ABSTRACT

In a more perfect world, we’d have a right to expect pornography to resist the demands of fashion. After all, the product affects components that are beyond our power to change, and as for the packaging, who cares for the length of a hemline that will presently be trampled underfoot? And yet fashion does its busy work here as everywhere else, and for the same reasons: to improve the product, to make it seem more necessary, and (a perennial problem for pornographers) to make it look respectable. Two recent developments in the genre are particularly intriguing.