Title: Porn Studies Author: Linda Williams Publisher: Duke University Press Publish Date: 2004 Pages: 516 Genres:: Film Studies, Compilation Reviewer: SexHerald Staff

Rating:

Porn Studies is a smart, insightful, and entertainingly analytical compendium of essays about pornography that I would recommend to connoisseurs as well as to skeptics of this particular genre of film. Part of the success of the book is, in fact, due to the fact that the essayists, whose pieces cover race and class, contemporary politics, high and low art, the history of film, and homosocial bonds, actually do treat porn as a legitimate genre of film, rather than a perverse manifestation of deviant sexuality. Linda Williams, who is also the head of film studies at UC Berkeley, is the editor of this anthology and is one woman who takes porn seriously. For the last decade or so, she has been breaking ground by examining porn alongside mainstream films and treating it as a genre deserving of examination and serious academic criticism. (Interestingly enough, the 'mainstream' genre to which Williams feels porn is most closely related is that of the musical.)

Though the essays contained in this volume range from themes as diverse as Constance Penley's "Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn"; Deborah Samoon's "Office Sluts and Rebel Flowers: The Pleasures of Japanese Pornographic Comics for Women"; and, Thomas Waugh's "Homosociality in the Classical American Stag Film: Off-Screen, On-Screen." What ties them together is an understanding of porn's prescience as a social and cultural marker. Precisely because of lower budgets and a prolific yearly output of films, porn does not have to appeal to the lowest common denominator of mass audiences targeted by mainstream movies, and thus can move with social trends with a tremendous level of specificity in scope and style.

In her introduction, Williams discusses "on-scenity" as opposed to obscenity, a result of a society that is increasingly saturated with sex and the high priority of private matters in the public sphere. According to Williams, porn has made the transition from imitating life to being imitated by life, and she notes that much of modern news and politics follows 'pornographic structures.' In no way is this point better illustrated than in Maria St. John's essay "How to Do Things with the Starr Report: Pornography, Performance, and the President's Penis," which points out the extent to which the public's obsession with private matters has been affected by an increasing familiarity with sex in the media.

This book is stimulating and highly thought provoking, and certainly should not be missed.