Culture April 9, 2013

To begin with the most obvious of philosophical questions, What is pornography? The problem of definition is well known and often invoked as part of the argument against the legal repression of pornographic materials. If we decide to censor, the worry goes, what will be the fate of works by artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Norman Mailer? What should be done about ad campaigns like those of Victoria’s Secret, which openly draw on soft-core tropes, and American Apparel, which invokes the semiotics of amateur “teen” hard-core sites? Won’t we have to censor more things than necessary? I encounter this