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 erotica from 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.
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