Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture

Description

Pornification presents an international overview of how pornography - from softcore to hardcore, gay to straight, female to male, black to white - infiltrates and proliferates through our media.Porn is everywhere; from the suggestiveness of music videos to the explicit discussions of popular magazines; from the erotica of advertising to the refashioning of sex acts into art works; from a small garage industry to an internet empire. The media immerses us in the pornographic aesthetic. Now integral to popular culture, porn is part of our everyday lives. Sexual desire is commodified, pornified and the media leads the way. Exploring music videos, alt porn sites, Cosmogirls and Gaydar online forums, H&M's street advertising, retro pin-ups, film and educational sex videos alike, Pornification analyses the transformation of porn in today's media and its impact on our culture.

Susanna Paasonen is research fellow at the Collegium for Advanced Studies at University of Helsinki. She is the author of Figures of Fantasy: Internet, Women and Cyberdiscourse and co-editor of Women and Everyday Uses of the Internet: Agency & Identity. Kaarina Nikunen is postdoctoral researcher at the department of Journalism and Mass Communication Studies and Laura Saarenmaa is researcher in Media Culture, both at the University of Tampere.

What is so fascinating about the book is how our collective experience of pornography and fetishistic porno-chic, now an established part of mainstream culture through advertising, has been orginally shaped by a noticeably small overall number of pornographic films and genres, mostly American but with some European influence, up until the 'porno chic' era of the 1990s. -- Ed St Boniface * Chronicles *