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transgressions. Ironically, even though society has supposedly become more
“permissive” so as to consider this type of interchange between the high and the low as
characteristic of postmodernism, this inclusion has undoubtedly caused the ire of the
many reviewers of the novel such as Alberto Manguel and Roger Rosenblatt, who urged
potential readers to “Snuff this Book.”
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As a pastiche of consumerism, American Psycho mimics the speech of
pornography in order to criticize how consumer culture objectifies human sexuality and
how the public at large embraces this practice by indulging in its various representations,
from suggestive displays of sexual behavior to hardcore porn. Underlining the absence of
emotional content in American Psycho, Murphet observes that the women are paid and
suggests that sex is merely another consumer good in the novel, another product of
capitalist society for which Bateman is the perfect poster-boy. It is to this particular
equation that the entire billion-dollar porn industry owes its success, an industry whose
print media typically enclose accounts of sexual acts that closely resemble those of Ellis’
novel. The Adult Entertainment Industry capitalizes on sexual curiosity and a voyeuristic
tendency called scopophilia, “a sexual drive that manifests itself in a detached, inquiring
gaze (Mulvey 18),” which is a pleasure typically experienced by men through the “male
gaze” by turning women into sexual objects. Although Mulvey’s term was originally
directed towards mainstream cinema it is obviously even more applicable in the case of
pornography. In addition, while pornography is typically marketed to a predominantly
male public, it does not exclude female viewers, who might also be capable of deriving