SEXUAL IMAGES AND SELLING SEX

SEXUAL IMAGES AND SELLING SEX

EROTIC REPRESENTATIONS IN HISTORY
• By the dawn of the great ancient civilizations such as Egypt,
people were drawing erotic images on walls or pieces of papyrus
just for the sake of eroticism.
• Greece is famous for the erotic art that adorned objects like bowls
and urns.
The Invention of Pornography
• Pornography, which tends to portray sexuality for its own sake, did
not emerge as a distinct category until the middle of the 18th
century.
• Obscenity was illegal among the Puritans because it was an
offense against God.
• Historians of pornography trace the modern pornographic novel
back to Renaissance Italian writer Pietro Aretino (1492-1556).
• The story of pornography is not just about publishing erotic
material but also about the struggle between those who try to
create it and those who try to stop them.
• The term erotica is often used to refer to sexual
representations that are not pornographic, but it means only
that it is considered by a viewer or society as within the
acceptable bounds of decency.

SEXUALITY IN THE MEDIA AND THE ARTS
• Over the last 25 years, representations in the mass
media have become more explicitly erotic.
Erotic Literature: The Power of the Press
• Although the portrayal of sexuality is as old as art
itself, pornography and censorship are more modern
concepts.
• Pornography in the modern sense began to appear
when printing became sophisticated enough to allow
fairly large runs of popular books, beginning in the
16th century.
• Due to fears that people would turn away from
religious teachings, by the 17th century, the Church
pressured civic governments to allow them to inspect
bookstores, and soon forbidden books, including
erotica, were being removed.

The power of the Press continued
• It was the struggle between the illicit market
in sexual art and literature and the forces of
censorship that started what might be called
a pornographic subculture that still thrives
today.
• Although modern debates about pornography
tend to focus more on explicit pictures and
movies, it was the erotic novel that first
established pornographic production as a
business in the Western world, provoking a
response from religious and governmental
authorities.

Television and Film:
Stereotypes, Sex, and the Decency Issue
• In 2003, Sex on TV: Content and Context,
the largest study ever of sexual content on
television was published by the Henry J.
Kaiser Family Foundation.
• Sixty-four percent of all shows included some
sexual content.
• Thirty-three percent were found to include
sexual behaviors.
• Fourteen percent included sexual intercourse
• It is estimated that 15% of shows today with
sexual contact have references to safer sex.

Advertising: Sex Sells and Sells
• In his groundbreaking book Gender
Advertisements, Erving Goffman (1976) used
hundreds of pictures from print advertising to
show how men and women are positioned or
displayed to evoke sexual tension, power
relations, or seduction.
• Research from the 80s and 90s suggested that
gender biases existed in advertising.
Advertising and Portrayals of Sexuality
• a. Sexually explicit advertising has become
more common in the last 30 years.
• b. Some researchers claim that
advertisements have tried to use subliminal
sexuality in advertisements.

PORNOGRAPHY AND THE PUBLIC’S RESPONSE
• The debate over pornography is particularly active today
because pornography has become so widely available.
Court Decisions
• The legal definition of obscenity dates back to the 1868 case
of Regina v. Hicklin in England where the court defined
obscenity as material that tended “to deprave and corrupt
those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.”
• The Hicklin decision permitted the confiscation of obscene
materials due only to their sexual content, which remained the
American standard until the 1930s.
• Court cases in the U.S. have established the 3-part definition
of obscenity.
• It must appeal to the prurient interest
• It must offend contemporary community standards
• It must lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value
• Obscenity laws have been used in the 20th century to control
many fiction and nonfiction books.

Presidential Commissions
• In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson set up a
commission to study “a matter of national
concern”: the impact of pornography on
American society.
• The commission studied four areas:
pornography’s effects, trafficking and distribution
of pornography, legal issues, and positive
approaches to cope with pornography.
• The commission concluded that no reliable
evidence was found to support the idea that
exposure to elicit sexual materials is related to
the development of delinquent or criminal sexual
behavior among youth or adults, so adults should
be able to decide for themselves what they will or
will not read.

More Government Research
• The 1986 Attorney General’s commission
on pornography (the Meese Commission)
• In 1985 President Ronald Reagan set out
to overturn the 1970 ruling on
pornography.
• Those who did not support the
Commission’s positions were treated with
hostility.
• The Meese Commission came to the
opposite conclusion of the 1970 ruling,
dividing pornography into 4 categories:
violent, degrading,
nonviolent/nondegrading, and nudity.
• The reaction was strong and mixed.

The Pornography Debates:
Free Speech and Censorship
• The religious-conservative opposition to
pornography is based on a belief that people have
an inherent human desire to sin and that
pornography reinforces that tendency and so
undermines the family, traditional authority, and
the moral fabric of society.
• The issue of pornography has been divisive among
feminist scholars, splitting them into two general
schools.
• The antipornography feminists, led by Catharine
MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, see pornography as an
assault on women that silences them, reinforces male
dominance, and indirectly encourages sexual and
physical abuse against women.
• The other perspective includes group such as the
Feminist Anticensorship Taskforce and argues that
censorship of sexual materials will eventually be used to
censor such things as feminist writing and gay erotica
and would endanger women’s rights and freedoms of
expression.

Anti-pornography Arguments
• MacKinnon argues that pornography is about power and
cannot be separated from the long history of male domination
of women and that it reinforces women’s second-class
status.
• Andrea Dworkin sees pornography as a central aspect of
male power, which she sees as a long-term strategy to
elevate men to a superior position in society by forcing even
strong women to feign weakness and dependency.
Anticensorship Arguments
• Many critics argue that a restriction against pornography
cannot be separated from a restriction against writing or
pictures that show other oppressed minorities in subordinate
positions.
• Once sexually explicit portrayals are suppressed,
anticensorship advocates argue, so are the portrayals that try
to challenge sexual stereotypes.

Studies on Pornography and Harm
• Societywide Studies
• Correlations that sex offenders have large
amounts of pornography have been used since
the early 19th century to justify attitudes toward
pornography.
• Researchers have found higher rates of rape in
states with the highest circulation of sex
magazines, yet in countries where pornography is
common and/or unregulated there are low rates
of rape relative to the United States.
• One longitudinal research study could find no
increase in rape relative to other crimes in four
countries as the availability of pornography
increased dramatically.

Individual Studies
• While little evidence indicates that
nonviolent, sexually explicit films provoke
antifemale reactions in men, many studies
have shown that violent or degrading
pornography does influence attitudes.
• Other studies show that men’s aggression
tends to increase after seeing any violent
movie, even if it’s not sexual.
What is Harm?
• a. Voices of women are silent in
pornography studies.
• Questions of harm focus on whether
pornography induces sexual violence in
men.

Online Pornography
• Industry is growing and worth approximately $1
billion in 2003.
• Estimated that one-third of all Internet users visit
sexual websites.
• Viewers can be recreational users (enter sites
due to curiosity) at-risk users (those increasingly
drawn to increase usage) compulsive users (who
spend over 11 hours per week engaging in online
sexual activities.
What the Public Thinks About Pornography
• The majority of the general public wants to ban
violent pornography and feels that pornography
can lead to a loss of respect for women, acts of
violence, and rape.
• Research suggests that even people who felt that
pornography had negative effects on others were
opposed to regulating it.

Discussion/Group Questions
1. Have you ever bought a product
because the advertising sold you?
Was sex used to sell it? What made
you want to buy the product?
2. Do you think using pornography is
helpful or harmful in society (at an
adult level)? Why? Why Not?