Carolyn Bronstein

On her book Battling Pornography: The American Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement, 1976-1986

Cover Interview of September 26, 2011

Comments

September 30, 2011

This is my favorite from last question:
“liberating for sexual minorities who might otherwise have trouble finding one another as well as erotic materials that feature their preferred practices. But, for many others, the prevalence of pornography contributes to a gloomy and dehumanized view of sexuality.”
Can one say more about the good of it?

history / media studies / violence / gender / justice / 20th century / sexuality / feminism / advertising / music /

Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.

Daryn Lehoux,
Interview of November 13, 2017

It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.

Christopher Rea,
Interview of October 26, 2016