More than a case of mistaken identity: Adult entertainment and the making of early sexology

2020 ◽  
pp. 095269512090395
Author(s):  
Sarah Bull
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Public Writing ◽  
Mistaken Identity ◽  
Sex Research ◽  
Explicit Material ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sexually Explicit ◽  
Sexual Science ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship

Sexology emerged as a discipline during a period of keen concern about the social effects of sexually explicit media. In this context, sex researchers and their allies took pains to establish the respectability of their work, a process that often involved positioning sexual science in opposition to erotic literature and images. This article argues that this presentation of sexual science obfuscated sex researchers’ complex relationship with erotic print culture, which during the late 19th and early 20th centuries provided sexual scientists with access to explicit material that served as evidence for theories about human sexuality, facilitated transnational exchanges of sexual-scientific thought by bringing sex research across borders, and introduced sex research to wider audiences. Erotic print culture can thus be seen as one of several fields that contributed to the interdisciplinary development of sexology and facilitated the diffusion of sexual-scientific theories. Sex researchers’ shifting, often ambivalent relationship with erotic print and its producers emphasizes that while the boundaries of sexology were extremely porous, they were also heavily policed: Working to establish a modern, respectable new branch of science, sexual scientists reframed the output of other fields of enquiry as products of their own, blotted their reliance on these sources from the historical record, and denigrated them in public writing.

Does size matter? Genital self-image, genital size, pornography use and openness towards cosmetic genital surgery in 3662 Swedish men and women

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingvill Bagøien Hustad ◽  
Karin Malmqvist ◽  
Ekaterina Ivanova ◽  
Christian Ruck ◽  
Jesper Enander
Keyword(s):  
Cross Sectional Study ◽  
Sexually Explicit Material ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Genital Surgery ◽  
Labia Minora ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Explicit Material ◽  
Sexually Explicit ◽  
Pornography Use ◽  
Size Matter

This cross-sectional study investigated the distribution and characteristics of genial self-image in a large sample of males and females, and whether factors such as actual genial size (length of penis or protrusion of labia minora), consumption of sexually explicit material (SEM) or avoidance and safety seeking behaviors were associated with genital self-image. Overall, 3.6% of females and 5.5% of males suffered from a severely low genital self-image and 33.8% of all individuals reported dissatisfaction with the appearance of their genitalia, with 13.7% of females and 11.3% of males being positive towards undergoing cosmetic genital surgery. Mean protrusion of labia minora and stretched flaccid penis length in the population was estimated to 0.76 cm (95% CI 0.63-0.89 cm) and 12.5 cm (95% CI 12.33-12.76 cm), respectively. A better genital self-image was associated with having a larger penis or less protruding labia minora, but not associated with the degree of SEM consumption, although 93.6% of males and 57.5% of females had consumed SEM in the past three months. Avoidance and safety seeking behaviors were strongly correlated with a negative genital self-image. Considering this relationship, more research is warranted in the development of potential psychological interventions in order to alleviate genital dissatisfaction in individuals.

Magazines and the Making of America: Modernization, Community, and Print Culture, 1741–1860

2017 ◽  
Vol 91 (2) ◽  
pp. 377-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Student ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
Freshman Year ◽  
Loved One ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
One Year

Someone could go a long way toward telling the story of my life through its magazines: the Highlights my parents gave me, determined that my small self should be as entertained and enlightened as possible; my grandparents’ neatly collected Readers’ Digests, which I eagerly read until learning my freshman year in college that they were hopelessly bourgeois; the New Yorkers I loved and displayed in my graduate student apartment, the Vanity Fairs I loved and hid under the bed. Magazines tell the story of who I was supposed to be and who I wanted to be. Or perhaps they don't; how much of what the magazines meant to me is visible in the historical record? I didn't purchase all that I read, after all, nor did I read all that I purchased. A magazine I loved one year might embarrass me the next, and then find its way back into favor, my subscription all the while remaining unchanged. Magazines, in short, are both perplexing and promising subjects of analysis, with the question of how they create communities of readers posing perhaps the most promising and perplexing question of all.

PRINT CULTURE AND ITS PUBLICS: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF BOOKSTORES IN TEHRAN, 1900–1950

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Afshin Marashi
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Technological Changes ◽  
Political Empowerment ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

AbstractThis article investigates the evolution of print culture and commerce in Tehran during the first half of the 20th century. The first section examines technological changes that facilitated the commercialization of texts and then details the history of early print entrepreneurs in the Tehran bazaar. The second section examines the expansion of the book trade between the 1920s and 1940s, tracing the emergence of modern bookstores in a rapidly changing Tehran. I argue that patterns of change in print commerce between 1900 and 1950 contributed to the emergence of mass culture by midcentury. This new mass culture involved the social and political empowerment of a diversity of new reading publics in the city, and enabled the emergence of new forms of popular politics.

Advertising Women: Gender and the Vendor in the Print Culture of the Medical Marketplace, 1660–1830

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara M. Benedict
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
The Public ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
The Social ◽  
Public World ◽  
Medical Marketplace ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Ambiguous Position

This essay asks when and how did early periodical advertisements identify or solicit consumers by gender? In response to this question, Barbara Benedict analyses the representations and self-representation of women medical practitioners (physicians and apothecaries) and the female body in handbills and newspaper advertisements from 1650 to 1751. It argues that the rough-and-tumble world of advertisement provided women with opportunities to capitalise on their gendered physicality, despite the social and gender prejudices this move entailed. Benedict illuminates how medical ads by women physicians occupy an ambiguous position as simultaneously participants in the public world, the printed marketplace, and as privileged or limited by their special connection to domesticity, and particularly to the body. Print, the essay concludes, enabled early female medical practitioners to compete in the medical marketplace.

Persevering through Colonial Transition: Nazareth's Palestinian Residents after 1948

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 8-23
Author(s):  
Leena Dallasheh
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
National Minority ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
The Ideal

Nazareth, the only Palestinian city to survive the 1948 war intact, became the social, economic, and political hub of Palestinian life in the postwar period. As such, it provides the ideal setting to study early Palestinian responses to the creation of Israel. This paper reexamines the ambivalent relationship between Nazareth's political leadership and the newly established State of Israel to argue that the Palestinian citizens of Israel were neither traitors and collaborators, on the one hand, nor passively quiescent, on the other. Rather, as a new national minority, Palestinians overcame myriad forms of control as they negotiated the structural obstacles placed before them by their new overlords. Local Communist politicians, in particular, took a leading role to advocate on behalf of Nazarenes beset by the day-to-day hardships of poverty, hunger, displacement, and unemployment. The Israeli authorities harped on the Communist threat in response, echoing the Cold War rhetoric of the time.

Pornography as a US Public Health Problem

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Emily F. Rothman
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Public Health Problem ◽  
The United States ◽  
Coalition Building ◽  
Public Health Approach ◽  
Sexually Explicit Material ◽  
Sexually Transmitted ◽  
Dating Abuse ◽  
Explicit Material ◽  
Sexually Explicit

Pornography is being indicted as a public health crisis in the United States and elsewhere, but the professional public health community is not behind the recent push to address pornography as a public health threat. While pornography may not be contributing directly to mortality or acute morbidity for a substantial percentage of people, it may be influencing other public health problems, such as sexual violence, dating abuse, compulsive behavior, and sexually transmitted infections. However, the evidence to support pornography as a causal factor is mixed, and there are numerous other factors that have more strongly established associations with these outcomes of interest. Throughout history, repressive forces have inflated the charges against sexually explicit material in order to advance a morality-based agenda. Nevertheless, a public health approach and tried public health practices, such as harm reduction and coalition-building, will be instrumental to addressing the emergence of mainstream Internet pornography.

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