Porn.com: Making Sense of Online Pornography

Pornography has always been central to debates about sex and emerging new media technologies. Today, debate is increasingly focused on online pornographies. This collection examines pornography's significance as a focus of definition, debate, and myth; its development as a mainstream entertainment industry; and the emergence of the new economy of Porn 2.0, and of new types of porn labor and professionalism. It looks at porn style behind the scenes of straight hardcore, in gay, lesbian, and queer pornographies, in shock sites, and in amateur erotica, and investigates the rise of the online porn fan community, the sex blogger, the erotic rate-me site and the visual cultures of swingers. Treating these developments as part of a broader set of economic and cultural transformations, this book argues that new porn practices reveal much about contemporary and competing views of sex and the self, the real and the body, culture, and commerce.

The Editor: Feona Attwood teaches media and communication studies at Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom. Her research interests include new pornographies, online sex practices, and controversial images. She is the editor of Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture (2009) and the co-editor of two journal special issues: «Controversial Images» (with Sharon Lockyer, Popular Communication, 2009) and «Researching and Teaching Sexually Explicit Media» (with I.Q. Hunter, Sexualities, 2009).