FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

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