For readers of Peggy Orenstein and Rebecca Traister, an authoritative, big think look at pornography in all its facets - historical, religious, and cultural. In the 1960s, sex researchers Masters and Johnson declared the end of the fake orgasm. Nearly two decades later, in 1982, evangelical activist Tim LaHaye foretold that the entire pornography industry would soon be driven out of business. Neither prediction proved true. Instead, with the rise of the internet, pornography saturates the American conscience more than ever and has reshaped our understanding of sexuality, relationships, media, and even the nature of addiction. Dr. Kelsy Burke has spent the last five years researching and interviewing internet pornography's opponents and its sympathizers. In The Pornography Wars, Burke does a deep dive into the long history of pornography in America and then turns her gaze on our present society to examine the ways this industry touches on the most intimate parts of American lives. She offers a complete understanding of the major players in the debates around porn's place in society: everyone from sex workers, activists, therapists, religious leaders, and consumers. In doing so, she addresses and debunks the myths that surround porn and porn usage while showing how everything from the way we teach children about sex to the legal protections for what can be published is tied up in the deeply complicated battles over pornography. Sweeping, savvy, and deeply researched, The Pornography Wars is a necessary and comprehensive new look at pornography and American life.

The Feminist Porn Book celebrates the power of desire, turning the spotlight on an industry where feminism is thriving.

"One of the best and most disturbing war novels in years." —The Wall Street Journal “War porn,” n. Videos, images, and narratives featuring graphic violence, often brought back from combat zones, viewed voyeuristically or for emotional gratification. Such media are often presented and circulated without context, though they may be used as evidence of war crimes. War porn is also, in Roy Scranton’s searing debut novel, a metaphor for the experience of war in the age of the War on Terror, the fracturing and fragmentation of perspective, time, and self that afflicts soldiers and civilians alike, the global networks and face-to-face moments that suture our fragmented lives together. In War Porn three lives fit inside one another like nesting dolls: a restless young woman at an end-of-summer barbecue in Utah; an American soldier in occupied Baghdad; and Qasim al-Zabadi, an Iraqi math professor, who faces the US invasion of his country with fear, denial, and perseverance. As War Porn cuts from America to Iraq and back again, as home and hell merge, we come to see America through the eyes of the occupied, even as we see Qasim become a prisoner of the occupation. Through the looking glass of War Porn, Scranton reveals the fragile humanity that connects Americans and Iraqis, torturers and the tortured, victors and their victims.

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject American Studies, grade: 1,3, University of Paderborn (Fakultät für Kulturwissenschaften), course: Feminist Wars, language: English, abstract: The London Porn Festival is known to celebrate queer sexuality and holds annual festivals with pornographic screenings. In 2019, feminist activist groups protested against the festival claiming it to be harmful and dangerous. Given this event, this paper claims that the London Porn Festival Protest in 2019 is evidence that the sex wars between feminists are ongoing. To prove this thesis right, the paper is structured like the following. The first chapter deals with the concept of culture wars and the Feminist Porn Wars of the 1980s as a theoretical framework for the analysis. Here, the chapter defines the two opposing views of feminists on pornography. The analysis contains an elaborate examination in how far the Feminist Wars are ongoing with the example of the London Porn Film Festival protests. Finally, the paper's findings will be summarized and an outlook on further research will be given.

Diese Arbeit ist eine Fallstudienanalyse des zeitgenössischen feministischen akademischen Pornografie-Diskurses. Anhand zweier wissenschaftlicher Artikel werden zwei konkurrierende Diskurse identifiziert und mittels konstruktivistischer Grounded Theory und Diskursanalyse untersucht. Der "Clash" der Diskurse wird erstens auf sich verändernde Normen zur Sexualität zurückgeführt: Ältere Generationen haben die meisten Machtpositionen innerhalb der Wissenschaft inne und meist restriktive Ansichten darüber, was "akzeptable" Sexualitäten sind. Zweitens entziehen sich aktuelle Forschungskonventionen innerhalb der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften einfachen Erklärungen. Forschende müssen sich diesen Konventionen oder den Sexualitätsnormen anpassen.

Develops a novel characterization of the pornographic as a cultural concept. This original contribution to porn studies aims to interrogate previously untheorized changes in contemporary understandings of the pornographic. Helen Hester argues that the words “porn” and “pornographic” are currently being applied to an ever-expanding range of material and that this change in language usage reflects a wider shift in perception. She suggests that we are witnessing a seemingly paradoxical move away from sex within contemporary understandings of porn, as a range of other factors come to influence the concept. Using examples from media, literature, and culture, and discussing the rise of notions such as “torture porn” and “misery porn,” Hester’s argument ranges from sexually explicit German novels and British policy documents to a discussion of the differences between European and American editions of pornographic films. She concludes that four factors in particular—transgression, intensity, prurience, and authenticity—can be seen to influence the way that we think about porn.