Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #319104 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 200 pages

Customer Reviews

A serious slice of context for porn users
It was while ago since I read this book, but it helped me a lot in my own struggles with pornography which like many men became more and more compulsive with the almost infinite availability of pornographic imagery through the internet. This book tracks the path of porn use from its earliest manifestations and the cultural, technological and psychological boundaries which limited mens exposure and relationship to it, through to the home video and then internet revolutions which multiplied the industry and its users exponentially. It looks in depth at how the porn industry has fulfilled a certain aspect of the masculine desirous tendency by producing ever more degrading imagery which has ended up with the prevalent model of pornography being that of 'gonzo porn' cheap to make, brutal and utterly degrading. Robert Jensen challenges us to ask ourselves if we can truely see ourselves as empathic beings and still affirm the imbalance of power and masculine dominance so clearly demonstrated in pornographic imagery. This is a serious brave book, which draws on dialogue taken directly from porn films and interviews with performers/directors to reflect to us a psychology of dominance, which ultimately affirms the prevelant mainstream world view - that of the military industrial complex.

Lacking, Lacking, Lacking
This is not what the critique of pornography needs. Everything about this book is misguided and unhelpful, from his style - which at times resembles tabloid style emotional blackmail - to his wholly unconvincing rehash of the Dworkinist assertion of man as rape incarnate. Jensen has precious little in the way of analysis that goes beyond personal anecdotes and descriptions of the content of hardcore films, which always end with a variation on the imperative to put yourself in the picture - imagine she was your daughter or how would you feel in the same situation etc. His critique is utterly lacking in the wide ranging analysis of consumer culture which pornography is situated within and instead focuses on a man-negating hysteria which resorts to quasi-religious rhetoric to escape its dead end.

In the beginning he emphasises the links between the porn industry and consumer capitalism in general, and highlights the need for the questions addressed to pornography to also be addressed to society as a whole, yet at the end point he resorts to a discussion of "sex as an unfathomable mystery to honour" and a bizarre description of "people touching with light". There is none of the cutting psychoanalytic or sociological analysis that would open doors to a genuinely far reaching critique of porn and gender roles. Jensen clearly is a troubled man, evident by the amount of personal "journey" material that takes up the book and the self hating conclusions he draws from them, frankly at times it's laughable.
This is not a serious work and does nothing but highlight the dead ends that resulted from the radical feminist critique in the 1980s. This area of research deserves a lot more than Jensen is capable of delivering.

Revelatory
Porn never really held much appeal for me because I don't enjoy seeing women being raped for money, its sado-masturbation material. Jensen seems to be the one man that actually sees women as human beings.