Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ora!ambar From: monaghan@cs.heriot-watt.ac.uk (N.O. Monaghan) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: does healthy, mutual erotica exist? Message-ID: <2825@odin.cs.hw.ac.uk> Date: 25 Apr 91 17:39:09 GMT References: <1991Apr15.170141.19828@watcgl.waterloo.edu> <1991Apr19.213039*Steinar.Haug@delab.sintef.no> Sender: ambar@ora.com (Jean Marie Diaz) Organization: Computer Science, Heriot-Watt U., Scotland Lines: 74 Approved: ambar@ora.com In article <1991Apr19.213039*Steinar.Haug@delab.sintef.no> Steinar.Haug@delab.sintef.no (Steinar Haug) writes: >[...] my husband doesnt read playboy, >i would strongly mind it, though, if he read violent porn. (does playboy >really fall into this category? i've never looked at it, or playgirl either >for that matter, so i have no idea, really.) It always seems somewhat strange that Playboy is considered as the shining example of 'soft porn.' From what I have seen of it, there is in fact very little nudity in it - I think about 4 or 5 pages in the centre of what is a fairly bulky magazine. And that is just 'straight forward' female nudity - in other words nudity occupies about the same ratio of space as it does in several national British newspapers which depict topless girls on 'page 3'. I.e. in Playboy, the nudity is somewhat incidental rather than the central theme of the magazine. There are a couple of German weekly magazines which seem to have quite a few posed nudes scattered through them - it seems somewhat strange as they do not seem to be aimed at a solely male audience - the rest of the articles are mixed between news features, travel, cookery and 'problem pages'. I can imagine conversations between husband and wife - "No, of course I didn't buy it to look at the nudes; I just thought that we could cook this pork dish for our next dinner party." I was very suprised in Sweden once (do you have the same type of magazine in Norway?) when I picked up what seemed to be a fairly innocent magazine which turned out to alternate between news features and (very) hard-core pornography. > [...] it's not him reading it specifically that i mind, it's the violent >porn in general. There are a lot of books which include descriptions of violence against women but are not classified as pornography because there is a low sexual content - at least I assume that - I have never read one myself. Funnily enough (I may be wrong) but it seems that they are read mainly by women. Why? An exception is the science fantasy series by John Norman known as the Chronicles of Gor or Counter-Earth. Otherwise an enjoyable series it has been totally ruined by the increasing concentration on the theme of male sexual and in fact total dominace over women. Essentially this topic is brought in by the existence of slavery on Gor - although just a passing theme in the earlier books, in the later ones it has totally obsessed the author to the stage where he has written more than one volume from the woman's perspective detailing the kidnapping of a woman from modern-day Earth and her submission 'to the lash' - at first unwilling but then 'she realises her true biological role and hence happiness, love and fulfillment comes from being the total slave of men'. There is little explicit sexual description and nothing that can be classed as even remotely erotic. Almost all of the debate about pornography whether violent or not seems to be centred on visual pornography in magazines and films. There does not seem to be the same intensity on purely written pornography - do people feel that there is a major difference between the two forms. Is something described in a book allowable but the same thing shown on a film unacceptable? Or are both acceptable or not acceptable? I myself think that violence is somehow the dividing mark. I have never seen any explicitly violent pronography (nor do I wish to) but from what I read on the net, there seems to be a lot of it about. Is this perhaps more of an American problem that a European one? >i know he would never harm a woman for sexual fun. he's too >tender hearted and gentle, which is one of the reasons i married him. but, now >that i think about it, that may also explain why he's never read violent porn >(that i know of anyway). maybe it bugs him too? It certainly worries me that there are people out there who actually enjoy such material. Nils.