Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America [Hardcover]

Laura Kipnis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1996

In this eye-opening exploration, Laura Kipnis challenges our tendency either to demonize pornography or to dismiss it. Examining the entire spectrum of pornography--from the anti-porn positions of Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin to the activities of men's magazine publishers such as Larry Flynt--Kipnis challenges our most basic preconceptions about the meaning of porn.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Laura Kipnis, who teaches film at Northwestern University, adopts an unpopular stance: that of speaking for those whose sexual tendencies stray from the acceptable path. As such, she adds a different perspective in the always-raging debate on the role of pornography in America. Among her arguments is that pornography is often overlooked as a class issue, couched instead almost always as a morality matter. Realizing that many of those employed by the sex industry and those who support it are separated by class from those who deem it so unsavory, provides a particular insight into the perspective of those sitting in judgment.

From Publishers Weekly

Kipnis (Ecstasy Unlimited) argues in five loosely connected essays that just about everyone-from the religious right to militant feminists-misunderstands and misjudges pornography, which she considers a form of fantasy that is an end in itself and not the cause of something else, such as rape. The individual essays deal with a homosexual sadomasochist who made the mistake of discussing his fantasies on the Internet with an undercover cop and was entrapped and sentenced to 33 years in prison; America's fat phobia and how it is reflected in fat pornography; transvestite pornography, focusing on the revealing photographic self-portraits featured in drag publications; and the rise and fall of Larry Flynt and Hustler, with an emphasis on the magazine's populist political philosophy. The disjointed concluding essay, "How to Look at Pornography," tries, unsuccessfully, to pull all this material together, touching along the way on subjects that range from masturbation to Andrea Dworkin's alleged misreading of pornography as a feminist issue to Jeffrey Masson's legal battles with Janet Malcolm and others. Kipnis's individual essays make a stronger case than does her book as a whole, but she is a lively and engaging writer who argues, often convincingly, that we would be better off simply thinking of pornography as just another form of science fiction.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 226 pages
• Publisher: Grove Pr; 1st edition (June 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802115845
• ISBN-13: 978-0802115843
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,595,855 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Laura Kipnis is the author of Against Love: A Polemic and The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability, which have been translated into fifteen languages. She is a professor in the Department of Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University, has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and has contributed to Slate, Harper's, The Nation, and The New York Times Magazine. She lives in New York and Chicago.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An eye-opening, mind-expanding look at "filth", November 25, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (Hardcover)

Kipnis adds her distinctive study to the growing chorus of books by women that have defended and explored pornography dispassionately in the last five years. (See, for example, Nadine Strossen's _Defending Pornography_ and Wendy McElroy's _XXX:A Woman's Right to Pornography_.) Kipnis takes as her jumping-off point the case of a gentle, well-behaved gay man who was given a long jail sentence for responding to fantasy bait concocted by the FBI on the Internet; somehow, discussion (read: Orwellian "thought crime") of sex and murder of children translated to hard time in jail. Mere ideas are NOT innocent in this country, after all. [But why don't we jail authors and fans of murder mysteries and true crime books, or at least TRACK them?) She goes on to study the odd byways of pornography: magazines of nude and copulating fat people, geriatric porn, transvestite pornography. If you've never seen such material and tend to assume it must connect to mental illness and criminality, Kipnis will give you much to think about. Her discussion of the ideology and techniques of Hustler magazine is nothing short of brilliant, even for the men -- and we are legion -- who have always found the magazine disgusting or beneath notice. A welcome addition to the public debate over durdy peek-chures

40 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This is the future of porn studies, June 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (Paperback)

The author of the Kirkus Review (above) states that Kipnis's work would be "more at home at an MLA conference," while at the same time he contends her work is "not likely to inspire the dawning of a new era of pornography studies." But what could signal the dawning of such an era as well as a presentation by Kipnis at an MLA conference? You can't have it both ways, Kirkus.

Besides, Kipnis's essays are not written in the complicated intellectual prose of typical MLA fare. They are very accessible, and due to this fact they were able to open my mind to thinking about pornography in a way I never had before: Why, among all commodities, is porn singled out (as are few others) for specific questions about its moral value and societal worth? And what are the class issues embedded in the porn industry?

Although this chapter strayed a bit from the porn theme, the most enlightening in the piece for me was the chapter on how our culture views fat and fat people. Kipnis talks about cultural taboos and reasons for the demonization of the fat in a way that I've never seen done before. She makes the reader understand why people hate you if you're fat, and why prejudice against fat people is one of the few remaining culturally-sanctioned prejudices, even for the politically-correct, along with classism and prejudice against the mentally ill.

Contrary to Kirkus's view, Kipnis's work is definitely groundbreaking and may lead to further intellectual investigations, into porn, on a level never seen before.