[Reader-list] The Pleasures and Politics of Pornography

[Chandni Parekh]

http://psychologynews.posterous.com/the-pleasures-and-politics-of-pornography

Excerpts from Shohini Ghosh's article:

The anti-porn position, inspired by the writings of American feminists Robin
Morgan and Susan Brownmiller, argues that pornography is material which
depicts violence against women and is itself violence against women thereby
drawing a straight line between pornography and male violence.

At this point, one might ask: Do media messages then have no impact on the
viewer? If words and images left no impact, why would we make films, write
articles or even present papers at conferences? Film and cultural studies on
spectatorship continue to foreground the complexity of the relationship
between the image and the viewer by emphasising large number of social and
personal factors that shapes a person´s responses to the media. Meaning is
not produced exclusively by either the text or the viewer but is born at the
intersection of both.

If the mainstream culture industry relentlessly stages the fair and slender
socially desirable female body then porn stages its reverse. It renders
visible sexually desirable bodies that militate against accepted notions of
female beauty and sexual conformity. If the socially desirable body is one
of restraint then the sexually desirable body, most commonly available in
the sex and porn industry, is one of excess.