Nudes, Prudes and Attitudes

Nudes, Prudes and Attitudes PDF Author: Avedon Carol
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
Given that censorship is so dangerous, it is frightening to see people court it so casually. Yet we hear few demands that the government support its moves for censorship with serious evidence for its claims that sexual or violent materials are known to cause anti-social acts. This book aims to show that there is no evidence for these claims, that the arguments against pornography and for censorship are not supported by any scientific or historical evidence, that anti-pornography activism is a distraction from the real needs of women, and that the very nature of the way the arguments are posed rests on sexist and representative beliefs.

Nudes, Prudes and Attitudes

Nudes, Prudes and Attitudes PDF Author: Avedon Carol
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
Given that censorship is so dangerous, it is frightening to see people court it so casually. Yet we hear few demands that the government support its moves for censorship with serious evidence for its claims that sexual or violent materials are known to cause anti-social acts. This book aims to show that there is no evidence for these claims, that the arguments against pornography and for censorship are not supported by any scientific or historical evidence, that anti-pornography activism is a distraction from the real needs of women, and that the very nature of the way the arguments are posed rests on sexist and representative beliefs.

Pornography

Pornography PDF Author: Gail Dines
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135251002
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Get Book Here

Book Description
First published in 1998. No other issue has divided the feminist movement in the past two decades quite like pornography. By providing the first book to engage in an empirical investigation of the pornography industry itself, the authors--each grounded in the radical feminist anti-pornography movement--move beyond the rhetorical bomb-tossing of an often polarized debate. The authors engage in a systematic examination of the politics, production, content, and consumption of contemporary mass-market heterosexual pornography, thereby contributing to a fuller understanding of pornography's role in the cultural construction of gender, racial and sexual identities, and relations. They begin with an overview of the social and political history of the feminist anti-pornography movement and the debate over pornography within feminism. Then they address the various rhetorical dodges--definitional, legal, and causal--used to distort the fact that institutionalized pornography helps maintain the sexual and social oppression of women within a patriarchal system. Exploring the beginnings of the commercial pornography industry, the book focuses in part on the history of Playboy magazine. It also analyzes the content of contemporary mass-market videos. Dines, Jensen, and Russo argue that the sexual ideology of patriarchy eroticizes domination and submission, with pornography playing a significant role in how these values are mediated and normalized in American society. They discuss the effects of pornography on the lives of those who use it and those against whom it is used. In so doing, the authors hope to contribute to creating a world in which sex is not a site of oppression but of liberation.

Imagining Sex

Imagining Sex PDF Author: Sarah Toulalan
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191526150
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
Imagining Sex is a study of pornographic writing in seventeenth-century England. It explores a wide variety of written material from the period to argue that, unlike today, pornography was not a discrete genre, nor was it one that was usually subject at this time to suppression. Pornographic writing was a widespread feature of a range of texts, including both popular literature (ballads, news-sheets, court reports, small books, and pamphlets) as well as poetry, drama and more specialised medical books. The book analyses representations of sex, sexuality and eroticism in historical context to explore contemporary thinking about these issues, but also about broader cultural concerns and shifts in attitudes. It questions both modern feminist and psychoanalytical interpretations of pornography, arguing that these approaches are neither appropriate nor helpful to an understanding of seventeenth-century material. Through discussions of sex and reproduction, homosexuality, flagellation, voyeurism, and humour, the book explores the nature of early modern sexual desire and arousal and explores their relationship to contemporary understandings about how the body worked. Imagining Sex presents a radically new interpretation of pornography in this period, arguing that concerns about fertility were at the heart of representations of bodies and sex, so that images of pleasure were entwined with ideas about conception and reproduction. It also shows that these texts legitimized the (sexual) pleasure of the reader by highlighting the pleasure of looking and the incitement to sexual action that it provided.

Before Pornography

Before Pornography PDF Author: Ian Frederick Moulton
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195137094
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book Here

Book Description
Before Pornography explores the relationship between erotic writing, masculinity, and national identity in Renaissance England. Drawing on both manuscripts and printed texts, and incorporating insights from modern feminist theory and queer studies, the book argues that pornography is a historical phenomenon: while the representation of sexual activity exists in nearly all cultures, pornography does not. The book includes analyses of the social significance of eroticism in such canonical texts as Sidney's Defense of Poesy and Spenser's Faerie Queene.

Drugs

Drugs PDF Author: Colin Cripps
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Get Book Here

Book Description
Argues that the drugs situation is close to being beyond our grip & that a new pragmatism is urgently needed which will challenge those who seek quick fix solutions.

A Hypersexual Society

A Hypersexual Society PDF Author: K. Kammeyer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230616607
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Black Body in Ecstasy

The Black Body in Ecstasy PDF Author: Jennifer C. Nash
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822377039
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
In The Black Body in Ecstasy, Jennifer C. Nash rewrites black feminism's theory of representation. Her analysis moves beyond black feminism's preoccupation with injury and recovery to consider how racial fictions can create a space of agency and even pleasure for black female subjects. Nash's innovative readings of hardcore pornographic films from the 1970s and 1980s develop a new method of analyzing racialized pornography that focuses on black women's pleasures in blackness: delights in toying with and subverting blackness, moments of racialized excitement, deliberate enactments of hyperbolic blackness, and humorous performances of blackness that poke fun at the fantastical project of race. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and media studies, Nash creates a new black feminist interpretative practice, one attentive to the messy contradictions—between delight and discomfort, between desire and degradation—at the heart of black pleasures.

Domestic Violence

Domestic Violence PDF Author: Gill Hague
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book contains new material on the improved police response, family and housing law, the policy of the new government, child protection issues, multi-agency initiatives and abusers' programmes.

Drugspeak

Drugspeak PDF Author: John Booth Davies
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317836561
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drugspeak The Analysis of Drug Discourse describes the way in which conversations between drug users vary and change according to context and circumstance in ways that suggest that there is no single truth about the state we call addicted. The central thesis of the book is that the explanations that drug users give for their drug use make sense not so much as sources of facts, but as primarily functional statements shaped by a climate of moral and legal censure. Consequently the significance of drug conversations lies not in their literal semantics but in the purposes such conversations serve. The argument raises a number of fundamental issues about the performative rather than the informative nature of language, about the nature of the scientific facts concerning drug use, and about the very nature of science itself. Starting with a general overview of the problems arising from a mechanistic and deterministic view of science, the book identifies a need for a new approach to the un

Freedom of Speech

Freedom of Speech PDF Author: Uladzislau Belavusau
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135071985
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book considers the issue of free speech in transitional democracies focusing on the socio-legal developments in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. In showing how these Central and Eastern European countries have engaged with free speech models imported from the Council of Europe / EU and the USA, the book offers valuable insights into the ways States have responded to challenges associated with transformation from communism to Western democracy. The book first explores freedom of expression in European and American law looking particularly at hate speech, historical revisionism, and pornography. It subsequently enquires into the role and perspectives of those European (mandatory) and US-American (persuasive) models for the constitutional debate in Central and Eastern Europe. The study offers an original interpretation of the "European" model of freedom of expression, beyond the mechanisms of the Council of Europe. It encompasses the relevant aspects of EU law (judgments of the Court of Justice and the harmonised EU instruments) as mandatory standards for courts and legislators, including those in transitional countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The book argues for de-criminalisation of historical revisionism and pornography, and illuminates topics such as genocide denial, the rise of Prague and Budapest as Europe’s porno-capitals, anti-Semitism and anti-Gypsyism, religious obscurantism and homophobia, virulent Islamophobia, and the glorification of terrorism. The research methodology in this study combines a descriptive case law assessment (comparative constitutional, public international, and EU law) with a normative critique stemming from post-structuralist scrutiny, rhetoric, postmodern legal movements, legal history, history of ideas, and art criticism. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of, comparative constitutional law, law and society, human rights and European law as well as political philosophers.