At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life FROM THE PUBLISHER
Juffer demonstrates how women's consumption of erotica and porn for their own pleasure can be empowering while simultaneously reinforcing conservative ideals. She shows, for instance, how the Victoria's Secret catalog functions as a kind of pornography whose popularity is enhanced by both its reliance on Victorian themes of secrecy and privacy and by its appeals to the pleasures of modern career women. In her pursuit to understand what women like and how they get it, Juffer delves into adult cable channels, erotic literary anthologies, sex therapy guides, cyberporn, masturbation, and sex toys, showing the degrees to which these materials have been domesticated for home consumption.
FROM THE CRITICS
Booknews
Juffer (women's studies and English, U. of Illinois-Urbana- Champaign) takes a position not of liberation or transgression, but of domestication. She explores how women are bringing sex under their control for their own pleasure in everyday life through such means as women's literary erotica, masturbation discourse, adult cable programming, couples' video porn, cybersex, sex toys for women, lingerie catalogs, and sexual self-help books. Sorry guys, not illustrated. Paper edition (4237-8), $17.95. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.