Sexuality

Pornification, The Porn Report and Princesses and Pornstars are three recent entries into the burgeoning academic field known as ‘porn studies’. All three books aim to move beyond the simplistic ‘for’ and ‘against’ arguments that have traditionally surrounded pornography. Instead, each text explores the challenges and complexities of living in a world where sexually explicit material is more prevalent than ever before.

I should read my email more carefully. Like many, I have to admonish myself thus at regular intervals, but it doesn’t always work. This review is a case in point. When invited to review a book on ‘sex and pleasure’, this request stood out from an unread e-mail queue that was uncomfortably long. I had just published a book myself on the history of sexuality (Histories of Sexuality: Antiquity to Sexual Revolution), so the topic had appeal, but, in my haste to reply, I neglected the qualifying phrase ‘in Western Culture’. To my horror, I opened Gail Hawkes’s book only to be confronted with an immediate ethical dilemma (and given my current role as Dean of an Arts Faculty, I could do without another one). Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture covers substantially the same ground as my book: from Ancient Greece to the present day. Even some of our chapter divisions overlapped: classical antiquity; early Christianity; the medieval era; the early modern period and so on. How could I approach a review in the dispassionate way this art requires, when troubled by insidious fears that this might be a better book?

In the era of gay liberation, ‘coming out’ has for many taken on the character of a religious experience. Gays and lesbians in the US draw easily on a religious culture of personal salvation even while denying the sometimes oppressive institutions it has created. In Australia, we are not given to the same public display of emotional and spiritual commitment, but ‘coming out’ has nevertheless come to be regarded as a gay rite of passage.

Lyn Hughes’s One Way Mirrors begins with a white horse impaled on headlights. It’s autumn, ‘the stars look cold and pinched’. You know it’s going to end badly and it does, mostly.