Product Description

No other issue has divided the feminist movement in the past two decades quite like pornography. By providing the first book to engage in an empirical investigation of the pornography industry itself, the authors--each grounded in the radical feminist anti-pornography movement--move beyond the rhetorical bomb-tossing of an often polarized debate.

The authors engage in a systematic examination of the politics, production, content, and consumption of contemporary mass-market heterosexual pornography, thereby contributing to a fuller understanding of pornography's role in the cultural construction of gender, racial and sexual identities, and relations. They begin with an overview of the social and political history of the feminist anti-pornography movement and the debate over pornography within feminism. Then they address the various rhetorical dodges--definitional, legal, and causal--used to distort the fact that institutionalized pornography helps maintain the sexual and social oppression of women within a patriarchal system.

Exploring the beginnings of the commercial pornography industry, the book focuses in part on the history of Playboy magazine. It also analyzes the content of contemporary mass-market videos. Dines, Jensen, and Russo argue that the sexual ideology of patriarchy eroticizes domination and submission, with pornography playing a significant role in how these values are mediated and normalized in American society. They discuss the effects of pornography on the lives of those who use it and those against whom it is used. In so doing, the authors hope to contribute to creating a world in which sex is not a site of oppression but of liberation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #231993 in Books
• Published on: 1997-11-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 200 pages

Review
Finally a sophisticated analysis that sorts out the sclerotic from the erotic, the selling from the telling, and pseudo-liberal from the liberating. Recommended for scholars, students, and advocates of gender equity.
–George Gerbner, University of Pennsylvania

Crisply written yet authoritative, Pornography opens a window onto a seamy world. The chapters on the pornography industry are worth the price of admission alone. Essential reading for everyone interested in how our society commodifies sex.
–Richard Delgado, University of Colorado, Boulder

Read this book for its incisive analysis of the pornography industry and its honest examination of the male users.
–Janice G. Raymond, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Customer Reviews

An authoritative and ethical discussion--must read!
This book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding a feminist anti-pornography perspective. It is careful, responsible, and evenhanded while also engaging moral and political passion about this very important subject. The authors effectively describe pro-pornography positions that some feminists have supported, and respond to these views with careful arguments that, to my mind, settle the issue firmly for the anti-pornography side. [...] Gail Dines' chapter on the growth of the porn business, beginning with Playboy, is alone worth the price of admission. Even (or especially) if you don't agree with feminist anti-porn politics, you should read this book.

Pretty much the same old story
I can't figure out why this book got published. There is almost nothing in it beyond what one might have read years ago in books by Diana Russell, Catherine Itzin, Susan Cole, and others.

The authors give a little ground in admitting that some women enjoy and create pornography, and that no conclusive causal link between pornography and violence has been shown (and possibly ever will be). They admit to reading Linda Williams, Wendy McElroy, Nadine Strossen, Laura Kipnis, and some of the other pro-porn feminist commentators -- which is more than one may say for Dworkin and MacKinnon, who resolutely pretend that valid feminist opposition to their position doesn't exist.

But one reads the same old assumptions: the culture "is saturated with pornography"; one out of three American women is said to report some form of sexual abuse; "violence of various types is present in almost all pornography"; "The simple truth is that in this culture, men have to make a conscious decision not to rape" (I don't remember that one ever being an issue for me), and so on.

Jensen has a quaint chapter in which he interviews porn users, though more than 50 percent of them are convicted sex criminals (how's that for a representative sample?). While he acknowledges that "most of the pornography users who reported heavy consumption also reported no abusive sexual behavior" and "some of the sex offenders reported relatively light consumption," he also races past the significance of remarks such as the one by a violent and abusive ex-Marine and lumber worker who prefers "fast-forwarding past scenes of women in control" (which simply don't exist in pornography, if one ascribes to the authors' orthodoxy).

It's interesting to see how often and repeatedly Americans from across the political spectrum -- religious fundamentalists to radical feminists -- need to keep scratching this issue without ever quite getting to the source of the itch ... when it just isn't an issue for the rest of us.

Interesting Reading
This was a short, easy to read book on the truth of pornography and its harmful effects. I'd recommend it for anyone interested in getting a bit more credible info on the subject. A very good read and certainly very relevant to anyone interested in the effects pornography is having on the world around them.