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Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography: The Pornographic Object of Knowledge
Hardcore pornographic films combine fantasy and real sex to create a unique genre of entertainment. Pornographic films are also historical documents that give us access to the sexual behavior and eroticism of different historical periods. This book shows how the making of pornographic films is a social process that draws on the fantasies, sexual scripts, and sexual identities of performers, writers, directors, and editors to produce sexually exciting videos and movies. Yet hardcore pornographic films have also created a body of knowledge that constitutes, in this digital age, an enormous archive of sexual fantasies that serve as both a form of sex education and self-help guides. Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography focuses on sex and what can be learned about it from pornographic representations.
238 pages, Paperback
First published February 12, 2021
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About the author
Jeffrey Escoffier
18 books13 followersJeffrey Escoffier wrote on glbtq history, politics, culture, sexuality, music, and dance. One of the founders of OUT/LOOK: National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly, he published widely. Among his books are American Homo: Community and Perversity and a biography of John Maynard Keynes in the Chelsea House series on the Lives of Notable Gay Men and Lesbians. He co-edited (with Matthew Lore) Mark Morris' L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato: A Celebration and also edited is Sexual Revolution, an anthology of writing on sex from the 1960s and 1970s. In 2009, he published Bigger Than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore. He was also on the board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at The City University of New York.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 24, 2023
This book is a collection of Escoffier's previous publications strung together to create an uneven and often repetitive edition of his works.
“How is pornography about of knowledge? Michel Foucault, in the history of sexuality and introduction, argues that there have been two ways of organizing knowledge about sex. In ancient Eastern civilizations knowledge about sex was codified as an ars erotica, based on practical experience to be passed down to the uninitiated. In Western Europe, a sciential sexualis emerged during the late 19th century, first as sexology and later psychoanalysis, which has grown into the academic fields of gender and sexuality studies… in the 20th century, this pornographic archive became a mechanism of knowledge and power centring on sex, what Foucault would call a “strategic unity.” The knowledge accumulated in pornography is not a systematic body of knowledge but is instead and enormous catalogue of loosely organized sexual fantasies sexual scripts-like a cookbook in which every recipe must be tested, every pornographic scene is a test for feasibility of a particular perverse fantasy-where “every detail counts.” 4
“human sexuality, whether it's a biological process or affected by the limitations of the human body, is shaped by social and historical forces. The narrative and behavioural requirements of sexual conductor organized bisexual scripts.” 5
“The scripts used in pornographic movies can also be organized into genres. They are basically fetish categories that draw on the spectator’s ‘festishized’ expectations and establish ground rules for both producers and performers.” 6
“While erotic representations-stories, visual art, or movies-have portrayed some combination of both (1) objects of desire and (2) narratives of sexual action. Laplanche, Ponytails and Stoller have argued that narratives are essential to the generation of sexual excitement.” 9
“The most influential theory of sexual revolution was articulated by Wilhelm Reich in The Sexual Revolution, his 1933 book on the fate of sexual reforms following the Russian Revolution. He had long argued that human suffering could not be alleviated solely by individual therapy but required social action-in fact, that sexual reforms were impossible without radical political action. Conversely, he also stressed that political revolution, including socialist revolution, was doomed to failure unless it was accompanied by the abolition of sexual repression.
It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of Wilhelm Reich’s thinking about sexuality in the decades following World War II. The sexual revolution of the sixties was initiated by people who shared many of Reich’s beliefs…” 15-16
“Kinsey’s survey is still one of the largest ever conducted-over 18,000 individuals were interviewed for the two books published in 1948 and 1953.” 17
“During the fifties, sixties, and seventies sex and sexuality and public discussions of it had come to occupy an increasingly significant place in American culture-in newspapers, books, movies, and theatre; sex had entered the arena of public discourse in an unprecedented way.
Sexuality is social constructed. Changes in sexual norms and behaviour are much more likely to follow from broader changes in culture.” 19
“The sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies would never have taken place were it not for the battles fought over obscenity and pornography during the late fifties by pornographers, stand-up comics, literary writes, and publishers. These prolonged debates and legal battles helped create a public space in American culture for sexual speech, a space where it was permissible not only to discuss patterns of sexual behaviour but also to portray sexuality honestly and bluntly in fiction, on the stage and in movies.” 22
“Ironically, the creation of a market for pornographic films was the unintended result of a U.S. Supreme Court decision. The Court’s decision in the 1948 Paramount case required the major Hollywood studios to divest themselves of their theatre chains. Theaters were thus no longer routinely provided with films to run, and television had cut deeply into weekly ticket sales. Move audiences shrank from 78.2 million ticket buyers per week after World War II to 15.8 million by the end of the sixties- a drop of 80 percent. By the late sixties, movie theatres were often sparsely populated. Theater owners were desperate to bring customers back…The legal guidelines defining obscenity in films changed continuously throughout the sixties…” 23
“Pornography succeed in the market because it articulated wish-fulfilling fantasies that resonated with its audience. But commercial success also fed the perverse dynamic: the constant push to identify new varieties of polymorphous possibilities-and at the same time offered strategies of symbolic containment. Pornography both harnesses those perverse desires and generates desire.” 25
“Pornography was an integral part of the discourse that emerged during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Porn, however, played a more significant role in the life of gay men than among heterosexual men, not only because homosexuality had been a stigmatized form of behaviour but also because historically there were so few homoerotic representations of any kind. Gay men become sexually active adults without any socialization in the social and sexual codes of the gay male subculture. Pornography contributes to the education of desire. “For gay male culture,” observes Thomas Yingling, “porn has historically served as a means to self-ratification through self-gratification….The transition from ‘beefcake’ or software images, to sexually explicit hardcore porn films in the late 1960s was not only a change from one medium to another-from primarily still photographs and drawings to a cinematic medium, from a static image to an action image-but a shift that entailed a modification in the representation of homosexual desire from a focus on men as the objects of desire to men as the active agents of homosexual desire.” 29
“Their convictions were overturned after the Supreme Court ruled in MANual Enterprises, Inc. v. Day (1961), that beefcake magazines could not be considered obscene.” 30
“Gay life in the years before Stonewall riots of 1969 was centred around small groups of friends and in bars; casual sex often occurred in public restrooms, parks and piers.” 30
“Pornographic materials-whether written or visual-were difficult to obtain, expensive, and even dangerous to possess. Homosexual images-that is, photographs of nude men or drawings of erotic scenes-were available only through private networks or to ‘select mail-order customers.’…By the mid-1950s there were more than a dozen small-scale (measuring five by eight inches) beefcake magazines-including Apollo, Physique Pictorial, Male Nudist Review, Fizeek Art Quarterly, Grecian Guild Pictorial, Art and Physique, Trim, Tomorrow’s Man, Male Pix, Vim, Adonis and Young Adonis-all publishing photographs and illustrations of attractive, almost nude young men, often posed in sexually suggestive situations. In their back pages, photographs of tanned and oiled bodybuilders were available by mail order.” 31
“Despite the challenges, the beefcake magazines created a loose counter discourse to the homophobic discourses in American society at that time. Christopher Nealon has argued that through their pictures, comments and stories, the magazines suggested some sort of gay male solidarity, ‘an imagined community,’ that countered the pathological model of gender ‘inversion’ (‘a woman in a man’s body’) and that appealed to classical Greek bodily and political ideals.” 32
“It was a pattern found over and over again in public restrooms, jails, prisons, military facilities, and other same-sex environments. In such a situation even a ‘straight’ man in the audience might engage in mutual masturbation with another man or allow a man to suck his penis. The porn theatre, part of the cinematic apparatus itself, had become a complex form of sociosexual space, an erotic signifying system and a stage for fantasy scenarios.” 33
“Gay porn films reinforced gay viewers’ identities as gay men. That identification was enunciated through the pornography’s dominant semantic and syntactical conventions…” 44
“Anal intercourse became the central act of gay male pornography. Rather than a strict dichotomy between the ‘trade’/masculine role and ‘queer’/effeminate role, or top and bottom…versatility represented the politically fashionable style of fucking.” 45
“The sexual revolution of the 196s and 1970s, the emergence of the gay liberation movement in 1969, and the increased freedom of sexual expression society-wide, together with the massive migration and concentration of gay men during the 1970s in the urban centre of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, fundamentally altered, accordion to sociologist Martin Levine, the forms (both social and sexual) of gay men’s lives. The migration and increased visibility brought together a critical mass of gay men who would economically sustain the kinds of commercial leisure establishments (bars, bathhouses, sex clubs, porn theatres, vacation resorts, and dance clubs) that facilitated sexual expression and generated a thriving and permissive sexual subculture. Patrick Moore has argued that during the 1970s, gay men adopted sex as a tool for radical change and developed ‘new models of sexual interaction.’ It was, he concluded, ‘an astonishing experiment in radically restructuring existing relationships, concepts of beauty and the use of sex as a revolutionary tool.” 48
“Gay writers, historians and sociologists have shown that public sexual activity flourished among men long before 1970s. In a world where homosexual desire and conduct are stigmatized and criminalized, finding sexual partners was an important, through often a dangerous activity for gay men. Men who experience homosexual desire do not grow up within communities that recognize homosexuality and as a consequence are not socialized into cultural patterns ‘appropriate’ for homosexual men.” 55
“Gay men embraced the public places they cruised and where they had sex. And these places-the baths, the trucks, the piers-became landmarks of the gay male sexual subculture.” 56
“How is pornography about of knowledge? Michel Foucault, in the history of sexuality and introduction, argues that there have been two ways of organizing knowledge about sex. In ancient Eastern civilizations knowledge about sex was codified as an ars erotica, based on practical experience to be passed down to the uninitiated. In Western Europe, a sciential sexualis emerged during the late 19th century, first as sexology and later psychoanalysis, which has grown into the academic fields of gender and sexuality studies… in the 20th century, this pornographic archive became a mechanism of knowledge and power centring on sex, what Foucault would call a “strategic unity.” The knowledge accumulated in pornography is not a systematic body of knowledge but is instead and enormous catalogue of loosely organized sexual fantasies sexual scripts-like a cookbook in which every recipe must be tested, every pornographic scene is a test for feasibility of a particular perverse fantasy-where “every detail counts.” 4
“human sexuality, whether it's a biological process or affected by the limitations of the human body, is shaped by social and historical forces. The narrative and behavioural requirements of sexual conductor organized bisexual scripts.” 5
“The scripts used in pornographic movies can also be organized into genres. They are basically fetish categories that draw on the spectator’s ‘festishized’ expectations and establish ground rules for both producers and performers.” 6
“While erotic representations-stories, visual art, or movies-have portrayed some combination of both (1) objects of desire and (2) narratives of sexual action. Laplanche, Ponytails and Stoller have argued that narratives are essential to the generation of sexual excitement.” 9
“The most influential theory of sexual revolution was articulated by Wilhelm Reich in The Sexual Revolution, his 1933 book on the fate of sexual reforms following the Russian Revolution. He had long argued that human suffering could not be alleviated solely by individual therapy but required social action-in fact, that sexual reforms were impossible without radical political action. Conversely, he also stressed that political revolution, including socialist revolution, was doomed to failure unless it was accompanied by the abolition of sexual repression.
It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of Wilhelm Reich’s thinking about sexuality in the decades following World War II. The sexual revolution of the sixties was initiated by people who shared many of Reich’s beliefs…” 15-16
“Kinsey’s survey is still one of the largest ever conducted-over 18,000 individuals were interviewed for the two books published in 1948 and 1953.” 17
“During the fifties, sixties, and seventies sex and sexuality and public discussions of it had come to occupy an increasingly significant place in American culture-in newspapers, books, movies, and theatre; sex had entered the arena of public discourse in an unprecedented way.
Sexuality is social constructed. Changes in sexual norms and behaviour are much more likely to follow from broader changes in culture.” 19
“The sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies would never have taken place were it not for the battles fought over obscenity and pornography during the late fifties by pornographers, stand-up comics, literary writes, and publishers. These prolonged debates and legal battles helped create a public space in American culture for sexual speech, a space where it was permissible not only to discuss patterns of sexual behaviour but also to portray sexuality honestly and bluntly in fiction, on the stage and in movies.” 22
“Ironically, the creation of a market for pornographic films was the unintended result of a U.S. Supreme Court decision. The Court’s decision in the 1948 Paramount case required the major Hollywood studios to divest themselves of their theatre chains. Theaters were thus no longer routinely provided with films to run, and television had cut deeply into weekly ticket sales. Move audiences shrank from 78.2 million ticket buyers per week after World War II to 15.8 million by the end of the sixties- a drop of 80 percent. By the late sixties, movie theatres were often sparsely populated. Theater owners were desperate to bring customers back…The legal guidelines defining obscenity in films changed continuously throughout the sixties…” 23
“Pornography succeed in the market because it articulated wish-fulfilling fantasies that resonated with its audience. But commercial success also fed the perverse dynamic: the constant push to identify new varieties of polymorphous possibilities-and at the same time offered strategies of symbolic containment. Pornography both harnesses those perverse desires and generates desire.” 25
“Pornography was an integral part of the discourse that emerged during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Porn, however, played a more significant role in the life of gay men than among heterosexual men, not only because homosexuality had been a stigmatized form of behaviour but also because historically there were so few homoerotic representations of any kind. Gay men become sexually active adults without any socialization in the social and sexual codes of the gay male subculture. Pornography contributes to the education of desire. “For gay male culture,” observes Thomas Yingling, “porn has historically served as a means to self-ratification through self-gratification….The transition from ‘beefcake’ or software images, to sexually explicit hardcore porn films in the late 1960s was not only a change from one medium to another-from primarily still photographs and drawings to a cinematic medium, from a static image to an action image-but a shift that entailed a modification in the representation of homosexual desire from a focus on men as the objects of desire to men as the active agents of homosexual desire.” 29
“Their convictions were overturned after the Supreme Court ruled in MANual Enterprises, Inc. v. Day (1961), that beefcake magazines could not be considered obscene.” 30
“Gay life in the years before Stonewall riots of 1969 was centred around small groups of friends and in bars; casual sex often occurred in public restrooms, parks and piers.” 30
“Pornographic materials-whether written or visual-were difficult to obtain, expensive, and even dangerous to possess. Homosexual images-that is, photographs of nude men or drawings of erotic scenes-were available only through private networks or to ‘select mail-order customers.’…By the mid-1950s there were more than a dozen small-scale (measuring five by eight inches) beefcake magazines-including Apollo, Physique Pictorial, Male Nudist Review, Fizeek Art Quarterly, Grecian Guild Pictorial, Art and Physique, Trim, Tomorrow’s Man, Male Pix, Vim, Adonis and Young Adonis-all publishing photographs and illustrations of attractive, almost nude young men, often posed in sexually suggestive situations. In their back pages, photographs of tanned and oiled bodybuilders were available by mail order.” 31
“Despite the challenges, the beefcake magazines created a loose counter discourse to the homophobic discourses in American society at that time. Christopher Nealon has argued that through their pictures, comments and stories, the magazines suggested some sort of gay male solidarity, ‘an imagined community,’ that countered the pathological model of gender ‘inversion’ (‘a woman in a man’s body’) and that appealed to classical Greek bodily and political ideals.” 32
“It was a pattern found over and over again in public restrooms, jails, prisons, military facilities, and other same-sex environments. In such a situation even a ‘straight’ man in the audience might engage in mutual masturbation with another man or allow a man to suck his penis. The porn theatre, part of the cinematic apparatus itself, had become a complex form of sociosexual space, an erotic signifying system and a stage for fantasy scenarios.” 33
“Gay porn films reinforced gay viewers’ identities as gay men. That identification was enunciated through the pornography’s dominant semantic and syntactical conventions…” 44
“Anal intercourse became the central act of gay male pornography. Rather than a strict dichotomy between the ‘trade’/masculine role and ‘queer’/effeminate role, or top and bottom…versatility represented the politically fashionable style of fucking.” 45
“The sexual revolution of the 196s and 1970s, the emergence of the gay liberation movement in 1969, and the increased freedom of sexual expression society-wide, together with the massive migration and concentration of gay men during the 1970s in the urban centre of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, fundamentally altered, accordion to sociologist Martin Levine, the forms (both social and sexual) of gay men’s lives. The migration and increased visibility brought together a critical mass of gay men who would economically sustain the kinds of commercial leisure establishments (bars, bathhouses, sex clubs, porn theatres, vacation resorts, and dance clubs) that facilitated sexual expression and generated a thriving and permissive sexual subculture. Patrick Moore has argued that during the 1970s, gay men adopted sex as a tool for radical change and developed ‘new models of sexual interaction.’ It was, he concluded, ‘an astonishing experiment in radically restructuring existing relationships, concepts of beauty and the use of sex as a revolutionary tool.” 48
“Gay writers, historians and sociologists have shown that public sexual activity flourished among men long before 1970s. In a world where homosexual desire and conduct are stigmatized and criminalized, finding sexual partners was an important, through often a dangerous activity for gay men. Men who experience homosexual desire do not grow up within communities that recognize homosexuality and as a consequence are not socialized into cultural patterns ‘appropriate’ for homosexual men.” 55
“Gay men embraced the public places they cruised and where they had sex. And these places-the baths, the trucks, the piers-became landmarks of the gay male sexual subculture.” 56
July 6, 2021
lots of very good information and he makes a lot of good points but it is very repetitive at times
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October 10, 2025repetitive, academics love "scripts"
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews