prevalence of pornographic themes and imagery in human sexual arousal and fulfillment. Contents: Preface; Acknowledgements; Introducton; The Problematic Place of Pornography in Culture; Sexual Liberalism in America; Feminists Confront Pornography; Christian Perspectives on Sex and Pornography; The Dynamics of Sexual Excitement: The Research of Robert J. Stroller, M.D.; Pornography's Challenge to Theology; Bibliography; Readings for Further Study; Index."

Pornography has fascinated and divided researchers, policymakers, and the public for years. Does it have harmful effects on individuals? What effects in particular? Does pornography influence everyone or just some people? How should society deal with the results of this influence? In Pornography, Linz and Malamuth sort through these and other questions by placing their topic within the broader context of fundamental human nature theories. Their approach reveals a systematic interweaving of social science, morality, and law through three different perspectives: conservative-moralistic, liberal, and feminist. The fifth volume in the innovative Communication Concepts series, this book is an invaluable addition to current research on pornography and obscenity. Students and professionals in communication studies as well as research methods and the social sciences in general will find Pornography to be an illuminating and compelling study.