Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio State University. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 219-222). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

The  anatomic  human  body  is  increasingly  visible  in  public  culture.  Representations  of  the  body  sourced  from  or  imitative  of  the  images  produced  by  medical  imaging   technology  are  bloodless  depictions  that  highlight  the  body’s  internal  structures  and  elide its viscerality. Despite the deliberate exclusion of the flesh, many of these images are saturated  in  erotic  potential,  both  implicitly  and  explicitly.  These  images  emerge  in  a  culture   preoccupied  with  the  visualization  and  control  of  women’s  bodies  and  sexualities. Feminist  scholars  have  long  been  critical  of  the  ways  in  which  popular  media   constructs  the  body  as  an  object  for  erotic  consumption;;  the  anatomic  images  I  consider   here  go  one  step  further.  The  mainstream  gaze  has  previously  been  limited  to  the  exterior   surfaces  of  the  body,  with  the  penetrating  gaze  into  the  body’s  interior  restricted  to  the   medical  and  legal  establishments.  The  penetrating  gaze  is  increasingly  democratized  as   x-ray  and  other  interior  views  of  the  body  become  more  prevalent.The  texts  under  discussion  in  this  thesis  traverse  the  opaque  barrier  of  the  skin  and  serve  to  construct  the  totality   of  the  human  body  as  an  object  to  be  examined  and  consumed. While  X-­rated  x-­rays  can,  sometimes,  offer  a  potential  site  of  resistance  to  gen-­ dered  surveillance  of  the  anatomic  body,  their  increasing  ubiquity  demonstrates  the   escalation  of  a  dominating  surveillant  regime  intent  on  penetrating  and  controlling  the   anatomic  body.  The  images’  uncritical  public  consumption  provides  an  insidious  route  by which that regime may be normalized, furthered and even glorified. / text

Women work in the adult film industry in a variety of behind-the-scenes occupations and executive roles. Moreover, women can often negotiate the terms of their employment, pay scales have been standardized, and protecting women’s health is conventional practice. As would be expected, women were not always integrated into every level of the adult film industry workplace. This process occurred over time, as it occurred over time in myriad other workplaces; however, unlike many other workplaces, neither advocacy from an external social movement nor activism from workers within the industry itself initiated this integration. With the magnitude of the adult film industry, the apparent integration of women workers, rhetorical assumptions, and scholarly oversights in mind, two core questions are posed in this research. First, have women’s incorporation and opportunities for participation in the United States’ adult film industry changed since the 1950s? Second, has the content of adult films changed since the 1950s? The evidence suggests that women’s labor rights and opportunities have been expanded internally, from the top-down. Company owners, film producers, and powerful industry leaders began expanding women’s rights in response to legal and cultural pressures from regulators and industry-wide structural changes occurring during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this study, I explore the processes responsible for these developments. The central argument is that the historical development of the adult film industry has been shaped by dynamic multidimensional tensions existing between producers, consumers, and regulators. These tensions are partially reflected in the content of key adult films. The historical development of the adult film industry has led to the emergence of a closely interconnected occupational network. This network and what I call “industry protective practices” –endeavors initiated by adult film industry business leaders, owners, and producers that protect both the welfare of workers and the industry itself— operate synergistically and are responsible for the top-down expansion of women workers’ labor rights and opportunities over time. Industry protective practices, including mandatory and centralized HIV/STI testing and the development of a production code itemizing sex depictions to be avoided, tell us much about strategic rights expansion from the top down. / text

The original impetus for this investigation into prostitution comes from an economic inquiry into one form of work performed largely by women. But as a feminist study, this investigation cannot look simply at the economics of prostitution. Prostitution is both work and sex and an analysis must therefore also explore the question of sexuality, and the nature of sexual relations between men and women. This study seeks to offer a conceptual understanding of prostitution, and in particular, to examine the structural determinants of the sex industry. The analysis is couched within a feminist framework, taking cognisance of the theoretical divisions within feminism itself. The study attempts further to examine the question of policies towards prostitution, an issue which has been brought to the fore by the AIDS pandemic. In so doing, it refers to historical examples of state control of the sex market and draws on feminist challenges to such regulation. These challenges have exposed a fundamental contradiction for feminist praxis between the need both to protect and empower women. In exploring the nature and implications of this contradiction, the investigation looks also at the feminist debate around the censorship of pornography, a debate which highlights the kinds of questions feminists must confront when considering the issue of control. An attempt is made to resolve this contradiction by drawing a distinction between short-term and long-term policies towards prostitution. Although the long-term feminist project is the creation of a society where the structural determinants of the sex market have been eliminated, it is argued that this vision ignores the reality of prostitution and the problems faced by those women who work in the sex industry. Prostitution must be legalised to ensure the rights and protection of prostitutes, but these measures must be complemented by policies that challenge the structural basis of prostitution, and the oppression of women in society in general. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1992.

The overall aim of this thesis was to investigate pornography consumption and its relation to sexual experiences, lifestyles, health and perceptions of sexuality and pornography. One qualitative study (focus group discussions) and one prospective longitudinal quantitative study (baseline and follow-up questionnaires) are included. The core category emerging from the focus group discussions, among personnel working with adolescents, was “Conflicting messages about sexuality”. The participants’ stated that the message conveyed by pornography was contradictory to the message conveyed by national public health goals and laws. A professional approach was emphasized, and adequate methods and knowledge to improve sexuality and relationship education were requested (I). Participants at baseline in 2011 were 477 boys and 400 girls, aged 16 years. Almost all boys (96%) and 54% of the girls had watched pornography. The boys were categorized into frequent users (daily), average users (every week or a few times every month) and nonfrequent users (a few times a year, seldom or never) of pornography. A higher proportion of frequent users reported experience of sex with friends, the use of alcohol, a sedentary lifestyle, peer-relationship problems and obesity. One-third watched more pornography than they actually wanted to (II). There were few differences between pornography-consuming girls and boys regarding fantasies about sexual acts, attempted sexual acts inspired by pornography and perceptions of pornography. Predictors for being sexually experienced included: being a girl, attending a vocational high school programme, stating that boys and girls are equally interested in sex, and having a positive perception of pornography. Boys were generally more positive towards pornography than girls (III). Participants at follow-up in 2013 were 224 boys (47%) and 238 girls (60%). Being male, attending a vocational high school programme and being a frequent user of pornography at baseline predicted frequent use at follow-up. Frequent use of pornography at baseline predicted psychosomatic symptoms to a higher extent at follow-up than depressive symptoms (IV). In conclusion, pornography has become a part of everyday life for many adolescents. Frequent users of pornography were mainly boys, and there were minor differences in sexual experiences between the male consumption groups. Frequent use was associated with lifestyle problems, such as the use of alcohol and a sedentary lifestyle to a higher extent than with sexual experiences and physical symptoms. In the longitudinal analyses frequent use of pornography was more associated to psychosomatic symptoms compared with depressive symptoms. Access to pornography will presumably remain unrestrained. It is therefore important to offer adolescents arenas for discussing pornography in order to counterbalance the fictional world presented in pornography, increase awareness regarding the stereotyped gender roles in pornography and address unhealthy lifestyles and ill health among adolescents.

For over forty years, researchers, activists, and policymakers have questioned how, if at all, pornography affects its viewers. Previous research has focused on how pornography relates to many factors including sexual risks, sexual permissiveness, violence, rape myth acceptance, and sexual behaviors. Much of this research, though, has been unable to identify the direction of the relationship between viewing sexually explicit material and various sexual attitudes and behaviors, and rarely studies a sample that is representative of the U.S. adult population. Instead, much of the research on pornography has relied on college student samples or other convenience samples. My study addresses these gaps by exploring a wide range of sexual behaviors and attitudes through surveying a sample of respondents who participate in online survey research panels. By accessing online survey panels, researchers are able to specify the demographics they would like their particular sample to reflect. For this study, a sample has been selected to reflect the U.S. population on age, race, and gender. To better assess the directionality of the relationship between exposure to sexually explicit material and respondents’ sexual behaviors and attitudes, I have included several closed-ended items that may help to better identify the temporal order of these variables. Additionally, I have used open-ended questions to provide a more in-depth account of respondents’ perceptions of pornography and how it relates to their sexual behaviors and relationships. Findings suggest that not only are there correlations between viewing pornography and the sexual acts participants engage in and find arousing, but that the material individuals are exposed to may be shaping their behaviors and attitudes. I discuss the quantitative findings in relation to respondents’ qualitative remarks within the context of sexual scripts theory.

The prevalence of male-centric pornography has been attributed to accepted (heteronormative) notions of gender specific sexual arousal, with men being characterized as visually stimulated and women naturally more aurally and emotionally receptive (cf. Christensen 1990, Faust 1980, Soble 2002). It has been argued that “if women reject the freedom to enjoy pornography and even male cheesecake, it must be because – no matter what permissions society gives us – women do not want it” (Abramson and Pinkerton 1995: 184). As women are not imagined as the intended recipients of these materials, this study was interested in how women connect their use of sexually explicit materials to their sexual biographies in the on-going process of (re)presenting their sexual identities. I wanted to not only explore what women conceptualize as sexually explicit materials and how they make sense of what they are seeing, but how and why these materials are used, the meanings attributed to these materials and the pleasures derived from them. To this end, 26 women between the ages of 25-35 were interviewed, either individually or as part of a focus group. A theoretical analytic, which bridged interactionist accounts of meaning-making and Foucauldian accounts of discourse, discipline and docile bodies, was articulated to account for how pornographic spectatorship is created, maintained and regulated. Regulation and resistance were situated within broader understandings of sexual scripts and governmentality, focusing on the construction (meaning-making) and deconstruction (resistance) of understandings of mainstream/malestream pornography. This research resulted in two interesting outcomes: (a) the redefinition of ‘gaze’ to account for active female spectatorship, as described by the women who participated in this study; and (b) discussion surrounding the ‘ethical use’ of pornographic materials, conceptualized via a governmentality lens. For the women who participated in this study, engaging with sexually explicit materials was not a passive experience. The narratives elicited demonstrate that these women did not merely absorb pornographic representations unquestioningly; they interrogated them, both subconsciously and consciously, brought new meanings to them and understood them through a decidedly female gaze – their own. These findings suggest a disruption to the assumption of female sexual passivity reverberated throughout patriarchal society.

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The increasing importance of pornography since its commercialization at the end of the seventies modified the artistic landscape of sexual representation. What has occurred is a transformation of the horizon of expectations of pornographic images, the definition of eroticism and the relationship between the two notions. In this perspective, the thesis concentrates on the analysis of the appropriation of certain distinct traits of hard core pornography in feminist art. Specifically, it is a qualitative analysis of the interrelations between eroticism and pornography in feminist art during the 1980s. The thesis proceeds to an in-depth analysis of several works by Pipilotti Rist, Annie Sprinkle, and Marlene Dumas as well as adding three earlier works of sexually explicit representation by Carolee Schneemann. The analysis of these works aims to redefine notions of pornography and eroticism, drawing on the work of Linda Williams for the first definition and Georges Bataille for the second. The theoretical context of the thesis, which also turns out to be the historical context of the works, is made up of disciplinary approaches that have most contributed to the debate around eroticism and pornography: art history, philosophy, feminist studies, queer theory, semiology and psychoanalysis. / The thesis makes several conclusions. First, the dynamic between eroticism and pornography does not have to be considered oppositional; the two methods of expression are frequently both represented in the same work. Also, women are no longer uniquely victims of pornography (they are increasingly in the role of pornographic auteure) and the analysis of these works confirms that feminists have appropriated the genre to explore a diversity of female eroticisms and propose a form of feminist, intersubjective pornography. Finally, the use by female artists of syntaxes and features typical of pornography helps to bring about a demand for a more complete and complex female subjectivity which is no longer only political, but also sexual.