Against the claims of increasing sexualisation of culture, one truism is constantly rehearsed – that women have little taste for pornography. In One for the Girls!, a new basis for understanding women’s pleasures in sexually explicit materials is offered focusing on the production and consumption of For Women magazine. This thought-provoking book argues that theories of harm, women’s subordination and accounts of effects or transgressive potentials have deflected attention away from the lived experiences and practices of pornography; drawing on rich empirical detail, One for the Girls!, brings them sharply into view.
The book examines the ways in which pornography has become a favoured repository of social fears and debunks the myth of the ‘evil pornographer’ producing images of objectified women for troubled male viewers. By focusing on an individual publication, this book illuminates the ways in which pornography is a social product and subject to a range of institutional practices which influence its styles and presentations. Significantly this book moves beyond the usual rehearsal of claims about readers’ vulnerability to ideologies hidden in the text and uses readers’ designations of ‘sexy’ and ‘pleasureable’ to underpin an alternative theorisation of pornography. Exploring readers’ responses to nude male pinups, explicit stories and sexy articles, the book traces the patterns of response hidden behind the title ‘porn reader’.
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how and why women might like porn.
Chapter titles
Chapter 1: 'Approches to Pornography'
Page 31
Chapter 2: 'Sex Sells'
Page 51
Chapter 3: 'What Turns Women On?'
Page 69
Chapter 4: 'Creating a Woman's World of Sex'
Page 105
Chapter 5: 'Woman, Sex and the Possibilities of Pleasure'
Page 123
Chapter 6: 'Rauchy Nude Photosets'
Page 155
Chapter 7: 'Emotional Vibrations and Physical Sensations: For Women's Fiction'
Page 189
Reviews
'Clarissa Smith has achieved something special with her new proffering from her masculinities repertoire: One for the Girls! The Pleasures and Practices of Reading Women’s Porn. Smith’s text is groundbreaking, multidisciplinary and equally importantly – extremely readable. It is the last point perhaps that really sets this work apart, as One for the Girls! has a great deal to offer both the specialist academic and the general reader. Clarissa Smith’s accessible style allows readers with little prior knowledge of critical theory, cultural studies or the 1980s pornography debate, to not only understand these discourses, but to develop a strong grasp of their impact in this context.' – Michelle Parslow, Transition Tradition
'A new book, One for the Girls, by Clarissa Smith claims that not all women are repelled by porn. In fact, it's the opposite; women, says Smith, are new consumers' – Metro
'Smith's text undoubtedly attempts to redress the balance – the silence of female consumers of women's pornography – by contemplating such responses within wider contexts of lived experiences, institutional practices and social schemas of production at a specific moment in time in order to attain a broader understanding of the possibilities of pleasure.' – Beth Johnson, Screen
'Smith's work will provide historians with much to think about before approaching pornography and assuming that there are simplistic ways to understand it.' – The Historian
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