Why It’s Time for the Journal of Porn Studies

The first issue of Porn Studies, an academic journal exploring “pornography, and sexual representations more generally,” has debuted.

The mere fact of its existence, which became public in mid-2013, was occasion for a media event. But the journal’s articles are serious articulations of the intersection between the concerns of media studies and those of pornography. Porn Studies is not a joke, though it seems to provide everyone with some relief to treat it as one.

That’s because so many people look at so much porn: HuffPo noted last year that porn sites get more visitors than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined. And yet the majority of Americans say looking at porn is “wrong.” Porn is a national contradiction baked into the daily ablutions of hundreds of millions of people.

This is a profoundly uncomfortable situation for a nation.

So pornography remains undertheorized. In the public sphere, there are very few serious ideas about what porn is or how it works or what it means to us, beside from the obvious.

Perhaps in the past, it would have been possible to ignore this situation. But the Internet turns out to, basically, be a very efficient porn delivery machine.

“Scholarly interest in pornography has also been driven by technological changes,” write Porn Studies editors and media scholars Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith:

The increasing accessibility provided by various media technologies has opened up the market for pornography, and as a consequence amateur porn has proliferated, alongside a growing range of independent and alternative productions, while pornographies of all kinds have become accessible to a wider range of audiences.

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