Sex Society And The Making Of Pornography

Hardcore pornographic films combine fantasy and real sex to create a unique genre of entertainment. Pornographic films are also historical documents that give us access to the sexual behavior and eroticism of different historical periods. This book shows how the making of pornographic films is a social process that draws on the fantasies, sexual scripts, and sexual identities of performers, writers, directors, and editors to produce sexually exciting videos and movies. Yet hardcore pornographic films have also created a body of knowledge that constitutes, in this digital age, an enormous archive of sexual fantasies that serve as both a form of sex education and self-help guides. Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography focuses on sex and what can be learned about it from pornographic representations.

Moving beyond a partial view of only biology and psychology, this work also examines the wide sociological dimensions of sex.

Civil War soldiers enjoyed unprecedented access to obscene materials of all sorts, including mass-produced erotic fiction, cartes de visite, playing cards, and stereographs. A perfect storm of antebellum legal, technological, and commercial developments, coupled with the concentration of men fed into armies, created a demand for, and a deluge of, pornography in the military camps. Illicit materials entered in haversacks, through the mail, or from sutlers; soldiers found pornography discarded on the ground, and civilians discovered it in abandoned camps. Though few examples survived the war, these materials raised sharp concerns among reformers and lawmakers, who launched campaigns to combat it. By the war's end, a victorious, resurgent American nation-state sought to assert its moral authority by redefining human relations of the most intimate sort, including the regulation of sex and reproduction—most evident in the Comstock laws, a federal law and a series of state measures outlawing pornography, contraception, and abortion. With this book, Judith Giesberg has written the first serious study of the erotica and pornography that nineteenth-century American soldiers read and shared and links them to the postwar reaction to pornography and to debates about the future of sex and marriage.

In a society where sexualized media has become background noise, we are frequently discouraged from frank and open discussions about sex and offered few tools for understanding sexual behaviors and sexualities that are perceived as being out of the norm. This book encourages readers to establish new ways of thinking about stigmatized peoples and behaviors, and to think critically about gender, sex, sexuality and sex crimes. Sexual Deviance and Society uses sociological theories of crime, deviance, gender and sexuality to construct a framework for understanding sexual deviance. This book is divided into four units: Unit I, Sociology of Deviance and Sexuality, lays the foundation for understanding sex and sexuality through sociological frameworks of deviance. Unit II, Sexual Deviance, provides an in depth dialogue to its readers about the sociological constructions of sexual deviance with a critical focus on contemporary and historical conceptualizations. Unit III, Deviant Sexual Acts, explores a variety of deviant sexual acts in detail, including sex in public, fetishes, and sex work. Unit IV, Sex Crimes and Criminals, examines rape and sexual assault, sex crimes against children, and societal responses to sex offenders and their treatment within the criminal justice system. Utilizing an integrative approach that creates a dialogue between the subjects of gender, criminology and deviance, this book is a key resource for students interested in crime and deviance, gender and sexuality, and the sociology of deviance.

This reference has been written by an international team of contributors presenting a global understanding of the key issues within social sciences. A board of advisory editors has worked closely with the editors in determining the most important concepts, thinkers and techniques in each field.

Pornography in a Free Society deals with what has been called the 'civil war over smut'. It addresses an issue about which citizens of Western nations are sharply divided. Gordon Hawkins and Franklin Zimring attempt to look at the problem of pornography in a wider perspective than that of partisan political debate. To that end, they compare two American reports on pornography commissioned by Presidents Johnson and Reagan, the first published in 1970 and the latter in 1986, with the report of the British Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, which appeared during the years between the American reports. They discuss the radical feminist challenge to pornography and the question of pornography and children. Going on to consider likely future developments, the authors argue that the furore over pornography and the appointment of commissions are part of a 'ceremony of adjustment' to widespread availability of sexually explicit material and they predict less social concern about pornography as time passes.

Pornography has always been central to debates about sex and emerging new media technologies. Today, debate is increasingly focused on online pornographies. This collection examines pornography's significance as a focus of definition, debate, and myth; its development as a mainstream entertainment industry; and the emergence of the new economy of Porn 2.0, and of new types of porn labor and professionalism. It looks at porn style behind the scenes of straight hardcore, in gay, lesbian, and queer pornographies, in shock sites, and in amateur erotica, and investigates the rise of the online porn fan community, the sex blogger, the erotic rate-me site and the visual cultures of swingers. Treating these developments as part of a broader set of economic and cultural transformations, this book argues that new porn practices reveal much about contemporary and competing views of sex and the self, the real and the body, culture, and commerce.

As many can attest, the prevalence of sexual imagery has increased in modern society over the past half century. In this timely new study, Kenneth Kammeyer traces the historical development of sexual imagery in America and society's preoccupation with it, all within a firm theoretical and sociological framework.