"Porn" by Robert J. Stoller, M.D. (1991)

"Right.  They object to its depicting a sexuality they don't like.  The feminists who object to pornography are the women who feel pressured by society's sexual expectations of women.  They don't look like the people in those movies; they don't want to be like the people in those movies.  In no sense do they want to do those things.  They feel that this material creates unfair expectations of them on the part of men.  I really think that's what it's about.  Pornography is mainly an expression of male sexuality that they find threatening because of the demands that it implies.  That's what they're pissed off about.  In the same way that if men read women's romance novels, they'd find much to be annoyed about: in the idealized portrayal of men, because most of us are not handsome, swashbuckling guys.  Most of us are not physical men of action.  Most of us are not enormously wealthy or broodingly handsome and would find it difficult to live up to the standards of romance novel heroes.  The pressure on men to perform up to the heroic standards in our society has plenty of bad effects on men.  But they don't recognize that in the political way that feminists do."

I should say at the outset that I'm not a big believer in Psychology or its cousin Psychoanalysis.  The author of this book was a psychoanalyst working at UCLA, and many of the conclusions he draws concerning heterosexual pornography were far outside of what I consider a practical understanding of human behavior.  To put it another way, I tend to think that a dream about a woman eating a banana is just a dream about a woman eating a banana - and not a metaphor for oral sex.  Until proven otherwise, I try to take the facts of human behavior at face value, and I regard the over-interpretation of these facts as a misleading and often dangerous business.

So I had trouble with the introductory or explanatory parts of this book.  Freudian terminology is just not my thing, and I consider the author's analysis of porn to be far from objective, and also far from empirical.

Yet this disagreement with Psychology, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis wasn't a big impediment to my enjoyment of this book.  This is because the book is mostly just a series of interviews with those in the porn business.  In these interviews the subjects merely explain what they do, how they do it, and their opinions on both.  The author doesn't interrupt them too much, and he doesn't ask too many leading questions.  Those reading this book are free to take what they say for whatever it's worth.  It's not a perfect (comprehensive) picture of the porn industry by any means, but it is interesting.

This book is a bit dated now.  It was published in 1991, and the interviews were conducted in the late 80s.  But even if the technologies in use have changed, the content of porn hasn't.  We might be using the Internet now, we might be renting or purchasing DVDs, but a porn movie or magazine in 2015 isn't going to stray too far from what people were watching, buying, or renting in the early 90s.  For this reason the interviews in this book retain their relevance, and many of those interviewed had a lot to say.

I would recommend this book, but I would also recommend skipping the introductory sections.  It's brief, it's to the point, and it offers an interesting window into an extremely popular form of entertainment.