At Home with Pornography : : Women, Sexuality, and Everyday Life / / Jane Juffer.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Archive eBook-Package Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Juffer, Jane,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [1998]; ©1998
• Year of Publication: 1998
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Twenty-five years after the start of the feminist sex wars, pornography remains a flashpoint issue, with feminists locked in a familiar argument: Are women victims or agents? In At Home with Pornography, Jane Juffer exposes the fruitlessness of this debate and suggests that it has prevented us from realizing women's changing relationship to erotica and porn. Over the course of these same twenty-five years, there has been a proliferation of sexually explicit materials geared toward women, made available in increasingly mainstream venues. In asking "what is the relationship of women to pornography?" Juffer maintains that we need to stop obsessing over pornography's transgressive aspects, and start focusing on the place of porn and erotica in women's everyday lives. Where, she asks, do women routinely find it, for how much, and how is it circulated and consumed within the home? How is this circulation and consumption shaped by the different marketing categories that attempt to distinguish erotica from porn, such as women's literary erotica and sexual self-help videos for couples? At Home with Pornography responds to these questions by viewing women's erotica within the context of governmental regulation that attempts to counterpose a "dangerous" pornography with the sanctity of the home. Juffer explorers how women's consumption of erotica and porn for their own pleasure can be empowering, while still acting to reinforce conservative ideals. She shows how, for instance, the Victoria's Secret catalog is able to function as a kind of pornography whose circulation is facilitated both by its reliance on Victorian themes of secrecy and privacy and on its appeals to the selfish pleasures of modern career women. In her pursuit to understand what women like and how they get it, Juffer delves into adult cable channels, erotic literary anthologies, sex therapy guides, cyberporn, masturbation, and sex toys, showing the varying degrees to which these materials have been domesticated for home consumption. Representing the next generation of scholarship on pornography, At Home with Pornography will transform our understanding of women's everyday sexuality.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: From the Profane to the Mundane -- 1. Home Sweet Pornographic Home? Governmental Discourse and Women's Paths to Pornography -- 2. The Mainstreaming of Masturbation? Making Domestic Space for Women's Orgasms -- 3. Aesthetics and Access -- 4. The New Victorians: Lingerie in the Private Sphere -- 5. Behind and Beyond the Bedroom Doors: From John Gray to Candida Royalle -- 6. Eroticizing the Television -- Conclusion: Revisiting Transgression -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- About the Author