Under the circumstances, pornography could be restricted under obscenity laws because it was alleged to have no political content of any kind and therefore was not "expression" as such. Even as restrictions on sexual material were being lifted in the 1950s and 1960s, and social science had begun to take a less negative view of masturbation, pornography was still seen as, at best, "empty calories." ¶ Feminists generally had a negative view of...

While paedophilia causes growing hysteria in the west, the Japanese, even in public, read comic books featuring schoolgirls in pornographic poses. Does it make any difference that it's just ink and paper? ¶ A visitor to Japan might be surprised to see a grown man sitting on the train flicking through a comic hook the size of a telephone directory. The visitor might be more surprised still to glance across and see violent pornographic scenes...

WHAT'S BEHIND THE ESCALATING TREND? ¶ AS we head into the new millennium, marrying mitt dating across cultural lines seem to be increasing at record rates. ¶ Almost anywhere you go these days, you will encounter mixed-race couples: at the grocery store, the mall, the theater, at a company function, at: a concert, even at church. And while for years the Black man-White woman couple was more prevalent, today many social observers say that...

MAKING her first trip to the new South Africa, best-selling author Terry McMillan (How Stella Got Her Groove Back) inhaled and exhaled, giving new and revealing details of her art-imitating-life love affair. Speaking with unusual frankness and emotion, she said that she and Jonathan Plummer, the young man she met on a Jamaican beach in much the same way that Stella met her younger lover, are happy for now, but that she is realistic and realizes that the...

GIRLS GONE WILD, THE ENORMOUSLY popular video series in which young women are coaxed into peeling off their clothes, advertises itself as "Raw! Real! Uncut!" In titles like Girls Gone Wild: Craziest Frat Parties and Girls Gone Wild: Ultimate Spring Break, gifts who resemble people you might know--in other words, not supermodels--flash their breasts and yank aside their thongs. All they're offered in return is a little flattery ("Keep going! You're doing...

"Not even a ship under full sail is as beautiful as a young boy's ass." ¶ Latin inscription over the entrance to a ruined villa outside Rome ¶ IF PROSTITUTION is the world's oldest profession, pornography is surely one of its oldest pleasures. The Greeks and Romans were certainly aficionados, as Greek vase painting and the frescos at Pompeii attest. Imagine offering a guest a cup of wine which, once drained, showed...

Narrating the unionization of San Francisco's Lusty Lady Theater, Julia Query's first-person documentary tells how she and her stripper coworkers organized, gained recognition, and bargained their first contract between 1996 and 1997. The film illustrates how direct action as well as guidance from Service Employees International Union landed the strippers recognition and an agreement about working conditions. Sometimes titillating and sometimes...

ON a warm and breezy Georgia morning, a tall, toned and down-to-earth Tyler Perry swaggers onto the front porch of his grand palace, dressed to the nines. The 34-year-old new-school playwright, who has, he says, made over $50 million writing and producing plays for the urban theater circuit, says that his 12-acre estate, nestled some 25 minutes outside of Atlanta, is a brick-and-mortar testament to the rewards of faith. Perry should know; in the...

00-00-0000 Safer Sex and the Polyamorous Lesbian ¶ Journal of Lesbian Studies, 01-01-1999 ¶ SUMMARY. In recent years, concern about transmission of AIDS and other STDs has prompted people of all sexual orientations to use various safer sex techniques. This article...

To the Editor: ¶ After reading "Straight Pen for Gay Men" by Karen Thomas, I felt compelled to let people know that the phenomenon of heterosexual women writing graphic porn about male-male sex is not really all that unusual, at least in the world of amateur fan writing. ¶ Beginning on a large scale with the original TV Star Trek, fans of the show wrote their own stories set in that universe. It didn't take too...