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Porn Studies
edited by Linda Williams
Duke University Press
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The intersection of hard-core porn and postmodern critical theory sounds like the perfect place for a car wreck. While the pleasures of the body and the pleasures of the mind do-- as often as not-- meet in some harmony, the academy (since Plato, anyway) is not the usual trysting place.

But why shouldn't academics take a look at porn and tell us what they see? The serious academic study of pop culture is at least a half-century old, and certainly porn is popular culture-- with the emphasis on "popular." In "Naked Capitalists," a 2001 essay in the New York Times, critic Frank Rich pointed out that porn-- economically speaking-- is the center of American popular culture. Revenues from porn-- videos, DVDs, websites, magazines, toys, cable, in-room hotel rentals-- are between 10 and 14 billion a year-- far greater dollar-wise than what Hollywood produces, and greater than professional football, baseball, and basketball put together. And porn, as many have observed, has driven growth and technological innovation of the internet.

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In Porn Studies, Linda Williams-- professor of film and rhetoric at UC Berkeley-- brings together 16 smart, readable, and provocative essays on a wide range of topics. There's Williams's own "Skin Flicks and the Racial Border: Pornography, Exploitation, and Interracial Lust." Zabet Patterson looks at internet porn in "Going On-Line: Consuming Pornography in the Digital Era," and Nguyen Tan Hoang examines the presentation of Asian ethnicity in "The Resurrection of Brandon Lee: The Making of a Gay Asian American Porn Star."

While the grumpier of porn watchers may just grumble that the purpose of porn is to get the viewer hot and bothered (now, that's a curious phase: why "bothered"?) without involving anything analytical, the reality is that porn can do both. None of these essays ever denies that the intent of porn is to sexually stimulate. In her introduction, Williams describes the reactions of students to a history-of-porn class she taught at University of California, Irvine, in 1994, and how they negotiated revealing/not-revealing their own sexual interests. And, of course, it's impossible to think about porn without admitting, at the very least, that someone, somewhere is being turned on by it.

Open your notebooks, please

So what do we learn here? Despina Kakoudaki's "Pin-up: The American Secret Weapon in World War II" is a fascinating look at the soft-core images of scantily-clad women that proliferated among GIs. Kakoudaki argues-- using examples from the famous Vargas pin-ups in Esquire to "Blitz Wolf," a 1941 Tex Avery animated cartoon about German bombs losing their potency when faced with a pin-up-- that sexy images of women were used in WWII to literally make the fighting man "hard" so that he could battle the enemy. The irony here was that the "hard" fighting man was not supposed to come-- metaphorically-- as that would weaken and deplete him of his manhood. In "The Cultural-Aesthetic Specificities of All-Male Moving-Image Photography" (a terrible title), Rich Cante and Angelo Restrivo take a look at Jack Deveau's famous 1977 porn film A Night at the Adonis and discuss its use of on-site filming (it was made at New York's famous, eponymous porn theater), and how lines of public and private space become blurred. The essays tend to overtly pomo-ish phrases, such as "pornoperformative vocalizations"-- i.e. when some says "fuck me harder" or "suck that big dick." For the most part, however, the writing is accessible and smart.

Nguyen Tan Hoang's "The Resurrection of Brandon Lee" is a model of incisive and ingenious porn criticism. By comparing porn star Brandon Lee to martial arts actor Bruce Lee (as well as his son Brandon Lee, who died during the filming of The Crow and from whom the porn star took his name) Hoang examines recent changes in the images of Asian men in porn and cinema generally. Hoang compares Bruce Lee's tasting his own blood in Enter the Dragon with Brandon Lee tasting his own cum in Asian Persuasion 2 and understands both images as a series of complicated messages about the acceptance and voiding of Asian male identity.

Porn Studies covers a wealth of other issues as well-- the seemingly shifting sexual orientation of Beavis (he keeps having to be reminded by Butthead that he's heterosexual), the sexual imagery in the 1975 Hollywood race-sex shocker Mandingo, the role of "boredom" in porn (as exemplified by Andy Warhol's brilliant Blow Job, which features one long-take of the face of a man getting sucked-off), the homosocial/sexual space that emerged in underground stag films popular in the US from the 1930s to the 1950s. Williams's anthology illuminates images that most of us simply take for granted only as ways to get turned-on and get-off.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com