Twenty-five years after the start of the feminist sex wars, pornography remains a flashpoint issue, with feminists locked in a familiar argument: Are women victims or agents? In At Home with Pornography, Jane Juffer exposes the fruitlessness of this debate and suggests that it has prevented us from realizing women’s changing relationship to erotica and porn. Over the course of these same twenty-five years, there has been a proliferation of sexually explicit m… More >>
At Home with Pornography: Women, Sexuality, and Everyday Life
A very refreshing view of women and pornography! People have been brainwashed for years about how horrible pornography is toward women! So its about time someone starts to point out the wonderful aspects of women and porn! There is certainly nothing degrading about porn!
Rating: 5 / 5
Heh. It appears to me that both the previous reviewers missed the point of this interesting book. Let not the prospective reader be misled by them.
The thesis of Juffer’s book is that anti-porn and anti-censorship feminists alike have conducted their respective attacks on and defense of pornography at an abstracted level which does not address the ways in which production and marketing of erotic materials in the past have discouraged, limited, and in some ways guided, women’s interest in pornography.
She suggests the advent of videocassettes, and the seeping of the erotic (and even pornographic techniques) into other areas of domestic consumption, have altered this in recent years.
Skip over the brief but dense intellectual lingo in the introduction (folks named Ernesto Laclau, Chantel Mouffe and the inevitable Foucault rear their heads), and move on to Juffer’s thoughtful and (yes, gail@ttlc.net) witty discussion of the Victoria’s Secret phenomenon, Black Lace, and the man from Mars, John Gray.
What I found perhaps most interesting is Juffer’s observation that Black Lace, a successful series of British erotic novels written by and for women, pay no more attention to safer sex practices than traditional male-oriented porn. She also quotes a “Redbook” magazine reviewer who expresses disgust over a Candida Royalle Femme Productions video in which a condom is incorporated into the lovemaking.
Perhaps the sexes are not so unalike in their notion of what constitutes fantasy?
Rating: 3 / 5
At the introduction the author gets into a lingo of cross references with other writers which invites to an early closing of the book, but when the author goes to explain how women and market forces have colluded to turn products which deal with sexual descriptions and sexual practices from being labeled pornography and now called erotic, the reading takes flight and gives hope that fascist such as Andrea Dworkin and the likes of the Messe Commission will not be able to revert women to a home cage as the only place were there their sexual desires are acceptable.
Rating: 4 / 5
I found this book to be filled with facts about porn and women over the past three or so decades, however, it left me rather cold as to it’s approach to the reader. I did not feel involved with the contents. It read more like a dictionary or encyclopedia than an expose or display on sex and porn and women. I found the amount of research to be adequate and all, but I just did not feel a part of what the author was trying to accomplish. I felt rather distant and cold to an issue which has been hotly debated since the begining of time. The book is interesting and well written, but not passionate by any standard. It certainly does not use flair, or even wry comedy to bring home it’s points. It chooses to acomplish it’s goals by just giving you the facts and nothing but the facts, madam. I may be looking at this issue from a male standpoint but after reading Woman, an intimate geography(which was fantastic), this left me a little cold.
Rating: 3 / 5