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Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America
In a book that completely changes the terms of the pornography debate, Laura Kipnis challenges the position that porn perpetuates misogyny and sex crimes. First published in 1996, Bound and Gagged opens with the chilling case of Daniel DePew, a man convicted—in the first computer bulletin board entrapment case—of conspiring to make a snuff film and sentenced to thirty-three years in prison for merely trading kinky fantasies with two undercover cops.
Using this textbook example of social hysteria as a springboard, Kipnis argues that criminalizing fantasy—even perverse and unacceptable fantasy—has dire social consequences. Exploring the entire spectrum of pornography, she declares that porn isn’t just about gender and that fantasy doesn’t necessarily constitute intent. She reveals Larry Flynt’s Hustler to be one of the most politically outspoken and class-antagonistic magazine in the country and shows how fetishes such as fat admiration challenge our aesthetic prejudices and socially sanctioned disgust. Kipnis demonstrates that the porn industry—whose multibillion-dollar annual revenues rival those of the three major television networks combined—know precisely how to tap into our culture’s deepest anxieties and desires, and that this knowledge, more than all the naked bodies, is what guarantees its vast popularity.
Bound and Gagged challenges our most basic assumptions about America’s relationship with pornography and questions what the calls to eliminate it are really attempting to protect.
Using this textbook example of social hysteria as a springboard, Kipnis argues that criminalizing fantasy—even perverse and unacceptable fantasy—has dire social consequences. Exploring the entire spectrum of pornography, she declares that porn isn’t just about gender and that fantasy doesn’t necessarily constitute intent. She reveals Larry Flynt’s Hustler to be one of the most politically outspoken and class-antagonistic magazine in the country and shows how fetishes such as fat admiration challenge our aesthetic prejudices and socially sanctioned disgust. Kipnis demonstrates that the porn industry—whose multibillion-dollar annual revenues rival those of the three major television networks combined—know precisely how to tap into our culture’s deepest anxieties and desires, and that this knowledge, more than all the naked bodies, is what guarantees its vast popularity.
Bound and Gagged challenges our most basic assumptions about America’s relationship with pornography and questions what the calls to eliminate it are really attempting to protect.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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993 people want to read
About the author
Laura Kipnis
15 books179 followersLaura Kipnis is the author of Against Love: A Polemic; How to Become A Scandal; The Female Thing; Bound and Gagged; and the upcoming Men: Notes from an Ongoing Observation (out in November). Her books have been translated into fifteen languages. She's written essays and criticism for Slate, Harper’s, Playboy, New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, and Bookforum. A former filmmaker, she teaches filmmaking at Northwestern University. She lives in Chicago and New York.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
February 26, 2019
Porn – like sci-fi or romance or any other kind of speculative art – is something I generally consider to be an imaginative and mind-expanding and positive thing, and a more interesting one than most since it upsets people and therefore touches on deep-seated subjects that we find hard to talk about. Plus, it's hot.
This book appeals to my own prejudices on the subject, so I suppose you, and I, should treat my positive assessment of it with caution until we can find a way of being objective about this most subjective of subjects. I have already said pretty much everything I can say about my own attitudes to porn in this review; suffice to add that now, rather than referring people there for my opinion, I can refer them to this book instead.
What makes Kipnis's analysis so good, I think, is firstly that she cuts through the outrage to provide an excellent summary of the problems that porn raises, and secondly that she is so alert to the class divisions that lurk beneath how it's discussed. Her consideration of what motivates porn will, perhaps, be too Freudian for some readers, but at least she is taking the psychology seriously, which is more than you can say for most commentators.
Her case studies (fat porn, Hustler magazine, transgender selfies, and a case in which a man was sentenced to 33 years in prison for swapping paedophilic murder fantasies with FBI agents) approach the subject via some of its most extreme manifestations. I found some of these more revealing than others, but Kipnis always comes back to the same points – that porn is forever challenging traditional ideas of sex and gender, and that whatever its intentions it ends up functioning ‘in essence, [as] an oppositional political form’.
If that sounds a bit grandiose, it's really not – it's just what happens when you apply the bare minimum thought and analysis to something that doesn't usually get any at all. Except from its critics – who, as Kipnis puts it, ‘seem universally overcome by a leaden, stultifying literalness, apparently never having heard of metaphor, irony, a symbol—even fantasy seems too challenging a concept’.
Numerous divisons loom over the whole subject: one can't help picturing these critics as middle-class women, just as one pictures the average porn consumer as a working-class man. Kipnis tackles these issues head-on. And she doesn't neglect the very real offence that pornographic images and jokes can cause to, especially, women – but, she suggests, this offence only kicks in ‘insofar as there are differing levels of sexual inhibition between at least some men and some women’.
In this way, Kipnis zeroes in on what to me is the central, most challenging issue of porn – the way it highlights ‘the even thornier question of the origins of sexual differences between men and women’. In doing so, she sidesteps sexual violence altogether, as a kind of red herring:
Kipnis wants to examine what it means to be offended by porn, when that offence is detached from questions of actual safety. In her analysis, it often comes down to a ‘transgression against something most of us feel quite deeply (although may not be able to articulate on the spot)—the expectation of a natural equivalence between sex and gender’. The terminology in which she couches this idea is a little dated, I think, but later in the book she goes into the point in more detail:
Which is not to say (I hasten to add) that ‘feminism’ is some kind of target in the book as a whole – Kipnis naturally identifies as a feminist herself, and offers her arguments in a spirit of intra-feminist discussion. I suppose some of what she says will probably appeal to anti-feminists too, but that is the strange-bedfellow nature of porn – in the same way that antiporn activism somehow unites radical feminists with cultural conservatives. This is one of the reasons that it seems so very interesting to me.
At any rate, the obvious caveat for a modern reader is that all this was written in 1996, before internet porn became a thing, and when reading it you are constantly re-examining her arguments in the light of the modern proliferation that the genre has undergone. I half-expected to find much of it about as useful as someone writing about Edwardian peep-shows; actually, though, most of it still seemed surprisingly relevant, although occasionally she seems unnecessarily forceful just because some of the arguments she's making have now moved much closer to the mainstream than they were when she made them.
Of all the stuff I've read about porn (not a very big list, admittedly), this is definitely the book that thinks hardest about why it's such a challenging genre, and for that reason, despite its age, I'd recommend it to anyone regardless of where they stand on the subject. My problem with a lot of people who write about porn is that they take it literally but not seriously. Kipnis takes it seriously but not literally, which is infinitely more productive and revealing.
This book appeals to my own prejudices on the subject, so I suppose you, and I, should treat my positive assessment of it with caution until we can find a way of being objective about this most subjective of subjects. I have already said pretty much everything I can say about my own attitudes to porn in this review; suffice to add that now, rather than referring people there for my opinion, I can refer them to this book instead.
What makes Kipnis's analysis so good, I think, is firstly that she cuts through the outrage to provide an excellent summary of the problems that porn raises, and secondly that she is so alert to the class divisions that lurk beneath how it's discussed. Her consideration of what motivates porn will, perhaps, be too Freudian for some readers, but at least she is taking the psychology seriously, which is more than you can say for most commentators.
Her case studies (fat porn, Hustler magazine, transgender selfies, and a case in which a man was sentenced to 33 years in prison for swapping paedophilic murder fantasies with FBI agents) approach the subject via some of its most extreme manifestations. I found some of these more revealing than others, but Kipnis always comes back to the same points – that porn is forever challenging traditional ideas of sex and gender, and that whatever its intentions it ends up functioning ‘in essence, [as] an oppositional political form’.
If that sounds a bit grandiose, it's really not – it's just what happens when you apply the bare minimum thought and analysis to something that doesn't usually get any at all. Except from its critics – who, as Kipnis puts it, ‘seem universally overcome by a leaden, stultifying literalness, apparently never having heard of metaphor, irony, a symbol—even fantasy seems too challenging a concept’.
Numerous divisons loom over the whole subject: one can't help picturing these critics as middle-class women, just as one pictures the average porn consumer as a working-class man. Kipnis tackles these issues head-on. And she doesn't neglect the very real offence that pornographic images and jokes can cause to, especially, women – but, she suggests, this offence only kicks in ‘insofar as there are differing levels of sexual inhibition between at least some men and some women’.
So a woman's discomfort at the dirty joke, and by extension, at pornography, is actually twofold. There's her discomfort at the intended violation, at being assailed, as Freud puts it, “with the part of the body or the procedure in question.” But at the same time, what she's assailed with is the fact of her own repression (which isn't inborn or natural, according to Freud and Hustler, but acquired). Pornography's net effect (and perhaps its intent) is to unsettle a woman in her subjectivity, to point out that any “naturalness” of female sexuality and subjectivity of the sort that [Robin] Morgan and many other feminists propagate isn't nature at all, but culture: part of the woman's own long-buried prehistory.
In this way, Kipnis zeroes in on what to me is the central, most challenging issue of porn – the way it highlights ‘the even thornier question of the origins of sexual differences between men and women’. In doing so, she sidesteps sexual violence altogether, as a kind of red herring:
Given the pervasiveness of real violence against women, it's understandable to want to pin it on something so easily at hand as sexual representation. But this mistakes being offended for being endangered, and they're not the same thing.
Kipnis wants to examine what it means to be offended by porn, when that offence is detached from questions of actual safety. In her analysis, it often comes down to a ‘transgression against something most of us feel quite deeply (although may not be able to articulate on the spot)—the expectation of a natural equivalence between sex and gender’. The terminology in which she couches this idea is a little dated, I think, but later in the book she goes into the point in more detail:
[T]he problem most women have who don't like porn is that they don't recognize the female characters in it as “like me”—either physically, or in their desires. These big-breasted porno bimbos want to have sex all the time, with any guy no matter how disgusting, will do anything, moan like they like it, and aren't repulsed by male body fluids—in fact, adore them—wherever they land. Women who dislike porn refer to this as a male fantasy, but what exactly is it a fantasy about? Well, it seems like a fantasy of a one-gender world, a world in which male and female sexuality is completely commensurable, as opposed to whatever sexual incompatibilities actually exist.
Heterosexual pornography creates a fantastical world composed of two sexes but one gender, and that one gender looks a lot more like what we think of (perhaps stereotypically) as “male.” Pornography's premise is this: What would a world in which men and women were sexually alike look like? (The romance industry proposes a similar hypothesis in reverse: What would the world look like if men were emotionally and romantically compatible with women?) So pornography's fantasy is also of gender malleability, although one in which it's women who should be the malleable ones. Whereas feminism's (and romance fiction's) paradigm of gender malleability is mostly that men should change.
Which is not to say (I hasten to add) that ‘feminism’ is some kind of target in the book as a whole – Kipnis naturally identifies as a feminist herself, and offers her arguments in a spirit of intra-feminist discussion. I suppose some of what she says will probably appeal to anti-feminists too, but that is the strange-bedfellow nature of porn – in the same way that antiporn activism somehow unites radical feminists with cultural conservatives. This is one of the reasons that it seems so very interesting to me.
At any rate, the obvious caveat for a modern reader is that all this was written in 1996, before internet porn became a thing, and when reading it you are constantly re-examining her arguments in the light of the modern proliferation that the genre has undergone. I half-expected to find much of it about as useful as someone writing about Edwardian peep-shows; actually, though, most of it still seemed surprisingly relevant, although occasionally she seems unnecessarily forceful just because some of the arguments she's making have now moved much closer to the mainstream than they were when she made them.
Of all the stuff I've read about porn (not a very big list, admittedly), this is definitely the book that thinks hardest about why it's such a challenging genre, and for that reason, despite its age, I'd recommend it to anyone regardless of where they stand on the subject. My problem with a lot of people who write about porn is that they take it literally but not seriously. Kipnis takes it seriously but not literally, which is infinitely more productive and revealing.
May 23, 2022
Laura Kipnis likes to pop the hood on culture and examine it carefully to find out why we act as we do. What hides beneath our behavior, driving it? What are we really achieving when we follow norms and what do we discover about ourselves when we flout them?
With her fluid writing style, she takes on pornography, the thing that is universally condemned and universally consumed and so is the perfect subject for analysis regarding the psyche.
She starts with a case of FBI entrapment. Two men are enticed by FBI agents to conspire to abduct, sexually abuse and then murder a child. No child is abducted, molested or killed, it is all about getting two people (necessary for a conspiracy) to make plans to do so. Execution of the plan is not needed. Even though one of the two men repeatedly fails to show up for planning meetings and the other even says he doesn't want to go through with it when the planning has advanced, a jury is so repulsed by the situation that it has no problem with convicting one of the men and a judge has no problem with sentencing that man to 30 years in prison. No victim, no criminal act, 30 years.
Kipnis relates the sex life of the man sent to prison. He is gay and looks for domination and humiliation in sex which he admits has much to do with a father that did not treat him as he felt a father should.
Thus the door to psychiatry is opened with all of the more or less conscious or unconscious motivations that have so much to do with what pleases or offends regarding sex. Pornography permits vicarious experience without penalty or exposure of the drives that few dare to openly expose with another person but can safely let go in private.
Kipnis quite logically takes on Larry Flynt (d. 2021) and his pornographic magazine, Hustler, designed to push against good taste through articles and pictorials that delight in offending anyone and everyone, but particularly the powerful. Hustler was a kind of Mad Magazine with no restraints that raised a storm of criticism while selling well.
We are told that censorship is a bad thing, that while there are examples of pornography that are demeaning and abusive, it is a window on our inner selves that contains truths worth examining that cannot be easily seen in any other way but psychiatry. It is a low class art form serving up an aesthetic for the common people what expensive high art (concerts, opera, etc.) does for the wealthy. It is a largely harmless pleasure for the multitude with little evidence that what is experienced vicariously will stimulate those who partake to try to make the scenarios real.
Above all, Laura Kipnis wants the reader to understand that pornography is far from meaningless obscenity. As something that appeals to our sex drive and our fantasies, which are inseparable, it speaks to us at a deep level if we are willing to look. It is also a great equalizer where no body type or preference is excluded.
A visit to the pornhub site where free pornography is on offer will confirm this variety with dozens of categories, some of which are bound to repulse any person, but some of which will attract the same person. Nobody (pun intended) can be unaffected. The real danger is addiction. Just as alcohol and tobacco can ruin a person, so can pornography steal too much of one's life. And, as a coworker of mine said many years ago upon seeing a copy of Playboy, "why should I look at perfect bodies when I am married to a particular person with whom I intend to spend my life"? A question for him might be whether viewing pornography would have anything to do with thoughts of a partner with a perfect body.
What need is being met with pornography? Is there a more productive and rewarding way to meet the need? Freud told us of sublimation, the libido being re-directed productively but often inadequately by refusing to admit a place for sex. The Church always denounced sex for squandering what should be a spiritual approach to God with lowly bodily satisfaction. The author of this book would hope that each of us will not condemn pornography, but coolly ask ourselves, not in shame, what pornography does for us.
Interestingly, this book is not held by any of the local libraries where I checked for it. I had to go to the Chicago Public Library to check out their solitary copy. Could it be that even as pornography takes up a very large part of Internet bandwidth, for the reading public it is considered too hot to handle? Being very informative and far from prurient, it shouldn't be.
With her fluid writing style, she takes on pornography, the thing that is universally condemned and universally consumed and so is the perfect subject for analysis regarding the psyche.
She starts with a case of FBI entrapment. Two men are enticed by FBI agents to conspire to abduct, sexually abuse and then murder a child. No child is abducted, molested or killed, it is all about getting two people (necessary for a conspiracy) to make plans to do so. Execution of the plan is not needed. Even though one of the two men repeatedly fails to show up for planning meetings and the other even says he doesn't want to go through with it when the planning has advanced, a jury is so repulsed by the situation that it has no problem with convicting one of the men and a judge has no problem with sentencing that man to 30 years in prison. No victim, no criminal act, 30 years.
Kipnis relates the sex life of the man sent to prison. He is gay and looks for domination and humiliation in sex which he admits has much to do with a father that did not treat him as he felt a father should.
Thus the door to psychiatry is opened with all of the more or less conscious or unconscious motivations that have so much to do with what pleases or offends regarding sex. Pornography permits vicarious experience without penalty or exposure of the drives that few dare to openly expose with another person but can safely let go in private.
Kipnis quite logically takes on Larry Flynt (d. 2021) and his pornographic magazine, Hustler, designed to push against good taste through articles and pictorials that delight in offending anyone and everyone, but particularly the powerful. Hustler was a kind of Mad Magazine with no restraints that raised a storm of criticism while selling well.
We are told that censorship is a bad thing, that while there are examples of pornography that are demeaning and abusive, it is a window on our inner selves that contains truths worth examining that cannot be easily seen in any other way but psychiatry. It is a low class art form serving up an aesthetic for the common people what expensive high art (concerts, opera, etc.) does for the wealthy. It is a largely harmless pleasure for the multitude with little evidence that what is experienced vicariously will stimulate those who partake to try to make the scenarios real.
Above all, Laura Kipnis wants the reader to understand that pornography is far from meaningless obscenity. As something that appeals to our sex drive and our fantasies, which are inseparable, it speaks to us at a deep level if we are willing to look. It is also a great equalizer where no body type or preference is excluded.
A visit to the pornhub site where free pornography is on offer will confirm this variety with dozens of categories, some of which are bound to repulse any person, but some of which will attract the same person. Nobody (pun intended) can be unaffected. The real danger is addiction. Just as alcohol and tobacco can ruin a person, so can pornography steal too much of one's life. And, as a coworker of mine said many years ago upon seeing a copy of Playboy, "why should I look at perfect bodies when I am married to a particular person with whom I intend to spend my life"? A question for him might be whether viewing pornography would have anything to do with thoughts of a partner with a perfect body.
What need is being met with pornography? Is there a more productive and rewarding way to meet the need? Freud told us of sublimation, the libido being re-directed productively but often inadequately by refusing to admit a place for sex. The Church always denounced sex for squandering what should be a spiritual approach to God with lowly bodily satisfaction. The author of this book would hope that each of us will not condemn pornography, but coolly ask ourselves, not in shame, what pornography does for us.
Interestingly, this book is not held by any of the local libraries where I checked for it. I had to go to the Chicago Public Library to check out their solitary copy. Could it be that even as pornography takes up a very large part of Internet bandwidth, for the reading public it is considered too hot to handle? Being very informative and far from prurient, it shouldn't be.
May 31, 2014
I want to give this 6 stars. Easily the best thing I've read so far on the politics of pornography - and it's about so much more as well. It's a smart, nuanced exploration of both the power and fear of erotic fantasy in contemporary society:
Through close readings of pornographic magazines, films and texts - from Hustler to Guys in Gowns, Jumbo Jezebel, and Strictly Spanking, and regular digressions into cultural theory, anthropology, psychoanalytic theory and politics, politics, politics, Kipnis draws out some of those questions and shines a fresh light on what underlies our fascination with and fear of pornography.
The opening chapter is a harrowing account of how Daniel DePew, a young man involved in the gay S&M scene, ended up imprisoned for 33 years in a case "permeated at all levels" with fantasy. This chapter is confronting, disturbing and demonstrates how high the stakes go when considering the morality, legality and political acceptability of erotic fantasy. It also introduces certain themes and ideas that will resonate throughout the following chapters, which explore various pornographic subcultures, ideas of taste and aesthetics, body politics, gender, class and social hierarchy.
In addressing anti-porn campaigns, Kipnis sidesteps the usual pro- and anti- rhetorical strategies and instead explores the cultural, historical and political contexts in which such campaigns take place, teasing out obsessions with purity and pollution, innocence and corruption, gender identity and transgression, class hierarchies and propriety, taste and disgust that inform them. In the process, she takes such campaigns - and their rhetorical strategies - apart far more effectively than anything else I've read.
In the end, it's hard to dispute her argument that even offensive pornography can be worthy of serious (non-censorial) attention:
Reading this book 18 years after it was first published, I found myself thinking its relevance has grown, as debates about the destructive (or not) effects of pornography have spread to encompass all of popular culture. Arguments about sexualisation, misogyny, violence, racism and offensive or upsetting content rage across social media, the news media and academia. I myself have felt and expressed deep concerns over all of these things in the context of the comics industry, and I'm sure I'll continue to be involved in those conversations. But Kipnis' analysis forces me to think more deeply about what underlies my concerns, what really bothers me about certain narratives and fantasies, and whether even deeply offensive fantasies can have social and personal value:
It's a testament to the power of Bound and Gagged that it not only confirms and enriches views I already held (about the anti-porn movement, for example), it also disrupts political positions in which I had felt quite secure. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time (I read a library copy, but now I'm going to have to buy my own, so I can re-read it with plenty of underlining and marginal notes).
VERY highly recommended.
"This book means to offer a different footing for debates about pornography. Its position is that the differences between pornography and other forms of culture are less meaningful than their similarities. Pornography is a form of cultural expression, and though it's transgressive, disruptive, and hits below the belt - in more ways than one - it's an essential form of contemporary national culture. It's also a genre devoted to fantasy, and its fantasies traverse a range of motifs beyond the strictly sexual. Sex is pornography's vehicle, and also its mode of distraction, but coursing through pornography's dimly lit corridors are far larger issues. Abandon your prejudices about what kind of language is appropriate to serious philosophical inquiry, and you can see that within the staged, mythic world of pornography a number of philosophical questions are posed, though couched in a low idiom: questions concerning the social compact and the price of repression, questions about what men are (and aren't), what women are (and aren't), questions about how sexuality and gender roles are performed, about class, aesthetics, utopia, rebellion, power, desire, and commodification."
Through close readings of pornographic magazines, films and texts - from Hustler to Guys in Gowns, Jumbo Jezebel, and Strictly Spanking, and regular digressions into cultural theory, anthropology, psychoanalytic theory and politics, politics, politics, Kipnis draws out some of those questions and shines a fresh light on what underlies our fascination with and fear of pornography.
The opening chapter is a harrowing account of how Daniel DePew, a young man involved in the gay S&M scene, ended up imprisoned for 33 years in a case "permeated at all levels" with fantasy. This chapter is confronting, disturbing and demonstrates how high the stakes go when considering the morality, legality and political acceptability of erotic fantasy. It also introduces certain themes and ideas that will resonate throughout the following chapters, which explore various pornographic subcultures, ideas of taste and aesthetics, body politics, gender, class and social hierarchy.
In addressing anti-porn campaigns, Kipnis sidesteps the usual pro- and anti- rhetorical strategies and instead explores the cultural, historical and political contexts in which such campaigns take place, teasing out obsessions with purity and pollution, innocence and corruption, gender identity and transgression, class hierarchies and propriety, taste and disgust that inform them. In the process, she takes such campaigns - and their rhetorical strategies - apart far more effectively than anything else I've read.
In the end, it's hard to dispute her argument that even offensive pornography can be worthy of serious (non-censorial) attention:
"Despite whatever chagrin it may induce, offended parties (male and female) might want to reconceptualize pornography's offenses as a form of social knowledge. These offenses have eloquence. They have social meaning."
Reading this book 18 years after it was first published, I found myself thinking its relevance has grown, as debates about the destructive (or not) effects of pornography have spread to encompass all of popular culture. Arguments about sexualisation, misogyny, violence, racism and offensive or upsetting content rage across social media, the news media and academia. I myself have felt and expressed deep concerns over all of these things in the context of the comics industry, and I'm sure I'll continue to be involved in those conversations. But Kipnis' analysis forces me to think more deeply about what underlies my concerns, what really bothers me about certain narratives and fantasies, and whether even deeply offensive fantasies can have social and personal value:
"Preserving an enclave for fantasy is an important political project for the following reason: pornography provides a forum to engage with a realm of contents and materials exiled from public view and from the dominant culture, and this may indeed encompass unacceptable, improper, transgressive contents, including, at times, staples of the unconscious like violence, misogyny, or racism. But at the same time, within this realm of transgression, there's the freedom, displaced from the social world of limits and proprieties, to indulge in a range of longings and desires without regard to the appropriateness and propriety of those desires, and without regard to social limits on resources, object choices, perversity, or on the anarchy of the imagination."
It's a testament to the power of Bound and Gagged that it not only confirms and enriches views I already held (about the anti-porn movement, for example), it also disrupts political positions in which I had felt quite secure. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time (I read a library copy, but now I'm going to have to buy my own, so I can re-read it with plenty of underlining and marginal notes).
VERY highly recommended.
April 30, 2017
Excellent book – very accessible and engaging. Kipnis wants us to think about pornography not in terms of good/bad; instead she wants us to think about the larger questions and implications that pornography and taboos inspire. Instead of looking at culturally-sanctioned fantasies (examples: heterosexual rape fantasies, Playboy magazine ilk, straight porn), she analyzes the non-sanctioned varieties, which become taboo, highly regulated, and generally despised (examples include fat porn, transvestite porn, low-class porn like Hustler magazine). She argues that by looking carefully at how we police, legislate, and regulate sex we can learn quite a bit about our culture – our power structures, gender designations, and so forth. Interesting stuff.
June 13, 2011
After my disappointing experiences with Against Love and How to Become a Scandal, I was about ready to give up on Laura Kipnis. As you may recall, those were both freakin' awesome ideas for a book that, in Kipnis' capable hands, turned into interesting first chapters followed by hundreds of pages of pretty obvious observations delivered in prose that was annoyingly clever. This book, in contrast,is freakin' awesome start to finish. Long story short, she considers porn as a cultural production and interprets it in that light. Turns out there's quite a bit to say. Highly recommended.
September 2, 2013
Though it seems like many authors and academics are critically focusing on pornography nowadays, Laura Kipnis' work is one of the most interesting and influential: Rather than look at media technologies in relation to pornography (like Patchen Barss), or the symbolism behind particular codes of pornography (Berkeley Kaite), Kipnis considers the role pornography has in society in terms of its relation to culture. Kipnis' collection of essays are hardly disjointed: as she skips from S&M to cross-dressing to Hustler Magazine, she underscores her arguments with enough consistencies that makes this a great read from start to finish. My personal favorite chapters are chapters One (The Politics of Fantasy) and Four (Disgust and Desire: Reading Hustler Magazine). This is a great read for those who enjoy a case study analysis in the realm of cultural studies and psychoanalysis. Highly recommended.
December 29, 2016
“But probably here, more so than in polite culture—that is, more than in those versions of culture willing to relegate themselves to forms of ‘moral etiquette’—you have to be willing to squint, appraise, discern, turn it on its side, and then not run screaming from the room when, in response, it kicks you were it hurts: in your aesthetics.” (92)
Fascinating look not necessarily at pornography but at the intersection of reality/fantasy/intent. Definitely essential reading for anyone who’s working on the subject or anything even tangentially related. Pornography as repository of social meaning is a fantastic concept, and one that is expertly examined here.
Fascinating look not necessarily at pornography but at the intersection of reality/fantasy/intent. Definitely essential reading for anyone who’s working on the subject or anything even tangentially related. Pornography as repository of social meaning is a fantastic concept, and one that is expertly examined here.
March 16, 2007
The poor, repressed, emasculated, frustrated American male!
April 15, 2017
Laura Kipnis's 1996 book is probably the best analysis I've encountered of sex and pornography because it takes class and psychoanalysis seriously. She taken on culturally significant events, but looks closely at the side of the traditional villains (a man in jail for conspiracy to kidnap, film and then kill a child; Hustler magazine; pornography) to show how society's strong disavowal of them can be seen as a desperate attempt to keep our shared psychic uncertainties at bay. Here are two samples:
Sample #1:
"According to Bourdieu, artistic competence and the "aesthetic disposition" get produced via what he refers to as "educational capital"-itself a mechanism for enforcing class distinctions. So, inherent in these categorical distinctions between art and pornography are the class divisions that a distinctively high art works to maintain.
If the categorical distinctions between art and pornography come down to issues of sublimation, including the class imperatives to produce it, the problem with pornography is simply its failure to translate one set of contents into another. The problem seems to be that it produces a body of images that are too blatantly out of the unconscious, too unaesthetically written in the language of obsession, compulsion, perversion, infantile desires, rage, fear, pain, and misogyny. Too literally about sex and power rather than their aesthetically coded forms, as in the works of any number of well-respected artists and writers whose work dwells on similar themes. Too potent for art."
Sample #2:
"But the problem most women have who don't like porn is that they don't recognize the female characters in it as "like me"-either physically, or in their desires. These big-breasted porno bimbos want to have sex all the time, with any guy no matter how disgusting, will do anything, moan like they like it, and aren't repulsed by male body fluids-in fact, adore them-wherever they land. Women who dislike porn refer to this as a male fantasy, but what exactly is it a fantasy about? Well, it seems like a fantasy of a one-gender world, a world in which male and female sexuality is completely commensurable, as opposed to whatever sexual incompatibilities actually exist.
Heterosexual pornography creates a fantastical world composed of two sexes but one gender, and that one gender looks a lot more like what we think of (perhaps stereotypically) as "male." Pornography's premise is this: What would a world in which men and women were sexually alike look like? (The romance industry proposes a similar hypothesis in reverse: What would the world look like if men were emotionally and romantically compatible with women?) So pornography's fantasy is also of gender malleability, although one in which it's women who should be the malleable ones. Whereas feminism's (and romance fiction's) paradigm of gender malleability is mostly that men should change. It's possible that the women who are most offended by pornography are those most invested in the idea of femininity as something static and stable, as something inborn that inheres within us. ("Women are like this, men are like that.")
Of course one reason that women, and particularly feminists, have a hard time either enjoying pornography as an interesting gender fantasy, or dismissing it as a harmless gender fantasy, is our worry that in a world in which men have more social power than women, men have the power to force their fantasy of a one-gender world onto unwilling women, who have their own ideas about how female sexuality should feel. But is pornography proffered (and enjoyed) as a form of propaganda? And if you think so, why presume that pornography alone, among the vast range of cultural forms, works as indoctrination, whereas every other popular genre is understood as inhabiting the realm of fiction, entertainment, even ideas, not as having megalomaniacal ambitions to transform the world into itself? We don't spend a lot of time worrying that viewers of pro wrestling will suddenly be seized with some all-consuming impulse to wrestle innocent passersby to the ground. On what grounds are such megalomaniacal intentions imputed to pornography?"
Sample #1:
"According to Bourdieu, artistic competence and the "aesthetic disposition" get produced via what he refers to as "educational capital"-itself a mechanism for enforcing class distinctions. So, inherent in these categorical distinctions between art and pornography are the class divisions that a distinctively high art works to maintain.
If the categorical distinctions between art and pornography come down to issues of sublimation, including the class imperatives to produce it, the problem with pornography is simply its failure to translate one set of contents into another. The problem seems to be that it produces a body of images that are too blatantly out of the unconscious, too unaesthetically written in the language of obsession, compulsion, perversion, infantile desires, rage, fear, pain, and misogyny. Too literally about sex and power rather than their aesthetically coded forms, as in the works of any number of well-respected artists and writers whose work dwells on similar themes. Too potent for art."
Sample #2:
"But the problem most women have who don't like porn is that they don't recognize the female characters in it as "like me"-either physically, or in their desires. These big-breasted porno bimbos want to have sex all the time, with any guy no matter how disgusting, will do anything, moan like they like it, and aren't repulsed by male body fluids-in fact, adore them-wherever they land. Women who dislike porn refer to this as a male fantasy, but what exactly is it a fantasy about? Well, it seems like a fantasy of a one-gender world, a world in which male and female sexuality is completely commensurable, as opposed to whatever sexual incompatibilities actually exist.
Heterosexual pornography creates a fantastical world composed of two sexes but one gender, and that one gender looks a lot more like what we think of (perhaps stereotypically) as "male." Pornography's premise is this: What would a world in which men and women were sexually alike look like? (The romance industry proposes a similar hypothesis in reverse: What would the world look like if men were emotionally and romantically compatible with women?) So pornography's fantasy is also of gender malleability, although one in which it's women who should be the malleable ones. Whereas feminism's (and romance fiction's) paradigm of gender malleability is mostly that men should change. It's possible that the women who are most offended by pornography are those most invested in the idea of femininity as something static and stable, as something inborn that inheres within us. ("Women are like this, men are like that.")
Of course one reason that women, and particularly feminists, have a hard time either enjoying pornography as an interesting gender fantasy, or dismissing it as a harmless gender fantasy, is our worry that in a world in which men have more social power than women, men have the power to force their fantasy of a one-gender world onto unwilling women, who have their own ideas about how female sexuality should feel. But is pornography proffered (and enjoyed) as a form of propaganda? And if you think so, why presume that pornography alone, among the vast range of cultural forms, works as indoctrination, whereas every other popular genre is understood as inhabiting the realm of fiction, entertainment, even ideas, not as having megalomaniacal ambitions to transform the world into itself? We don't spend a lot of time worrying that viewers of pro wrestling will suddenly be seized with some all-consuming impulse to wrestle innocent passersby to the ground. On what grounds are such megalomaniacal intentions imputed to pornography?"
September 23, 2021
A bit outdated and a bit obscure on gender identities, but interesting enough to employ class, ideology and psychoanalysis perspectives on western pornography.
April 15, 2011
Fantastic grouping of literary criticism! My favourite is On Reading Hustler! The essay On Reading Hustler, is a very interesting and helpful insight on the development of pornography as a language in our culture. The use of the image of a naked woman goes far beyond the obvious mastrabratourial stereotype. What Laura Kipnis argues is that, thanks to publications like Hustler, pornography has evolved from a simple skin-rag and into a critical force within our own culture. Hustler, as it mixes well-paid, well-endowned models with pictures volunteered by readers (and the women in their lives) makes a Marxist critique on sex.
Read it! Don't worry, there are no pictures.
Read it! Don't worry, there are no pictures.
Read
October 20, 2014People seem to like this book. Kipnis has some interesting insights into the semiotics of pornography, but the problem is that in order for her semiotic analysis to matter, Catherine Mackinnon and Andrea Dworkin have to be wrong. I'm not convinced they are, despite some brief arguments against those two in this book.
October 27, 2007
Excellent argumentation.
January 11, 2008
A really interesting look at the politics of pornography. The class analysis of Hustler and the section on fat porn were particularly insightful.
Want to read
July 9, 2009Tim tells me I need to read this.
Read
November 14, 2009Fantastic and fascinating so far
July 31, 2012
The chapter "Clothes Make the Man" blew my mind!!covered a lot of things i had thought about from first seeing Cindy Sherman,s work.
March 11, 2021
I tried because in Gender studies i had heard this book referenced as one of the texts in the Sex Wars and I thought it might be interesting to read so I slogged through the first chapter, but I had to stop after the plainly outdated offensive definition of transvestite and transexual (including but not limited to referring to trans women as men *several times*) I think I understand the main argument of this book without subjecting myself to those harmful ideas of what transness is. And I agree with my professor's decisions to reference the text without making modern students read it because you can get the point without exposing yourself to that language
100% Do Not Recommend unless you're writing an academic paper on this specific time period in the Sex War and you put in practices to distance yourself from and heal yourself from harmful ideas in this book (like I had to do when writing a paper on the NC Anti-Trans Bathroom Bill which involved reading a lot of anti-trans perspective pieces)
100% Do Not Recommend unless you're writing an academic paper on this specific time period in the Sex War and you put in practices to distance yourself from and heal yourself from harmful ideas in this book (like I had to do when writing a paper on the NC Anti-Trans Bathroom Bill which involved reading a lot of anti-trans perspective pieces)
May 5, 2025
With Bound and Gagged, Laura Kipnis puts pornography under the reflectors and analyses it as the cultural expression of society's repressed phantasies. Class struggle, feminism and freudian psychoanalysis are the lens through which such desires, and thus their expression, pornography, are understood. Although some of the anti-porn feminist movements she responds to seem to have gone out of fashion, her cultural analysis are still on point.
August 31, 2020
This book blasts genteel critiques of pornography while itself being a genteel critique.
With such a provocative title, I thought it would have something fresh and vital to say on the topic instead of just rehashing and remixing the same old cultural debates.
With such a provocative title, I thought it would have something fresh and vital to say on the topic instead of just rehashing and remixing the same old cultural debates.
December 29, 2022
It was interesting but not what I was expecting. I'm not sure what to make of the content. It had some really excellent parts, specifically, the chapter about Hustler and How to Watch Porn.
June 14, 2015
I was surprised this book is 20 years old! I really enjoyed reading it but it's not exactly an incisive view of porn today. The tone is interesting, it's editorial and she has interesting observations about society's sexual anxieties that get acted out through porn which is treated as a marginal concern even though it's pervasive in North American culture. So lots of psycho-sexual analysis gets enacted through porn. The author doesn't really make a value judgement about pornography, but rather about the government, about anti-porn feminism (which seems like a relic of the past), and popular sexual press like Playboy or Hustler etc. She seems to view porn as sort of a cultural equalizer, or a place where you can observe what actually turns people on as opposed to what more mainstream media outlets would have you think is sanctioned (she talks about stuff like adult baby porn, trans porn--TW re; very outdated language--or fat porn etc). She also has interesting things to say about classism and porn. Interesting and quick read.
May 1, 2017
Not bad, but densely academic in some places and overall fairly dated. Bad luck to publish a book about pornography just before the internet arrived. A good deal of the the book argues against the anti-porn feminism of the 80s championed by Dworkin and MacKinnon, which makes it feel even older than it is. That said, the chapter on fat porn is still highly relevant, and a lot of the questions raised are still valid, even though porn isn't a big part of the current culture wars.
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