Books like Bound and Gagged by Laura Kipnis

Bound and Gagged will completely change the terms of the pornography debate. Laura Kipnis challenges the position that porn perpetuates misogyny and hate crimes, arguing that porn isn't just about gender and that fantasy doesn't necessarily constitute intent. She opens with the chilling case of Daniel DePew, a men convicted - in the first nationwide computer bulletin board entrapment case - of conspiring to make a snuff film and sentenced to thirty-three years in prison for merely trading kinky sexual fantasies with two undercover cops. Using this textbook example of social hysteria as a springboard, Kipnis argues that criminalizing fantasy - even perverse and unacceptable fantasy - has dire social consequences. She explores the entire spectrum of pornography, arguing that its themes and messages are as richly complex and nuanced as the most "respectable" forms of culture. She reveals Larry Flynt's Hustler to be one of the most politically outspoken and class-antagonistic magazines in the country, and she shows how fetishists such as fat admirers challenge our aesthetic prejudices and socially sanctioned disgust. Kipnis demonstrates that the porn industry - whose multibillion-dollar annual revenues rival those of the three major television networks combined - knows precisely how to tap into our culture's deepest anxieties and desires, and that this knowledge, more than all the naked bodies, is what guarantees its vast popularity. Pornography is too deeply wedded to our culture ever to be eradicated.

First publish date: 1996