Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America

Rating:
Summary: An eye-opening, mind-expanding look at "filth"
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: This is the future of porn studies
Review: 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.