Taking as its focus soft-core pornography and its impact on the sexuality of young men, this book is intented as a contribution to the developing discussion of heterosexuality and its cultural representation within sociology, gender studies and media studies. Simon Hardy’s book was conceived as a response to the divisions among feminsts concerning pornography and as an attempt to disrupt the existing pattern of entrenchment into which critical discussion of sexual representation has fallen. The harm which pornography is thought to cause women is obviously mediated through men, and yet the male perspective, until now, has not been clearly stated.
Drawing on interviews with young men about their expeience and interpretation of pornographic material, the book shows that they have, paradoxically, a keen awareness of the pleasures which cencorship would curtail, but also a strong sense of danger attending the use of pornography. Whilst this male perspective perhaps only restates the dilemmas of heterosexuality which have troubled feminists for so long, the lack of male input on this topic in the past has encouraged a situation in which the harmfulness of pornography is either arbitrarily assumed or dismissed, as if the outcome of consuming such material were not contested and determined in the minds of men.