Customer Reviews

What Makes Pornography "Sexy"? (Thistle series)

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The Pose Workshop starts as an intriguing idea: Take pictures from magazines such as Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, and have men duplicate the poses in them in front of a crowd. The idea is to make men feel the emotions that women run through when they pose. And this book is excellent in the level of detail it goes through to describe how to put on the workshop to achieve optimal results. Unfortunately, I bought the book because I wanted to hear different voices giving their reactions to the experience, and answering the title question. In practice, the title question is never addressed; the closest we get to it is one-sentence sound bites given as typical of people going through the experience. I also think there is a subtle rigging of the workshop to create the desired effect; having a crowd of people shouting out suggestions on how to duplicate a pose is very different from having a photographer (who you've already created some rapport with) make suggestions. I've done some nude photography, and it is nothing like the experience as related in this book. I think the author acted in good faith when writing this book, but I'm not at all sure the results are valid.

As another reviewer noted, this book does little to address the question of the title. What it does do is describe in detail a "workshop" the author designed to offer men a different perspective on pornography. While the author clearly has personal opinions on the impact of pornography, he mostly keeps these to himself, as he says he does in his workshops.

Stoltenberg created a workshop in which men imitate in detail the poses and facial expressions of models in pornographic magazines. Others watch and offer suggestions to accurately reproduce the pose. Participants then take part in a guided discussion to help understand the experience. Stoltenberg says having men assume these poses, and seeing other men do so (instead of women, who we are more accustomed to seeing) almost always brings about an entirely new way of understanding pornography and how it affects both the audience and the models.

This book would be most useful for a person or group planning to run such a workshop themselves, as Stoltenberg lays out in great detail every step of his process. In some ways, this is more a manual of such a workshop than anything else, with added description of the author's own experience of participants' reactions.

I would think that if Stoltenberg wanted his test subjects to really gain empathy with women who pose for erotic pictures he would have paid them. After all, many women who have that livelihood are indeed well paid. I am not surprised that this portion of the context was lost on Stoltenberg. This is a predictable, politically correct take on pornography consistent with standard academic interpretations. Nothing original here, or in any of the author's other works.