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orangejenny's review against another edition
2.0
Not bad, but densely academic in some places and overall fairly dated. Bad luck to publish a book about pornography just before the internet arrived. A good deal of the the book argues against the anti-porn feminism of the 80s championed by Dworkin and MacKinnon, which makes it feel even older than it is. That said, the chapter on fat porn is still highly relevant, and a lot of the questions raised are still valid, even though porn isn't a big part of the current culture wars.
corey's review
People seem to like this book. Kipnis has some interesting insights into the semiotics of pornography, but the problem is that in order for her semiotic analysis to matter, Catherine Mackinnon and Andrea Dworkin have to be wrong. I'm not convinced they are, despite some brief arguments against those two in this book.
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