Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible"

by Linda Williams

In this now-classic study, Linda Williams moves beyond the impasse of the anti-porn/anti-censorship debate to analyze what hard-core film pornography is and does―as a genre with a history, as a specific cinematic form, and as part of contemporary discourse on sexuality. For the 1999 edition, Williams has written a new preface and a new epilogue, "On/scenities," illustrated with 25 photographs. She has also added a supplementary bibliography.

Genres: Nonfiction, Film, Feminism, Sexuality, Theory, History, Philosophy

380 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

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Linda Williams was an American professor of film studies in the departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

[Amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think it's pretty ridiculous to read some of the reviews regarding this book. "It's dry" or "It's dated" Did it not occur to those readers that they are reading an academic film theory book? Or that at the time of publishing it was a pioneering study? Williams captivated me with her comparisons of porn to musicals and S&M to the final girl in horror films. I laughed out loud when she described what it must have been like for the Greek gods, Zeus and Hera, to watch porn together. Although I have yet to read other academic studies of porn, it's clear Williams gave porn studies worth - validation that the genre had more going on then explicit sex.

[Whitney Borup · Rating 5 out of 5]

Linda Williams is one of the best academic writers I have come across. She is clear and concise, funny, and entertaining. I loved this book. It's very explicit, so it's obviously not for everyone, but any feminist (both pro- and anti-pornography) should check this one out.

[Joey Shapiro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Opened my mind and poisoned my letterboxd watchlist. (Lots of pixelated posters in there now, I fear.) This was an exciting challenge for me because I haven’t read theory in probably 8 years, since I was a college junior, but this is theory about not only film studies but SALACIOUS film studies so I was engaged and learned a lot! Genuinely! I love Linda Williams’ writing— dense but definitely digestible after reading things over slowly— and I like her approach to porn as a genre of film analogous to musicals or horror movies, worth dissecting and breaking down and critiquing like any other film. This is a very very film studies-y book, not about Porn Bad or Porn Good but about how these movies function and what they suggest about gender/sexual relations and the culture that produced them. LOVE the epilogue from 1999 that gets into virtual reality porn computer games. So so funny and bizarre.

[Kirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember reading this book back in grad school when it was the go-to giggle for bookworms who found it provocative to speak of Foucault and Lovelace in the same sentence. It's actually a worthwhile read for those looking for a "grammar" of pornography. Since the early 90s, "adult entertainment" has become an accepted medium of study, with some schools even offering courses in its analysis---most of them heaily indebted to this study. If anything, the cultural pleasures that "hardcore" supposedly appeals to have become mindnumbingly obvious since the Clintonian age, somewhat lessening the impact of this study. Still, I swear Paul Thomas Anderson read this as he was writing BOOGIE NIGHTS....

[Hagar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is probably the best book I've read on how to come to terms with pornography. Linda Williams purposefully argues beyond the pro-porno vs. anti-porno feminist and marxist debates. And tries to confront this unique medium on its own and within its own boundaries. This is a study of pornography as a cinematic form. It's origins and how it changes our sexuality significantly. 

For Williams, pornography came into existence with emerging modernity. Hence, any analysis of pornography should include issues of modernity as well. This passage highlights her thesis quite well:

"At the moment of cinematic origin with which we are concerned, then, all three of these apparatuses-social, psychic, and technological, are working together to channel the scientific discovery of bodily motion into new forms of knowledge and pleasure.... With the invention of cinema, in other words, fetishism and voyeurism gained new importance and normality through their link to the positivist quest for the truth of visible phenomena. No longer were they relatively rare sexual perversions practised by certain men to overcome difficulties in sexual performance. Cinema implanted these perversions more firmly, normalizing them in technological and social "ways of seeing." As a result, viewers gradually came to expect that seeing human bodies in motion in the better way afforded by cinema would include these perverse pleasures as a matter of course."

The only aspect lacking in this book is that, because it was published in 1989 (relatively early years of the accessible proliferation of pornography), she doesn't anticipate the industrial complex the porn industry has become. The emotional, mental, physical, sexual, ideological, economic, and social destruction/degeneracy conglomerates like MindGeek (now Aylo) and platforms like OnlyFans have caused is really something that she probably couldn't even comprehend coming. So, this book isn't for people looking for a more political or sociocultural analysis of the effects of porn. 

[Kai Perrignon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great but limited. Williams' prose is witty, accessible, and very clear, which makes even her most dense concepts compelling. She excels at connecting the development of cinema itself to a fundamental theory of how (primarily heterosexual) pornography engages with the presentation of sex as a gendered act(s). Everything from Muybridge to early stag loops blew my mind a bit. After that, it's a bit dicier. She was writing this at a very transitional moment in porn, and there are many questions that she doesn't have the hindsight, foreknowledge, or even diversity of appreciation to really answer. The BDSM section, for instance, feels almost tangential for how little she genuinely posits, and it's one of the sections that highlights how much her understandable exclusion of gay pornography has limited her analysis of the genre as a cultural and political object outside the relatively narrow confines of hetero-gender analysis. She also limits herself to mostly mainstream work at the expense of some genuine weirdo auteurs exploring the boundaries and philosophical implications of pornography such as Roger Watkins, Jonas Middleton, some of Damiano's more obscure stuff (I could go on and on - I think she mentions Rinse Dream and Cafe Flesh once as a throwaway oddity?); again, a broader appreciation of the form and its stranger corners could have filled in some gaps, but she was one of the pioneers so slack is plentiful.

[Jason Coffman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating history and study of hardcore pornographic film, its functions and development. Williams traces the development of hardcore from early photography and stags to the VHS era. My only real complaint is that the book is now seriously out of date-- as relevant as its observations are to the state of pornography in the 1980s, it's left to the reader to extrapolate how things have changed in the last 20 years or more. But that's probably an entire book itself!

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the first serious scholarly examinations of pornography. Williams use a formalistic process to examine and explain how porn films function within the larger cultural and political discourse. She also examines how viewing porn and the gaze may be understood as something that does not have to be gender specific.

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impressive weaving together of feminist, Marxist and psychoanalytic theory to explore both the development and meaning of pornography-on-film that despite being written before the seeming normalisation of pornography via the internet and contemporary commercialisations of the objectification of women retains intense analytical power. Williams manages to make sense of the complexities of pornography without falling into the twin traps of sensationalist opposition or cynical resignation to its presence. Deservedly a classic.

[Chloe · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love books that tell a complete history of something from beginning to up until the publication of the book and i love books that do that with interesting new theories that make u go OHHHH. it’s even more baller that the something in question is porn

[samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

• Preface
o To my surprise, however, colleagues in the academy seemed quite willing to countenance the academic study of moving-image pornography and anti-porn feminists ignored the book
o A field that might be called pornography studies has emerged ix
o Those making strides in engaging the history, theory, and practice of erotic pornographic representations
 Pro-sex feminists
 Gay men
 Susan Sontag lmao
o Hard Core’s flaws have grown apparent. If I were writing the book today I would no longer duck the study of nonheretosexual forms. Nor would I shrink from illustration. I would also want to explore the class and race dimensions of the form as well as its humor
 Footnotes: “see my cowardly fudging of both these issues”
• Foreword
o Separate study tentatively entitled Film Bodies. Essays on cinema considered from pov of what has most motivated the art forms and technology: the pleasure in looking at humanbodies in movement.
 I wanted to explore this most basic phenomenon of the movies, first in the prehistoric and primitive spectacles of cinematic body movement itself, and then in genres that focus on particular kinds of body movement and body spectacle—musicals, horror films, low comedies, “weepies.”
 My initial thought was simply to see how the male pleasure in looking operated in these other genres
 As an afterthought, and only because the logic of my approach seemed to dictate it, I determined to examine another genre in which body movement, involuntary physical response, and sexual difference figure prominently: hard-core film pornography
 Put off writing pornography chapter. Thought no new thought or research need. If you’ve seen one porn film you’ve seen them all.
 I found that film pornography did not so neatly illustrate such objectification. I found, in fact, that these apparently self-evident texts were fraught with contradiction.
o If the above explanation of my motives for writing this book sounds defensive, it is because I feel impelled to emphasize how I found it necessary to study pornography in spite of my “proper” feminist and womanly predilections against it.
o THESIS But proper or not, at this stage in the contemporary proliferation of discourses of sexuality it seems helpful for all of us—men, women, anti-pornography feminists, and anti-censorship feminists—to agree at least that we are moved, whether to anger or to arousal, by these images of hard-core pornography, and to proceed with an analysis of the power and pleasure they hold for us.
• 1. Speaking Sex
o THESIS
 This book considers hard-core film and video pornography as one of the many forms of the “knowledge-pleasure’ of sexuality. Its goal is to trace the changing meaning and function of the genre of pornography in its specific, visual, cinematic form. Foucault's idea that the pleasures of the body are subject to historically changing social constructions has been influential, especially the idea that pleasures of the body do not exist in immutable opposition to a controlling and repressive power but instead are produced within configurations of power that put pleasures to particular use.
 Pleasure to women is alien and other to all systems (ars erotic to scientia sexualis)
 The erotic arts of ancient and Eastern cultures acknowledged that women are different but did not actively seek detailed knowledge of women’s pleasure
• Hm
 My point, however, is simply to note that, for women, one constant of the history of sexuality has been a failure to imagine their pleasures outside a dominant male economy.
 Coming to terms with pornography does not mean liking, approving of, or being aroused by it��though these reactions are not precluded either.
 Rather, it means acknowledging that despire pornography’s almost visceral appeal to the body, it is not the only genre to elicit such ‘automatic’ bodily reactions.
 Question is not whether it is misogynistic (much of it is) or whether it is art (much of it is not); rather, I wish to ask just what the genre is and why it has been so popular.
 Feminist re-visionism “in tension with several others approaches: psychoanalytic theories of sexuality and sexual identity”
 Focus exclusively on hard-core as opposed to soft-core or ‘erotic’ pornography for the sake of addressing the genre’s apparent obviousness.
o The elusive genre of pornography
 H. Montgomery Hyde traces the history of pornography back to antiquity. Suggests the legitimacy of the genre within an illustrious literary tradition. He’s hoping in light of this, modern pornography will recover aesthetics.
 The sex revolution: all agree that porn is worthy of investigation
• Peter Michelson: “for better or worse the imaginative record of man’s sexual will” 10
• Sontag’s aesthetic Story of O, Story of Eye, The Image
• Other critics are less concerned to trace an aesthetic tradition of pornography.
 None establish a continuous thread from antiquity.
 Kendrick 1987 refuses to define pornography—high-class or low, ancient or modern—as a group of texts with any common qualities. His point is the fickleness of all definitions.
• He holds that the relatively recent emergence of pornography is a problem of modern mass culture
• By concluding that the modern-day feminist anti-pornography campaign simply repeats the past history of censorship, Kendrick reveals the basic problem with his approach: an inability to measure the real changes in the idea of pornography through the eyes of its beholders.
 The history of pornography as a definitive cultural form has not yet been written. The very marginality of pornography within culture has led us to argue only about whether pornography, like sex, should be liberated or repressed. And the fact that, as with sex, we simultaneously take for granted its “obvious definition—assuming, for example, that it is either a liberating pleasure or an abusive power—has only confused matters.
 Depending on the (sexual) politics of the perceiver, the “truth” of pornographic power or pleasure is viewed either as deserving to speak or as so ‘unspeakable’ as to require suppression.
 Even though the definition and history of pornography are elusive, then, there is remarkable consensus concerning the need to include “power as the significant new term in their formulation.
o To anti-pornography feminists like Morgan, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Griffin, Catherine MacKinnon, and Susanne Kappeler, violence is inherent in the male role in “normal” heterosexual relations.
o AKA controversy of anti-porn feminists. State that the problem is women’s role as victims (they still paly victims)
 But is cutting these imaginary women down any way to keep other, real, victims from being raped and killed? The real question is, what will keep another victim from getting strung up? As long as we emphasize womans role as the absolute victim of male sadism, we only perpetuate the supposedly essential
o HER STANCE:
 Thus, while I would agree with anti-pornography feminists that pornography—especially the heterosexual film pornography examined in this book—offers exemplary symbolic representations of patriarchal power in heterosexual pleasure, and while I believe that a feminist critique of this power is crucial, I side with the anti-censorship feminists who hold that censorship of these pleasures offers no real solution to patriarchal violence and abuse
 As long as a long-suffering, victimized, and repressed natural female sexuality is viewed as the antithesis toa falsely ideological, constructed, sadistic male sexuality (or any other kind of “perversion’), practical resistance to what many women do find inimical in that sexuality is limited to the condemnation of unorthodoxies measured against an orthodox norm
o In general, anti-censorship feminists agree that pornographic representations are often sexist, but they do not necessarily agree on which representations are sexist or why
o so much has been written about the issue of pornography and so little about its actual texts.
o The task of this book is to see what the organization of these regimes and these “phantasies’ has been at different historical moments. It is also to ask why and how the regimes and phantasies have changed
o Borrowing from Comolli, I call the visual, hard-core knowledge-pleasure produced by the scientia sexualis a “frenzy of the visible. Even though it sounds extreme, this frenzy is neither an aberration nor an excess; rather, it is a logical outcome of a variety of discourses of sexuality that converge in, and help further to produce, technologies of the visible.
• 4. Fetishism and Hard Core: Marx, Freud, and the “Money Shot”
o Stephen Ziplow’s Film Maker’s Guide to Pornogrpahy “plan on at least ten separate come shots. If you don’t have the come shots, you don’t have a porno picture”
o The money shot, however, succeeds in extending visibility to the next stage of representation of the heterosexual sex act: to the point of seeing climax.
o The ultimate goal of the rest of this book is to determine how feature-length hard core “speaks of sex. The present chapter will limit this discussion to the polysemic money shot alone and to the film by which that shot became best known, Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat
o As a substitute for what cannot be seen, the money shot can b viewed as yet another form of cinematic perversion—as a fetish substitute for less visible but more “direct” instances of genital connection.
 Also as an ideal instance of commodity fetishism.
 Also as representative instance of phallic power and pleasure
 These three frameworks: Freud, Marx, feminist
o [History of porn through stag film up to this full length feature with money shot]
 50s-60s exploitation picture
 Beaver film
 Stag film
 Deep Throat e.g. of hardcore
• For the first time in hard-core cinematic pornography a feature-length film—not a documentary or a pseudodocumentary, not a single-reel, silent stag film or the genital show of beaver films—managed to integrate a variety of sexual numbers (even more than the ten Ziplow advises) into a narrative that was shown in a legitimate theater
o Money shot
 She asks for it rather than come inside, in the hard core genre
 She closes her eyes, often
 He sees, and the audience sees.
o Deep Throat’s peculiar fetish, then, poses a special problem to feminists who want to challenge phallic power and pleasure without condemning it as perverse and without re-fetishizing woman's own organs in its place.
• The Marxian fetish
o Marx defines the commodity as a “mysterious thing’ in which the “social character of men’s labour” appears to be ‘stamped’ on the very products of that labor. Through an extended analogy to vision that is especially appropriate to visual representation, Marx explains that just as “the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself,” so we see the commodity as objectively possessing certain qualities
o Marx finally finds his proper analogy in the “mist-enveloped regions of the religious world,” where fetish objects of worship are “endowed with life” by the “productions of the human brain”: “So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities” (Marx [1867] 1906, 83). To Marx, then, the fetish is a form of delusion whereby the workers who produce a commodity fail to recognize the product of their own labor
• Freudian Fetish
o In an equally famous passage written a half-century later (one that we have already had occasion to examine), Sigmund Freud, too, defines the fetish as a delusion: it is a substitute phallus created in the unconscious of a little boy who does not want to surrender the belief that his mother has a penis.
• Although Marx and Freud define their fetishes very differently, they both share a common will to expose the processes by which individuals fall victim to an illusory belief in the exalted value of certain (fetish) objects. Thus both writers pose the illusion of the fetish object's intrinsic value against their own greater knowledge of the social-economic or psychic conditions that construct that illusion.
• For Marx in 1867, and for Freud in 1927, the term fetish already carried a conventional opprobrium inherited from eighteenth-century studies of primitive religion.” 104
• RELIGIOUS DEF
o religious definition, then, fetishism was understood as a delusion whereby the fetish makers worshiped their own constructions not simply as conventional human-produced symbols of supernatural power, but as the literal embodiment of that power. They gave up, in other words, their own productive powers.
• The Marxian and Freudian fetishist locates illusory and compensatory pleasure and power in the gleam of gold or the lacy frill of an undergarment.
• For both, fetishization involves the construction of a substitute object to evade the complex realities of social or psychic relations.
• FREUD MORE SYMPATHETIC
o Fetishes are thus short-term, short-sighted solutions to more fundamental problems of power and pleasure in social relations. For Freud, however, the illusory and compensatory belief in the fetish is a relatively minor perversion. He accepts as perceptual truth the “horror and the “threat” of a castration objectively located in the “real female genitals,’ thus tending to sympathize with the fetishist's delusion. He does not, like Marx, condemn the delusion as savagery; rather, he universalizes it as part of the primary process of unconscious and infantile thought.
o Since Freud's scenario of vision asserts a self-evident perceptual “truth” of female lack, his very explanation originates in a fetishistic misrecognition of a sensuous, perceptual thing, followed by the creation of a compensatory substitute, the fetish.
o Freud, too, sees an idolater who invests in an inanimate object, but this idolater retains his own humanity by turning the woman into an object even before he invests his desire in the substitute for her missing phallus.
• [In just about every sense, Deep Throat can be said—for all its talk about the clitoris—visually to fetishize the penis.]
o Gloria Steinem (1986b, 275), for example, writes that Damiano, the film's director, invented a gimmick that was “second only to Freud’s complete elimination of the clitoris as a proper source of female pleasure. . . . Though his physiological fiction about one woman was far less ambitious than Freud's fiction about all women, his porn movie had a whammo audiovisual impact; a teaching device that Freudian theory had lacked.”
• Feminism and Fetishism
o The lesson that feminism can draw from both Marx's and Freud's understanding of this mystery is to not fall back on the simple religious condemnation of fetishism as an illusory fraud perpetrated on the credulous
o Irigaray’s Women on the Market Marxian fetishism.
 Luce Irigaray offers an extended analysis of the analogy between the Marxian definition of value as predicated on exchange and the valuation of women’s bodies created in the exchange of women by men. Even though women, like commodities, do have an intrinsic use value related to their reproductive function, she argues, it is in the process of placing two women in a quantifiable relation to a third term—whether gold or a phallus—that women lose their own bodily specificity and become, like the commodity, an abstract and undifferentiated “product of man’s labor.’ Thus desire, in the context of exchange, “perverts’ need, “but that perversion will be attributed to commodities (marchandises) and to their alleged relations.”
 without defining positively what womans sexuality is, Irigaray suggests that it might be possible to recognize the existence of a nonunitary, plural economy of female pleasures
 But to do so we would have to abandon the sort of either/or opposition posed by Freud, which speaks solely of the one and only phallic pleasure.
 In both the Marxian economic and the Freudian libidinal senses, then, the fetish of the hard-core money shot compensates for scarcity and loss. But in its Freudian sense this fetish is peculiarly literal: in place of the psychic compromise that invests pleasure in a relatively indifferent signifier (Freud's example is the young man for whom a certain ‘shine on the nose’ of a woman was necessary to his sexual pleasure), the money shot offers a real penis substituting for the mythic phallus Freud's little boy fears to have lost
 Indeed, these close-ups of remarkably long, perpetually hard, ejaculating penises might seem to be literal embodiments of this idealized fantasy phallus which Freud says we all—men and women—desire. KINK FETISH
o If men think women are castrated versions of themselves, she argues, it is because of a fundamental castration—‘a hole —in their own limited signifying economy that can envision womans desire only as the desire for, and of, the penis (Irigaray 1986, 49).

[Nicolò Grasso · Rating 5 out of 5]

Treating the history and evolution of pornographic cinema from both a feminist and scholarly angle, Linda Williams writes an extensive and exhaustive book on a film genre that is seldom accepted or recognized as worthwhile. Drawing comparisons with Hollywood musicals, psychology, and visual mediums in general, she crafts an intriguing way of exploring this type of cinema, detailing how the female and queer gaze can use it to bring positive change in talking about sexuality, identity, and sex ed (among many other things). Long, but well worth it.

[Tako · Rating 3 out of 5]

I deeply enjoyed this reading because it was a very foreign topic for me. It made me understand the importance of producing porn that will accommodate the sexual needs of all genders and sexual expressions, rather than censoring it. I also enjoyed learning more about the hardships of women to authenticate and make their pleasures visible and what led to the formation of the gender division in this industry.

The author effectively argues about the problems that exist in the porn industry. The main issue described is how pornography portrays sex as a gendered act. Women are never the center of pleasure because this industry was produced and popularized by men for men, making it largely phallocentric. The book mentions that women are rarely consumers themselves but rather objects of consumption; their purpose predominantly encompassed the fulfillment of a man’s sexual will, which is why I always believed that pornography is degrading to women. It has always been hard for women to fantasize about their pleasures in the acts of dominant male subjectivity.

Realizing that women’s sexuality is almost always neglected led me to acknowledge men’s sexual power against women that makes them commit crimes against them and my only response was to completely censor it. However, now I realize that censorship offers no real solutions to the issues of abusive patriarchy and male subjectivity. A lot of my opinions resonated with that of anti-censorship feminists. They embraced the idea of sexual differences in genders and wanted that to be taken into consideration when it came to the porn industry as well. Men have definitely shown a large interest in uncovering mysteries about female sexuality, but never successfully since they always search for these answers through a standard of their own; since the phallus is a center of male sexuality and women lack it, female sexuality to men seems less representable or something that is lacking. Therefore, most of the discourses about these are simply examples of phallic blindness; in this case, blindness to woman’s differences.

[Libby · Rating 4 out of 5]

I grew up during a time when debate on pornography consisted of dire accusations that mainstream pornography was harmful to everybody- a view that was commonly espoused, despite a near complete lack of evidence supporting it. Linda Williams's book is a refreshingly frank and reasoned analysis of cinematic hard-core pornography- its history, censorship, how it was meant to be viewed, and how women viewing/making it has changed it.
But it's not all feminism and games- there's also some Freud-baiting (always fun), an examination of the way economic theory informs pornography, parallels with movie musicals and slasher films, a deliciously scathing indictment of "gaze-based" film analysis, and, in this edition, a very funny bit about CD-ROM based porn.

For all that the book was written before internet pornography really took off in the mid-to-late 1990s, Williams's analysis still feels fresh and relevant. Rather than being invalidated by current trends, the book, appropriately, leaves one desiring more. I look forward to reading more of Dr. Williams's work, and not just the stuff about dirty movies!

[6655321 · Rating 3 out of 5]

some of this has become REALLY dated, and some of this is REALLY psychoanalytic which just makes me want to throw the book at a wall (mostly the psychoanalysis) but i think it's a really important thing ~*~historically~*~ to look at how definitions/meanings/the production of pornography has evolved and how attempts to make "visible" pleasure is one of the challenges to this? this book may be best served excerpted in a film studies course although there is definately some reward to reading the whole thing, if this was like... not 2013 i would give it much higher marks (90s: 4.5, early 90s: 5)?

[Marek Pawlowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ta książka wręcz zachwyca erudycją jeśli chodzi o historię oraz znaczenie pornografii (głównie heteroseksualnej). Jest ona także wzorcowym przykładem krytyki dość głupkowatego stwierdzenia, że ”Pornografia jest teorią, gwałt praktyką” wyznawanego przez niektóre antypornograficzne nurty feminizmu (Dworkin, MacKinnon), które także są tutaj omawiane. Momentami trochę za dużo Freudowskiej symboliki czy też wchodzenia w dość pokrętne, żeby nie powiedzieć, dziwaczne rozumowania. Całość jednakże jest podstawową pozycją dla kogoś, kto chciałby się dowiedzieć nieco więcej o znaczeniu i sensie pornografii.

[Conor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super good, but a bit dry at times. Minus one star for being outdated as well - that's always a hit to media studies texts.

Beyond that, it's still a quick read and Williams has occasional moments of brilliance with the language - a very good sign of readability in non-fiction.

[David Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Bible of non-reactionary/conservative Feminist Studies of Pornography. An in-depth reading of visual pleasure and how it works.

[Lisa]

Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" by Linda Williams (1991)

[robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

smart and stimulating though at times a bit dry. if you like this read laura kipnis' essay on "making fat visible." (i hope i didn't massacre the title!)

[melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't read the whole book, just a few chapters for a class last year.

[Nora · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this on Google Books at work - hubba hubba!

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just loved this book and I really like stuff where it just goes straight into territory like pornography and exploitation films and applies an intellectual analysis around them, and I think Linda Williams does make some excellent points here. Also something where it was written in the wake of the Meese Report on pornography, which was commissioned by the Reagan government and endorsed by radical anti-porn feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, and I guess something where it really took such a scorched Earth approach to the subject. Not that I think the pornography industry isn't without its (often severe) problems. Thinking about the alleged non-consent of Linda Boreman when filming Deep Throat (1972) or the involvement of Traci Lords in various movies from 1984-1986 (all but one of which was filmed when she was under the age of 18) and so on and so forth.

But here it's something where I think it understands pornography as an art form while also, at the same time, reconciling with the more pernicious elements of the industry, and I really love how beautifully written this whole thing is. Particularly great segment where it highlights a segment involving radical feminist Kate Millett in the documentary Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography (1982) and that while she disagrees with the film that she resonated with her line that "There is some usefulness in explicitness." Also notable are how it highlights features such as the revolutionary power of gay pornography, particularly the films of Wakefield Poole, and the very stark misogyny of the 1972 porn film Beyond the Green Door. One thing I love is the comprehensive scope of the book, like there's A LOT to go on about. Pornography is very complicated both in terms of being an art form and as an industry, and I guess it's something where you can't quite separate it out from the film industry or really just forces of capitalism in general.

[Joseph Carrabis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard Core was recommended to me. I'm teaching myself to create female perspective stories and interviewing lots of females (all ages) on lots of subjects to do so. Also reading a lot, and Hard Core is about changes in the porn industry through the years and with a focus on how feminism has shaped the industry.
I rarely encounter a scholarly book in which the author goes through major convolutions to separate themself from their subject. It's good to be neutral when presenting research, it's not good when the reader loses track of what the research is because they're too busy decoding the sentence to determine what's being offered.
Case in point; fifty pages of conclusion and epilogue in a 300 page book? A sixth of the book is given over to "This is what I said"? I kept on thinking "Please light a cigarette and shut up."
Is this a worthy book? Perhaps for movie historians and sociologists. I wouldn't recommend it to someone wanting to improve their knowledge beyond those disciplines, though.
My limitation, I guess.

[Canyon Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me way too long to get through. It was fine, certainly informative and in some ways what I wanted, but also was really dense frustratingly academic. The historical trajectory from stag films to CD "virtual reality" pornography was interesting, but so many times I picked the book up, read 5 or 10 pages, and set it back down. The absolute opposite of a page turner, and it is quite dated, as I think the introduction of the internet has rendered a lot of this conversation, aside from the historical analysis, irrelevant, save for some specific circles of internet porn.

[Susannah Breslin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Linda Williams’ Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” is a rigorously academic work that seeks to trace the history of P movies and explore what their content reveals about their viewers. Dense and filled with academese, the book tackles adult content with all the sexiness of a spatula. While not strictly feminist, Williams’ work privileges feminist P over not-feminist P while failing to identify if there is an actual difference between the two beyond an ultimately failed marketing ploy. This book is a buzzkill.

[Graham Senders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the start of the title - "Hard Core" and the description of a number of hard core items, this is an accessible reader more about ways of seeing culture, particularly the moving image and what forces have dominated what we see on the screen.
I am sure that it is not for everyone. But those of us who like to look behind the smiling faces that fill the screens of Hollywood musicals, this serves well.

[Frances Wilde · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Linda Williams. This was kind of outdated, but at the same time, much needed still, to distinguish between anti-graphics and anti-censorship. She writes so concisely and produces a balanced argument. Love Chapter 7.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2

[Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you’re interested in film pornography from an academic perspective, this book is filled with fascinating insights. If you’re not interested in the academic perspective, do not read this book.