This book is great! Unfortunately my last roommate took my copy, so I have to buy it again.

I must disagree with the reader from NY and agree with the one from Boston! After reading and checking the background to this book all information is correct! for example: I found no other pictures on the net! I would strongly recommend this book as a good buy!

I strongly disagree with this arguement, the book is extremely accurate in what it says and very well executed if i may say so! I think a judgement can only be made by an individual and i recommend that it be bought and your opinions put forward!

This book was pretty good as a reference tool, but not that great otherwise.

The cover is a grotesque animation. A woman stands naked and exposed. Her mouth is lipsticked, her nipples enlarged, and she wears stilletos. But her face is crudely etched, and she has no hair. Her head is at an angle so that only eye is visible and the lid is a slit. A man twice her size stands looking at her but with his back to us. He is as hidden as the woman is open. He wears a raincoat, his feet tiny under the bulk of his body, a sign of his small endowment. His nose is overdrawn like the woman's lips and her breast closest to him. His mouth is open but thin-lipped, totally without any sensuality. There is something even apelike, primitive in the roughness of the figures of the sketch. The image is humorless and bleak in it's limited view of sexuality.
This collection of 11 essays aims to create a dialogue between the sexes, but even the introduction recognises that this is not easy given the inherent historically opposing views men and women have on the topic. Men take a classically objective stance to pornography, distancing themselves from involvement, and satisfied by the fantasy. Women are socially constructed to be appalled by pornography, since it's objectification disempowers them. They see the act of sex as expression of love and when love is not represented, it becomes a surrender, as in the way losing their virginity is an act of subjugation. The "cum shot", a moment of climactic liberation for the man, is said to be a psychological return to the passive mother of her milk, which is perhaps pushing the metaphor too far. While most of the essays concentrate on film pornography, a few touch on literature. Mike Woolf reveals that the pseudo-liberation of titles by D H Lawrence and Henry Miller, ironically encages their new sexual expression in obsession/compulsive neurosis. Avis Lewallen finds Angela Carter's revisionist fairy tales equally trapped by stereotypes. And Alison Assiter declares, that romantic Mills and Boon fiction is porn for women, with heroines objectified but with an erotic pleasure that compensates for the patriarchal oppression of their real erotic lives. Anthony Crabbe argues that sex films are made to prevent people (read - men) from "enlarging their sexual horizons". He provides an interesting account of Linda Lovelace, who in her biography admitted that her film career was an extension of her being a prostitute. This may be evidence to support the definition of pornography as the debasement of women, but it denies the notion of pornography as instruction, something which Lovelace's notorious Deep Throat can take credit for. What is interesting is that men are thought to be drawn to sex films as an alternative to actual sex, since they can peak much quicker than women, and a real encounter requires more effort if he aims to satisfy his partner. Maggie Humm questions the limited feminist scope of the male "gaze", claiming that verbal language is ignored. She makes no distinction between porn and mainstream movies, and cites Klute as an example as directed by a man. The voice of Bree, a prostitute, is used to extend the representation of her sexuality in her scenes with a therapist, in Bree's sessions with her clients, and via a tape recording used by the killer. Humm also cites Penthouse's Forum column which allows for greater explicitness than the poses of the magazine's photographs.
Since the authors of these pieces present themselves as staunch intellectuals, probably to ward off the intellectual illegitimacy of their subject, the writing itself tends to the humourless and highbrow. However like any collection of essays, one is able to pick and choose from a variety of voices, even if the conclusions remain disappointingly similar.

The semi-serious comic book fan will already be familiar with much of what is disussed here, especially if they follow the comic-related press. The casual comic reader will find little to put the transition of comics from mere heroic fare into, for a while, gloomy anti-heroism. The "context" of this transition, namely that society itself had become increasingly dark and depressing and violent and that comic literature reflects society, is barely touched upon. The interviews in the back are interesting, however and the book DOES serve as a very basic primer for super-heroics.