An intellectually stimulating read for porn fans and critics alike.
A thought-provoking examination of pornography in America.
“Rather than direct readers to a single truth about porn, this book instead challenges the myths that surround pornography itself and the people who have something to say about it,” writes Burke, a sociology professor and author of Christians Under Covers: Evangelicals and Sexual Pleasure on the Internet. From anti-vice activist Anthony Comstock to Inka Winter, the creator of ForPlay Films, “an all-woman porn production company,” the author introduces us to a plethora of interesting characters. Beginning with her own upbringing and difficulties as a “sexual outsider, queer without yet having a label,” Burke discusses the countless debates about what constitutes porn before moving on to evaluate the arguments on both sides. The author ably unravels a broad set of social and political values that the porn debate evokes, especially the moralizing facade of anti-porn arguments: “Antipornography activists suggest that the reason women participate in pornography is that they think it is good for them when actually it is not.” It’s clear that Burke wants readers to understand that sex and pornography go beyond the individual, contending that “the capitalist system provides constraints and opportunities for the internet sex industry and for pornography debates.” She is also thorough in her deconstruction of the way that pro-porn activists deal with racial iconography and violence in porn narratives. The book is well balanced and rigorously researched, featuring dozens of opinions from across the spectrum of debate, and Burke does her best to keep her own biases in check while illustrating her expertise in the topic. “What I observed over five years of research for this book is that fighters in the porn wars do not assume that if they fight hard enough, the other side will wave its white flag in defeat,” she writes. “The porn wars are fought not because either side perceives imminent victory, but because individuals believe it is the right thing to do.”
An intellectually stimulating read for porn fans and critics alike.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-63557-736-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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