1. the Process of Creating Ever-More Dazzling and Appealing Consumer Settings Is What Ritzer Has Called “Enchanting a Disenchanted World” (Ritzer 2005)
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NOTES CHAPTER 1 1. The process of creating ever-more dazzling and appealing consumer settings is what Ritzer has called “enchanting a disenchanted world” (Ritzer 2005). This process is not limited to everyday items of consumption but extends as well to the world of erotica and pornography. As just one example, early pornographic stag films, which were produced in the first half of the twen- tieth century, were crudely made, grainy, often with barely discernible images. Today’s pornography films, while not necessarily cinematographic works of art, are generally slickly filmed and cleverly marketed; the porn film is increasingly “enchanted.” 2. A few planned shopping centers were created in the decades before World War II, but the first modern shopping mall was created in Edina, Minnesota, in 1956. It was Victor Gruen who conceived of the “intro- verted” mall, which was distinctive because the entrances and windows of the stores faced inward to an enclosed mall rather than outward toward the parking areas (Gladwell 2004). 3. Despite the general acceptance of Victoria’s Secret window displays, occa- sionally their decorators overstep the bounds of acceptance. In 2005, the Victoria’s Secret store in a Northern Virginia shopping mall created some shopper outrage, which led to newspaper and television stories. The win- dow display went “over the top” with female mannequins that were barely dressed and in provocative poses (Dwyer 2005). The ensuing discourse about this display is an early illustration of how those who are offended by sexual displays and materials often add to the attention directed toward them. The next chapter will elaborate on how opponents of sexual mate- rial, erotica, and pornography add to the level of discourse about subjects they oppose. 4. A more extreme interpretation of how many American women, especially young women, have accepted the idea of sexually displaying their bodies can be found in Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (Levy 2006). 5. Exotic shoes are a version of what Marilyn Monroe once famously called, “Come f... me” shoes. 6. Hustler magazine routinely encloses DVDs featuring hard-core sex. 220 NOTES 7. This title is not to be confused with Janet Hobhouse’s book of the same name (Hobhouse 1988). 8. For a sociological analysis of Hooters, see Meika Loe’s article describing the intersection of power, gender, and sexuality in the world of “Bazooms” (an obvious code name for Hooters) (Loe 1996). A less-scholarly exposé of Hooters is April Pederson’s book What About Hooters? (Pederson 1998). 9. Even the highly touted cleanup of Times Square in New York City was largely accomplished by changes in the zoning laws. Even though Times Square has been cleaned up, pornography shops and strip clubs have simply moved a few blocks away from Times Square where they thrive today (Richburg 2008). 10. In a public appearance in New York City, Baudrillard was asked to sum up his view of himself and his life’s work. He answered cryptically, “What I am, I don’t know. I am a simulacrum of myself” (MacFarquhar 2005, 64). 11. Baudrillard’s most recent book, The Conspiracy of Art (2005), even argues that art, which by its very nature is an image or representation of reality, is not reality, or as he puts it, is not “truth” (MacFarquhar 2005). 12. Thompson (1994) has reached a conclusion similar to ours about erotica and pornography in his book Soft Core: Moral Crusades against Pornography in Britain and the United States. CHAPTER 2 1. For a recent journalistic book with the title Sex Sells, see Streitmatter 2004. 2. While the “Women of Russia” have a certain pornographic cachet on the Internet, many of the models on these Web sites come from other Eastern European countries, especially Hungary (Milter and Slade 2005). 3. In 1992, the Naked Maja by Goya was the cause of a contretemps at Pennsylvania State University, when a female instructor objected to a repro- duction of this painting hanging on a classroom wall. The picture was removed from the classroom and banned from all other classrooms at Penn State (Strossen 1995). 4. Foucault makes a similar point when he notes that elite males have been most likely to have sexual access to boys. 5. Even in the twenty-first century, legislatures and courts in a number of states are still debating whether or not two consenting adults may engage in sodomy, which includes anal and oral sex either by persons of the same or the opposite sex. 6. It should be noted, however, that the first book Gutenberg printed with his new invention was a Christian Bible. CHAPTER 3 1. When Attorney General Ashcroft resigned, the new attorney general quietly had the draperies removed from in front of the statuary (Eggen 2005). On the occasion of Ashcroft’s resignation, President Bush praised him for his NOTES 221 success in fighting Internet pornography (http://nytimes.com/2004/11/10/ politics/10cabinet), although most observers could not discern any decrease in Internet pornography during the Ashcroft years. 2. A vestige of the Comstock crusade to suppress sex still survived as late as 1946 when seventy-year-old John Sumner, Comstock’s successor as the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, stopped the sale of Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County. Wilson was America’s most-renowned literary critic at the time (Meyers 1995). 3. Because of Joyce’s writing style, it is difficult to capture in a few brief excerpts the sexuality of his Ulysses, but anyone who has read the novel will not forget Molly Bloom’s orgasmic soliloquy in the final pages of the book (Max 2006). 4. In an earlier era (1955), Senator Estes Kefauver held Senate hearings to investigate whether or not pornography contributed to juvenile delin- quency (Slade 2000a, 150). No apparent causal link was found. 5. Today, 7-Eleven and many other convenience, magazine, and book stores sell Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, and various other sexually oriented magazines. 6. In her personal life, Dworkin had an unorthodox relationship with her long-time partner John Stoltenberg, who is also an outspoken critic of pornography. Both Dworkin and Stoltenberg are primarily oriented toward same-sex relationships. 7. Father Hill served on the 1970 Presidential Commission on Pornography. 8. Rice Hughes made a brief appearance on a January 2006 ABC evening news show, speaking in support of the Child Protection Act, the legislation designed to protect children from seeing pornography on the Internet. CHAPTER 4 1. Millet’s American publisher is Grove Press, which, since the 1950s has had a history of publishing sexually explicit books. Grove Press will be described in more detail later in the chapter. 2. In April 2006, Hefner reached his 80th birthday, an event that was noted in many major American publications (Gentile 2006). 3. The film The People vs. Larry Flynt, starring Woody Harrelson, concentrates on the story of Flynt’s crusade for freedom of the press. 4. Goldstein was assisted by Penn Jillette of the Penn and Teller magician act. Jillette’s financial help allowed Goldstein to escape from homelessness and land a job at New York City Bagel selling bagels to retail outlets (Paumgarten 2005). More recently, Goldstein was reported to be out of work again. 5. Through the 1930s and into the 1940s many of Esquire’s cartoons were blatantly sexist, and some were crudely racist. 6. Helmut Newton was a pioneer in sexual fashion photography, and through- out his career, his photographs mixed edgy sex with fashion (Newton 2002). Newton died in an automobile accident in Los Angeles in 2004. 7. As but one example, in the January 2008 issue, Judith Thurman begins with a full-page photograph of the female photographer Lee Miller in the 222 NOTES nude. This classic photo was taken by Man Ray. 8. Two recent examples: A story by Singer (2008) described a cross-dressing beauty contest in an Omaha, Nebraska, gay-male bar, a second article is about the female photographer Lee Miller by Thurman (2008), which fea- tures a full-page nude photograph of Miller. The photo was taken by Man Ray, her lover at the time. 9. D. H. Lawrence once offered a surprisingly negative assessment of pornog- raphy, despite the fact that many people considered his writing pornographic. Lawrence, somewhat cryptically said: “you can recognize [pornography] by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit” (Hyde 1965, 20). 10. This book was seized by the Philadelphia police and the bookseller was charged with selling obscene books. The charges were later dropped, but the accompanying publicity greatly increased the sales of Robbins’s book. 11. This assessment is in no way meant to minimize the importance of many of Roth’s other novels, including the highly acclaimed Zuckerman books: Zuckerman Unbound (1981) and Zuckerman Bound (1985). 12. Dailey’s productivity is somewhat tarnished by the fact that in 1997 she admitted plagiarizing from another very successful romance novelist, Nora Roberts (Regis 2003, 161). 13. Comic books of the standard 8 1/2 x 11 format date back to 1938 when two high school students sold the idea for Superman to DC Comics for one hun- dred and thirty dollars. Along with superheroes, comics have also been inclined toward the humorous (Archie and Donald Duck, for example). CHAPTER 5 1. Even though Kinsey contributed greatly to the organization and popular- ity of the marriage course, within two years he was forced to withdraw from teaching his unit on sex. His teaching material in the course and the interviews with students about their sexual lives (as well as his counseling on sexual matters) had made Kinsey a lightening rod for opposition.