What Makes Pornography "Sexy"?

As another reviewer noted, this book does little to address the question of the title. What it does do is describe in detail a "workshop" the author designed to offer men a different perspective on pornography. While the author clearly has personal opinions on the impact of pornography, he mostly keeps these to himself, as he says he does in his workshops.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/AY7FHXNP0MMOC/ref=cm_pdp_rev_title_1...

Stoltenberg created a workshop in which men imitate in detail the poses and facial expressions of models in pornographic magazines. Others watch and offer suggestions to accurately reproduce the pose. Participants then take part in a guided discussion to help understand the experience. Stoltenberg says show more having men assume these poses, and seeing other men do so (instead of women, who we are more accustomed to seeing) almost always brings about an entirely new way of understanding pornography and how it affects both the audience and the models.

This book would be most useful for a person or group planning to run such a workshop themselves, as Stoltenberg lays out in great detail every step of his process. In some ways, this is more a manual of such a workshop than anything else, with added description of the author's own experience of participants' reactions. show less

What makes pornography "sexy" to men? To help men answer that question for themselves, author/activist John Stoltenberg devised a unique workshop in which several men are selected at random and told to "do the pose" in a designated photograph from a magazine such as Penthouse, Playboy, or Hustler. Other workshop participants are invited to compare the poses to the photographs. With eye-opening results, participants then talk about how it felt to pose, and how it felt to watch.