I was able to take Professor Soble's class this summer. As I was looking through this book in the University book store several of the chapter headings piqued my interest and I ended up reading the book even before class began. I found his writing to be clear and understandable, even with the occasional discussions of the love/sex life of the those poor confused individuals knows as x and y (I wish them luck in their search for exclusivity, constancy & reciprocity!) He often made his points with humor and even made me laugh out loud at his references to the World Series, things that are waved at the public during Mardi Gras and what provides an interesting distraction from grading exam papers! From Plato & St. Paul to Goldman & Nagel, Professor Soble's book takes the reader through the many questions asked throughout history about the nature of sex and love and does it in such a way that we can all understand it.

Thank you for finally writing a book about the diversity of humans and their sexuality in a clear and positive light!

One of the most peculiar coalitions in social movements is that of radical feminists and conservatives over the issue of pornography. It isn't surprising that conservatives, especially religious ones, don't like depictions of sexual activity, and pornography is not an uppermost issue for most people interested in fair dealing for both sexes. However, in the past few decades, there have been feminist writers, notably Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin (their followers are known as MacDworkinites), who have insisted that pornography dehumanizes women, causes rape and incest, and generally messes up societies. There are First Amendment issues over the matter, of course, which have been well covered by Nadine Strossen of the ACLU in _Defending Pornography_. Alan Soble has written _Pornography, Sex, and Feminism_ (Prometheus Books) which with the intensity of a pit bull's attack demolishes the MacDworkinite arguments against porn. Soble is an academic philosopher who has written several books about sexuality, and his convincing refutation of anti-pornography academic writings is full of footnotes, but it is also full of street-talk and graphic words describing sex and genitalia. Its style is well suited to its subject.

Pornography is dehumanizing, and degrading, say the MacDworkinites. Soble's most striking response is a resounding "So what?" Amusingly, he parades an almost anti-humanist stance. Humans are often ugly and disgusting, so degradation is not much of an issue. Along with this stroke, he goes on to critique the anti-porn arguments in detail, drawing upon his expertise in philosophy (mostly Kant) and upon research he has really done in viewing porn on the Internet, research he chides his antagonists for not doing. They pretend to have some sort of omniscient ability to look into the minds of men who enjoy pornography and to know just what those minds are thinking as they watch it; the viewer always thinks nasty things like "Get her," for instance. Soble demolishes such an argument by first pointing out that pornography comes in so many diverse and unmonolithic forms that to say there is one message involved is a ludicrous oversimplification. Secondly, it is absurd to say that a particular image has one particular message it conveys to all viewers. The MacDworkinites are having none of this complexity, because they have little research that shows what men think about when they see porn. They insist that pornography makes people want to live out what the pornography depicts. They say that viewing pictures in _Playboy_ causes incest. They insist that viewing porn sparks rape, but have not addressed such facts as the failure of the extremely violent pornography produced in Japan to bring on a high incidence of rape in that country (indeed, the incidence is very low).

The insistence that viewing pornography causes bad actions has not been clinically proven, but that does not stop these feminists from knowing that it does. Time and again, Soble takes the conservatives and feminists on for constructing straw man arguments that show sexual naivete' and unwillingness to admit that sexual behavior is not as simple as their pigeonholing would make it seem. They have decided they don't like pornography (and seem to see all sex as having dark and scary issues within it), and having decided this beforehand, they find it easy to make up "facts" and arguments to demonstrate that porn is bad. It is bad reasoning, and denies such pleasure as pornography, and as sex itself, might offer. This sort of view is currently politically popular, and there is plenty of propaganda to promote it. Soble's appropriately vulgar and withering attack, however, shows just how shockingly totalitarian the MacDworkinites' aims are, and how desperately wrongheaded.