Description: Even as it skirts mainstream contemporary culture, pornography remains a social taboo; there still exist strong biases both in favor and against it. With chapters addressing imagination, gender, power relationships, truth claims, aesthetics, and both pro and anti-porn slants, ...
Review Quotes:
"One allegation leveled against pornography is that it harms women in a variety of ways, including through degradation, silencing, and outright violence. These harms occur in the context of how individual women are treated in their personal relationships and in how society treats women as a group. Against this, some scholars have argued that pornography can be a liberating form of self-expression, especially for underrepresented or misrepresented minorities, or at least that pornography is properly protected by free speech considerations. This engaging anthology assembles contemporary scholarship on the moral, psychological, and social causes and effects of pornography. Readers familiar with Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon will recognize the influence of these anti-porn feminists in some of the entries, but the anthology strikes a nice balance between arguments in favor of and those opposed to pornography. . . .[T]he overall tone of the book is a welcoming but serious analysis of the issues. It is aimed at readers who have different levels of training and various theoretical backgrounds. This would be an excellent text for an advanced undergraduate or graduate-level course. The associated bibliographies will facilitate further exploration of this provocative topic. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above." --Choice Reviews
"The Philosophy of Pornography: Contemporary Perspectives...offers a wide range of articles on differing views on pornography as it reflects some of today's discussions of the topic.... Two must read chapters...are the second chapter, 'Pornography Makes the Man' by Matthew Ezzell, and chapter four, 'Pornographic and Pornified' by Robert Jensen. Ezzell discusses how pornography use...affects men's view of women and of sexual relationships. Jensen speaks about what types of expectations stereotypical pornography places on men and women, for example that men are naturally dominant and that women are naturally submissive, that all women always want sex from men and that women like all the sexual acts that men perform or demand.... The topic is surely a difficult one and this book really caused me to think, analyze and be critical of the arguments proposed in the book." --Metapsychology Online