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Dr Karen Boyle University of Glasgow

Just as the boundaries between the pornographic and mainstream have eroded in recent years, so too have the boundaries between academic and popular studies of pornography. In the bestseller lists, this boundary-blurring is exemplified by texts such as Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinistic Pigs and Pamela Paul’s Pornified. On the academic side, recent anthologies on pornography - including Porn Studies, More Dirty Looks, Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture - have also been concerned with the boundaries of the pornographic and how the blurring of boundaries has impacted on sexual representation in mainstream media cultures. At the same time, studies of unambiguously pornographic texts have arguably veered away from pornography for heterosexual men to consider alternative representations and there has been a methodological shift towards textual analyses of pornographic texts (and the mainstream texts that mimic them) in academic writing. As a result, some of the big questions that characterised earlier academic engagements with pornography - questions about regulation, production practices and the uses of pornography - have become marginalised.



This paper surveys this context and argues for the political importance of maintaining a distinction between pornography and other forms of sexually explicit media. In doing so, I argue for the (re - )positioning of pornography as a practice of commercial sex as well as an aesthetic practice. Thinking of pornography in relation to commercial sex practices allows us to retain a focus on the demand for pornography not in relation to the “right to access” certain images or representations, but as an issue of commercial exchange where one group of people buy access to the bodies of another group of people for sexual purposes.