Joseph Hawkins:
Over the past ten years pornography has rarely been out of the headlines. An ever-growing number of pressure groups have sought to outlaw soft-core material from newsagents' shelves by pointing to ‘new' and ‘conclusive' evidence of links between consumption of pornography and discrimination against women, sex crimes and demand for ‘snuff' movies.
Bill Thompson takes these pressure groups and their claims to task, demonstrating not only that they are misleading the public about the clinical research but that their true aim extends far beyond outlawing sexual images.
Drawing upon his extensive knowledge of research into the effects of pornography and the history of anti-pornography crusades, Thompson reveals that soft-core pornography has invariably been given a clean bill of health and that the current clean-up crusade has as its ultimate aim the inhibition of women's sexual expression. In doing so he raises awkward questions about sections of the women's movement, the media coverage of the issue, and why the major political parties were willing to consider further censorship of sexually oriented materials.
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