Pornodelic Pleasures

Pornodelic Pleasures is an illustrated document of the films of Jess Franco, the European cult director best-known for his lurid depictions of sex, obsession and horror with over 350 photographs and posters, more than 150 full-colour pages, a new introductory essay on Franco's career and work and a complete illustrated filmography. In the continued absence of a comprehensive critical evaluation of Franco's work, the book serves stimulating introduction to the world of one of cinema's most enduring and original visionaries.

The first edited volume devoted to the legendary cult director Jess Franco.

Solitary Pleasures is the first anthology to address masturbation, exploring both the history and artistic representation of autoeroticism. Masturbation today enjoys a highly equivocal and contradictory status among cultural discourses relating to sexuality. On the one hand, it is the subject of much popular treatment, especially in sexual self-help books, advice columns, and in pop culture--for example, Madonna's "Like a Virgin" performance, a recent Roseanne episode, and David Russell's movie Spanking the Monkey. On the other hand, masturbation is still a taboo subject for most people in everyday conversation. Perhaps more surprising, it has been largely dismissed by academics as a trivial, humorous topic and the "history of a delusion." It was not until the eighteenth century that "onanism" was portrayed as a morbid act of epidemic proportions that produced pox, hair loss, blindness, insanity, impotence and a horrible. Its prevention and treatment warranted diverse and often cruel measures: surveillance, diets, drugs, corsets, electrical alarms, urethral cauterization, clitoridectomy, and labial sewing. This literature's apocalyptic warnings about the personal and social morbidity of "pollution-by-the-hand" are largely unknown to most people today, but the ghostly echoes of these admonitions still inform and preserve the present taboo of the subject. Why did this apparently innocuous activity become so overpoweringly stigmatized? Why was the eradication of masturbation one of the most important goals of 19th century public hygiene? Why, even after the "sexual revolution," is masturbation still shrouded in shame?

When Joan Kelly took a weekend job as a professional submissive in a private dungeon, it seemed she'd finally found a perfect outlet for her pent-up desires. Suddenly, Joan was being paid to do things she'd only fantasized about. Having spent several years scouring the Internet unsuccessfully for a man who would dominate her in the bedroom without getting on her nerves outside of it, Joan had nearly lost hope of satisfying her sexually submissive urges. Now, using her professional name, "Marnie," she was being paid to do only what she felt like with kinky men who didn't even expect to have any real sex in their sessions. To Joan, it almost felt like being paid to practice the art of self-centeredness -- except for the part where she had to kneel and address strangers as "Master." The Pleasure's All Mine offers the reader a rare, intimate, often amusing, sometimes disturbing look into the life of a professional submissive -- one whose drive for self-acceptance and respect is as relentless as her sexual need for the services she provides. Readers will experience many humorous, bizarre, frightening, and utterly entertaining events through the perceptive and insightful eyes of this writer.

How did concepts of sex and gender, race and class, home and empire develop in Victorian society? Lisa Z. Sigel charts the evolution of these ideas through the medium of pornography. Governing Pleasures details its production, distribution, and consumption in Great Britain between Waterloo and World War One. Rather than viewing pornography as a static phenomenon, Sigel examines how this medium changed over time to explore key questions: How did British society define pornography? Who had access to it? What did people make of its ideas? And how did these messages affect sexual and social dynamics? The author asserts that pornography offered people a way to make sense of sexuality and its relationship to the world during the transition of British society from an era of radical politics to one of consumer pleasures. Sigel vividly illustrates her arguments with literary and visual materials drawn from public and private collections. Book jacket.