Porn: Myths for the Twentieth Century

Bill, Merlin, Happy, and Kay are among the porn-film performers and producers who tell their stories to Dr. Robert J. Stoller in this pschyodynamic ethnography of adult heterosexual pornography. Their engrossing accounts reveal in rich detail not only the inner workings of “the Industry” and the fantasies and motivations of its participants but also the relation between this most denigrated of occupations and “normal” human erotic behavior and attitudes.

Consistently nonjudgmental about the material he presents, Dr. Stoller nevertheless draws provocative conclusions about porn, its practitioners, and its effects on society. Everyone at work on a porn production, he says, uses it as a vehicle for unloading his or her rage against something―mores, institutions, laws, parents, females, or males. According to Dr. Stoller, pornography does not exist only to degrade women, there is no reliable evidence that it increases the frequency of rape, and (with the exception of child porn) it does little harm. Pornography, says Dr. Stoller, seems more the result of our changing society than a cause of change; it reflects, more than influences, our values and mores.