Customer Reviews

Soft Core: Moral Crusades Against Pornography in Britain and America (Sexual Politics)

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You'd have to go a long way to find a better book on the battle over pornography in America and Britain. In an easy to read and witty style, Thompson shows how the current criticisms of pin-up magazines, have an extremely ancient history. Apart from demonstrating - with indisputable evidence - that the vast majority of pornography IS NOT violent, or degrading to women OR men, he gets behind the real complaints. It turns out that even most 'social scientific evidence' hides an ideological agenda: a crusade against sexual diversity. He clearly shows that far from trying to protect women from 'evil men', the moral crusades against pornography are really trying to tell women how to behave. This book is a must for anyone doing term papers on pornography.

There seems to be a plethora of so-called sexual libertarians right now, writing coffee table books about the sexually empowering and liberating effects of pornography and prostitution. Bill Thompson's book is among the cartloads of this bandwagon, and like the rest of those kind, Thompson's book is a reductionistic, conflating, and naive approach to the complex and murky issue of pornography.

Basically, Thompson lists the argument on pornography into two categories: the pro-porns (depicted as transgressive, daring, and liberating) and the anti-porns (with the usual makeovers into religious fundamentalists and feminist zealots - sexually repressive, frigid, and downright puritan). No prize to whom Thompson awards the gold star to. It would've been justificatory if he'd critically engaged with the range of debates, and analyse them in a considerate, objective manner, but Thompson simply lacks the intellectual discipline to sit down and come up with a good argument.

In short, Thompson's book elides into another privileged, middle-classed, bourgeoise interpretation of pornography. And that is what it is with pro-porn movement: an idealised fiction in collaboration with the dominant consumer/commodity culture. And don't even think Thompson has no "moral" to preach in the book. He has one, and that is one of social irresponsibility masquerading as liberation. As if one hasn't saw that line in the sexual revolution movement.