As stated in the editor's introduction, the topic of this collection of essays is the use of music and sound in ‘feature-length cinema in which sexuality is central’ (p. 1). Chapters are largely arranged chronologically according to subject matter, mapping out a development associated with increasing sexual liberation and the gradual removal of censorship from the 1960s onwards. Together, these essays map out roughly half a century of shifting sonic practices in connection with the cinematic representation of sexuality. The collection thus forms an attempt to remedy the general visual bias of pornographic/erotic-film scholarship, an area where the ‘lack of attention to sound [which] exemplifies the more general neglect of aural cultures in favour of the visual’ (p. 1) seems to have been particularly pronounced.

With the exception of the first essay, Bruce Johnson's ‘ethnographic’ study based on interviews with Ole Ege (pioneering Danish producer of erotic film in the 1960s and early 1970s), all the chapters of the collection deal with the analysis of the use of music and sound either in more or less well defined cinematic subgenres or in individual films. What may initially appear somewhat surprising is that none of the essays has very much to say about the sonic practices of the contemporary mainstream of ‘hardcore’ porn cinema, a dominant genre in terms of quantity of production. The explanation for this state of things is made explicit in the contribution by Philip Hayward, coining the expression ‘sex muzak’ for ‘the standardization of musical grooves that emerged in sex cinema from the 1990s on’ (p. 120). Focus is thus placed on emergent codes of representation or hybridising experimentation with such codes, rather than on established and stable genre-defining practices.

Chapters focusing on genre studies include an essay by Mark Evans on Russ Meyer's ‘sexploitation’ films of the 1960s and 1970s. Here it is demonstrated how the use of music, sound effects and manipulation of vocal sound play a vital part in the construction of effects of comedy and satire in these films, effects normally incompatible with pornography. Two essays by Philip Hayward (one of them in collaboration with Emil Stoichkov) deal with music and sound design in films combining science fiction themes and representations of sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s and the soundtracks of science fiction-themed porn cinema in the period 1990–2010. Ralph G. Marsh analyses the music and soundscapes of 21st-century ‘zombie porn’ films, ‘an emergent proto-genre’ (p. 217) with distinct connections to hard rock styles and rock culture. The hypothesis formulated by Hayward and Stoichkov may serve to summarise a main point of all these genre studies: ‘the future of sonic experimentation in mainstream porn will be limited (…) the specialist fringes of the porn industry can be seen to be (…) more experimental – playful even – in their uses of sound and music’ (p. 136, emphasis in original).

Chapters dealing with individual films include a number of studies of films from the 1970s, illustrating the gradual stretching of the limits for permissible representations of sexuality in mainstream cinema. Lesly Chow analyses the use of music and sound in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972), as well as in this director's later films The Last Emperor (1987) and The Sheltering Sky (1990). The construction of sound in 1970s representations of S/M – Just Jaeckin's Story of O and Joe Davian's House of de Sade (both 1975) – is discussed by Clarice Butkus. Here, the crucial role of sound in the construction of gendered representations of sexuality is emphasised, the pleasure/pain ambiguity of female vocal sounds serving to illustrate the 1970s conflict between sexual liberation and feminist liberation. The one essay dealing with a non-Western film is James Wierzbicki's analysis of Nagisi Oshima's Ai no korida (In the Realm of the Senses, 1976). Wierzbicki argues that this film, at the time received in the West as a rather notoriously pornographic production, actually ‘probably ranks high among the most understood films of recent decades’ (p. 90), its focus on specifically Japanese cultural concerns passing unnoticed by Western audiences in spite of being underlined by the film's use of traditional Japanese music, rather than a mainstream Hollywood-type underscore.

Among the essays dealing with more recent films is Laura Wiebe Taylor's discussion of the use of music in Gregory Dark's New Wave Hookers (1985), a film situated in the ‘hardcore porn’ genre (but hardly its mainstream). Taylor demonstrates how this film draws on the subcultural values of punk/new wave, featuring a ‘semi-sophisticated self-conscious irony and satire’ (p. 153) which, however, ‘may be as superficial as its hipness’ (p. 153). Liz Giuffre analyses the use of music and sound in Mary Harron's The Notorious Betty Page (2005) and Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997), two mainstream films which feature pornography as their subject matter without showing it visually. Giuffre argues that the use of popular music here is made to function ‘as a substitute for the visual depiction of pornography (…) but also creating a level of character and narrative detail not normally evident in traditional pornography’ (p. 160). Following a discussion of the music in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999) by Kevin Clifton, two essays deal with 21st-century films representing recent cinematic genre hybrids. Andrea Warren performs an analysis of Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs (2004), a film straddling several genres (concert film/pornographic film/documentary) in an ambiguous combination. John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus (2006), a non-pornographic erotic film where ‘sex functions as a device to connect characters emotionally’ (p. 203), is discussed by Marianne Tatom Letts, who demonstrates the importance of the use of pre-existing popular songs in the film's soundtrack to create in the audience a sense of inclusion and participation.

The historical development outlined in this collection is one of a dialectic between experiment and codification: early experimentation with genre conventions is followed by the gradual establishment of the codes of new cinematic genres, which in their turn are manipulated to produce new hybrids. In this respect, pornographic/erotic cinema presents patterns of development familiar from other forms of popular culture. More importantly, however, these essays clearly demonstrate the important functions of music and sound in cinematic representations of sex and, in particular, in the representation of gendered power relations in this context. Johnson argues in the editor's introduction that in cinema, ‘[m]ale sexual pleasure is confirmed visually, female sexuality is represented sonically’ (p. 7) and several of the essays discuss the consequences of this opposition between visual explicitness and aural ambiguity. Taken as a whole, the collection demonstrates the crucial role played by music and sound in the construction of emotional, moral and cultural meanings in cinematic representations of sexuality, and it also provides an important corrective to vague, casual and non-committing arguments centred on homologies between musical and sexual behaviour and experiences.