This study of pornographic magazine photographs softcore, hardcore, transsexual/transvestite analyzes the visual code of these images. It engages questions about masculinity and masculine sexuality such as "Is there a necessary relation between difference and phallic desire?" "Can the masculine subject imagine otherness?" "Is there a will-to-asceticism in this (masculine) sexual surrender to indifferentiation?"

A unique and important book. I have never read any work which analyzes the subject in such a manner. This book is more thorough and has a more liberated point of view than others which attempt to tackle this hot potato' of the 1980s. Men should read this book. Women should read this book.

"Karen DeCrow, former President, NOW"

This study slices like a laser through all the fog of rhetoric, disinformation, bias, and fear that has long enveloped all discussions of the subject of pornography in the US. No argument in favor of the censorship of such material can be considered valid unless...

There is a new wave of pornographic entertainment in contemporary American culture. Liberated from X-rated bookstores and strip clubs, porn is everywhere, and Pop-Porn seeks to examine this phenomenon in some of its most striking manifestations. Written from a variety of perspectives and on a variety of topics representing the widespread increase of soft-core porn in our culture, Pop-Porn offers a detailed and complex approach to the porn industry in America. Rather than focusing on the current polarity of basic pro and con views on this topic--a polarity that ultimately...

In 1985 the Special Committee on Pornography and Prostitution, the Fraser Committee, recommended the criminalization of violent and degrading sexually explicit material on the ground that it harmed women. On two occasions (in 1986 with Bill C-114 and in 1987 with Bill C-54) the Mulroney government proposed a more restrictive approach to the regulation of pornography. Despite the support of various feminist and religious/family-oriented organizations, the government's attempts at law reform failed. Obscenity provisions were neither repealed nor replaced by a law criminalizing pornography....