Created with the explicit intent of inducing sexual arousal, pornography has held a prominent yet simultaneously veiled place in society for centuries. In recent decades, pornography has developed into a multi-billion dollar industry which has spread across all media and has continued to grow with the introduction of new technologies such as the VCR and the internet. How pornography is perceived has also changed drastically and has been a heated issue throughout its history.
In my final paper, I hope to investigate what exactly the role of pornography is and how it functions within society as a site of popular culture. The majority of scholarly texts written on pornography portray it in a negative light and argue outright that it should be banned from society. However, an article I read recently on the BBC entitled “What porn is really for” argued that porn plays a positive role in society in that allows us take our mind off of sex essentially by putting it on sex briefly. He argues pornography suppresses a person’s true sexual desires (in the context of the article, porn helps to uphold marriages) and prevents them from acting upon their fantasies. In line with the aforementioned article, studies have shown that an increased availability of pornography in a society equates to a decrease in sexual crime, as has been seen in many developed European countries. While his definition of pornography and his assumptions about human nature are somewhat short-sighted, the article brings up a number of points about the potential positive nature of pornography.
Pornography appeals directly to a person’s animalistic desires as at its core, pornography is pure unadulterated sex, assuming sex as an innate human desire. From a Freudian perspective, pornography operates at a similar level to the dream realm described by Freud in that it acts as a place to play out our fantasies and desires. I will examine how pornography accomplishes this and its limitations. Using a feminist approach, I will investigate pornography as a site of the ‘male gaze’ and how this has shaped pornography and in turn how pornography has shaped the female image and glamorized male dominance. Drawing upon a Marxist approach, I will look at how the commercialization of sex and pornography’s explosive popularity signifies a deeply sexually repressed society and what are the potential causes and consequences of this.
I hope to focus my study specifically on pornography in America, but will draw from international examples as well as they illustrate the effects of a different perspective on pornography.
The majority of my research will be composed largely of books and articles as a wide range of scholarly perspectives exist on the issue. As pornography is a rather taboo subject and most people would not be comfortable speaking publicly on the subject, primary sources will rely largely on user comments from web articles such as those who commented on the BBC article.
Listed below are a few of the sources I intend to use:
Soble, Alan. Pornography: Marxism, Feminism, and the Future of Sexuality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.
Kipnis, Laura. Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
Stross, Nadine. Defending Pornography. New York: Scribner, 1995.
Peckham, Morse. Art and Pornography. New York: Basic Books Inc., 1969.
Donnerstein, Edward and Daniel Linz and Steven Penrod. The Question of Pornography: Research Findings and Policy Implications. New York: Macmillian Publishers, 1987.
A. Hughes, Douglas. Perspectives on Pornography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970.
J. Berger, Ronald and Patricia Searles and Charles E. Cottle. Feminism and Pornography. New York: Praeger, 1991.
James, Clive. “What porn is really for” BBC Magazine. 3 April 2009.
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