Chapter 3 reads Vladimir Nabokov’s banned, belle-lettristic best-seller Lolita as a complex interrogation of the presiding sexual, legal, and literary critical formalisms of the postwar period. Nabokov’s pathological protagonist, Humbert Humbert, attempts to produce the compliant literary and legal confession of a pedophile. His account requires that he characterize his sexual subjectivity as fixed and antecedent to the forbidden class of objects (children or, in his own rarefied taxonomy, nymphets) for which he has an unnatural desire. But his fine-grained account of his desire for Lolita cannot successfully repress, indeed depends on, a more fluid and relational erotic dynamic: his confession must simultaneously deny and rely on Lolita’s own position as sexual agent in order to illuminate his desire and his deeds. Likewise, the literary loyalty oaths taken by the novel’s formalist defenders (including Nabokov himself) and moralist detractors alike contain kindred contradictions. Ultimately the failure of these legal and literary confessions served to reveal the unsustainability of the oppositions – morality/aesthetics, natural desire/perversion, ordinary subjectivity/monstrosity – on which the concept of the postwar desiring subject was predicated.

This chapter proposes to show that reading Martin Amis’s representation of women in his London Trilogy today raises a number of issues related to the elusive nature of the author’s voice and values in the text. In Money and London Fields in particular, the violence women are submitted to by the male narrators and characters, even though partaking of the satire Amis brushes upon British society in the 1980s, tends to systematically portray women as victims. However, it must not be forgotten that Amis also introduces a number of female figures of relative empowerment in his novels, whose various forms of agency (murderees, authors, femmes fatales) are worth pointing out. The question as to the reality of this agency has to be raised, however, in the context of the general economy of the simulacrum which Amis’s novels denounce and promote. If Amis’s carnivalesque satires leave nothing unscathed and celebrate the death of all great narratives, how can the feminist narrative be applied to them? It seems that Amis’s own beliefs in the powers and of language and language games provide a key to beginning to answer this question.

This chapter analyses the function of pornographic material in Amis’s framing of masculinism in London Fields and Yellow Dog. It emphasises elements of alignment of Amis’s satirical mode with two major late twentieth-century theoretical contributions: feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon’s criticism of heterosexual male-oriented pornography as an instrument of coercion and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s theorisation of ‘imposture’ as a core component of male heterosexual desire as constructed in patriarchy. The chapter further supports my assessment, in prior contributions, that Amis’s discursive techniques denounce heterosexual male-oriented pornographic discourse and practice as insidious ways for masculinist power to thrive under contemporary rule-of-law regimes. It also stresses the continued relevance of Amis’s critical framing of masculinism in a contemporary socio-political environment increasingly dominated by small but powerful extreme right interest groups whose representatives, from ‘manosphere’ social media gurus to heads of state, behave and sound eerily like Amis’s masculinist focalisers.

Despite being a writer who was celebrate for transcending the written word to work in multiple forms of media, Burroughs remains underrecognized for his contributions to the art of cinema, especially as a screenwriter. This chapter explores the history of Burroughs’ engagement with cinema, highlighting his neglected, and unrealized, screenplays from the late 1960s and 1970s. After exploring his 1960s collaborations with Antony Balch on the cut-up films, Towers Open Fire and The Cut-Ups, this chapter traces the arc of Burroughs’ screenwriting, from his earliest film treatment, “Twilights Last Gleamings,” his closet screenplay, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, his screen adaptation of his novel, The Wild Boys, and his screenplay, Blade Runner: A Movie. After situating these works within the changing field of American cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s, this chapter considers Burroughs’ theoretical contributions to screenwriting in his lectures on the subject at the City College of New York and Naropa College in the mid-1970s. Through this overview of Burroughs’ screenwriting and thinking, this chapter argues that Burroughs’ remains neglected for offering a valuable vision of an alternate cinema at a crucial time in American culture and history.

American morality standards traditionally dictated restrictions on erotica featuring nudity and sex. Early twentieth century pornography only circulated in marginal spaces — brothels and all-male gatherings. But the new Kodak camera fueled amateur pornography, and, despite Hollywood’s self-censorship, adult “exploitation” films grew. In postwar America, pornography emerged from the shadows. Obscenity laws and their enforcement weakened, and Hollywood relaxed its censorship as acceptance of sex imagery grew. Porn bookstores and foreign or “art” films featuring nudity increased in downtown sex districts. Risqué novels, Playboy, and beefcake magazines addressing gay subculture became popular. Sexually explicit films starting with Deep Throat (1972) achieved notoriety and commercial success. By the 1980s, however, urban renewal gentrified porn districts while videotape and cable TV shifted pornography to homes and privacy, increasing pornography’s audience. The Internet merely proliferated at-home pornography. As pornography expanded, so did public opposition in a feminist anti-pornography movement allied with Christian conservatives

This chapter argues that the decade of the 1810s, especially when understood as ‘the Regency’, reflects a vision of time as static and repetitive, resistant to what Walter Benjamin famously called ‘homogenous, empty time’. To this end, this chapter looks at an unusual textual archive, nineteenth-century flagellation pornography. Two works are analysed with differing connections to the decade: Venus School-Mistress, probably published in 1810, and The Rodiad, written in 1871 but masquerading as a text of the 1810s. Comparing these two texts – one an authentic product of the period, the other an erotic antiquarian hoax – reveals not just the consistent temporal multiplicity of nineteenth-century pornography. It also demonstrates how the 1810s take on a paradoxical historiographical role as a specific example of the repetitive sameness of time. In so doing, the chapter aims to recast the idea of ‘the 1810s’ as a node of reactionary resistance to the temporality of liberal progress.

This chapter argues that contemporary memoirs by gay men about transactional sex challenge assumptions that commercial and noncommercial sex divide into separate spheres, and that sex can be cleanly differentiated from other, mundane practices. While these memoirs contain many unambiguous depictions of transactional sex, they also depict moments where transactional arrangements yield intimacies that are far more difficult to categorize. In addition, they raise questions regarding where the “sex” in the sex trade both ends and begins.

The final chapter focuses on the only Belgian who briefly pierced his country’s silence on sexual ‘inversion’ during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. In 1899, the internationally acclaimed author Georges Eekhoud published the most daring queer novel of the period. A charge of indecency against his explicitly homoerotic and class-transcending love story caused an uproar among Europe’s literary community. Celebrity authors, including Émile Zola, collectively screamed blue murder over this attempt to curtail the hallowed freedom of artistic expression. The trial that followed ended in triumph and Eekhoud seemed poised to become a standard-bearer of the budding transnational movement for homosexual rights. But at home, Eekhoud soon grew isolated and unhappy as leftists and artists alike shunned him for his association with such an odious issue. While the writer’s autobiographical writings and private diary offer a rich insight into the way sexology shaped his sexual sense of self, they also reveal how Belgium’s stifling culture of bourgeois respectability still buried homosexuality in shame during the early twentieth century, while Eekhoud’s Dutch and German allies were already pushing the matter successfully onto the public agenda.

Chapter 7, Be Careful about the Publisher, examines how the diverse sources, distribution networks, and audiences associated with sexology undermined Havelock Ellis’s attempts to frame his book on homosexuality with John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1897), as a serious medical work, and led to its appearance in the obscenity trial R. v. Bedborough (1898). Authorities charged Bedborough aiming to break up a radical group, but sexologists and their allies framed the trial as an ignorant attack on scientific progress. Elaborating on strategies pioneered by birth-controllers, they argued that the censorship of “naturalistic” sexual expression had mired society in sexual ignorance, fostering “abnormal” sexual behaviour and an appetite for pornography, the rightful target of obscenity laws. In positioning their own work as vital to society and pornography as a product of sexual science’s suppression, they obfuscated ways in which early sexologists relied on pornographers and their products. By examining sexologists’ attempts to navigate these issues, this chapter further demonstrates how arguments about obscenity were used tactically to sanitize sexual knowledge and its producers.

Chapter 1, Holywell Street Medicine, traces the pornography trade’s birth out of the collapse of revolutionary politics in the 1820s, and shows how early agents in the trade scavenged for content to fill lists of sexual material. This fostered a vibrant mid-century traffic in cheap reprints and reworkings of works on contraception, venereal disease, fertility, and midwifery alongside pornographic novels and prints, bawdy songbooks, and other sexual material, operating out of London’s Holywell Street and other thoroughfares near the Strand. While showing how these agents harnessed the expanding infrastructures of the press and the post to sell their wares works across the nation, this chapter demonstrates that they framed medical works through two different, but compatible, lenses. Following a long line of disreputable publishers, Holywell Street publishers framed medical works as titillating reading material. However, they also adapted earlier radical arguments for sex education and female sexual pleasure, marketing medical works as containers of practical information about the body that readers could apply to support safe, active, and pleasurable sex lives.

Chapter 4, Obscene… in a Certain Sense, shows how charges of obscenity were used against pornographers and irregulars during the 1850s and 1860s, amid landmark changes to obscenity law. In doing so, it introduces one of the book’s major arguments: that allegations of medical obscenity were usually tactical, and became increasingly imbricated in projects aimed at contesting medical authority. The most influential anti-vice group of the period, the Society for the Suppression of Vice, led a crackdown on the pornography trade during this period, which brought medical works into the courtroom, and some were destroyed on the grounds that they were obscene. The chapter parallels arguments that medical works could be obscene in court with tactics in the medical press. With mixed success, campaigns against “obscene quackery” attacked irregular practitioners who treated sexual issues by arguing that their manuals’ low prices and wide circulation made them a threat to public morals. The chapter ends with the 1868 formulation of the Hicklin test, a legal test of obscenity that affirmed that arguments examined in this chapter could justify the destruction of medical works.

• Clinical symptoms and brain changes seen in substance use disorders have also been observed in particular behaviours, leading to the concept of ‘behavioural addiction’.

• Gambling disorder and gaming disorder are now classified by the World Health Organisation alongside substance use disorders

• In the future other behaviours, such as harmful use of internet pornography, may join gaming and gambling disorders.

• Like substance use disorders, behavioural addictions can lead to harms for the individual including worsening mental health, social function and academic performance.

• Relatives, friends and others can also suffer consequences of behavioural addictions such as financial loss (with gambling disorder) and deteriorating relationships.

• The evidence on how best to treat behavioural addiction are still building, but approaches used for substance use disorders are typically recommended.

• Our relationships with our family members, friends, and romantic partners are important to our body image and can have both negative and positive effects on our sense of self.

• Developing friendships and romantic partnerships can be an important part of your life during your teens and adulthood and can open you up to feelings of vulnerability about your appearance; experiencing some stress surrounding the initiation of relationships is common.

• Maintaining healthy relationships can contribute to your positive body image development.

This chapter is a comprehensive history of sexually-explicit literature drawn from books banned and prosecuted in Asia and Europe, sixteenth to twentieth centuries. The prurient treatment of sexual violence and the lewd mockery of authority form part of this discourse, yet law and censorship denied its literary value, reduced all erotica to the most basic “obscenity” or mere “pornography” (literally, “whore-writing”), and sometimes put the author to death. (Paradoxically the cultures richest in sex-writing also suppressed it most fiercely.) Here is a more complex history, hybridizing multiple genres: manuals of sexual positions, courtesans” autobiography, satire against hypocrisy and repression, philosophies of mind, body, and desire – normally homoerotic, though in China and the West true knowledge of sexuality is represented as female, passed down by mistresses of the secret arts providing instructions for the wedding night (and beyond). The phallus was even gendered female. Libertinism continued to explore same-sex desire (especially in Italy and Japan), while its heteronormative branch dissociated sexuality from procreation, insisting that biological sex should be transformed into an art of aesthetic “transmutation”, urging women to pursue erotic pleasure as a supreme end in itself – centuries before contraception made this realistic. Feminocentric and masculinist perspectives intertwine.

The decades since the Second World War have seen dramatic shifts in the approved varieties of sexual experience in liberal democracies. Sexuality, once regarded as an intensely private matter, is now on display everywhere, on large and small screens. Effective contraception has made what was once primarily a procreative act into a form of recreation, available to both heterosexual and same-sex couples. From being regarded as a privilege of marriage in the 1950s, today access to sex might be regarded as a right. An extreme form of this belief might be seen in the “Incel” movement. Cohesive community ideals about sexuality within marriage disintegrated in the post-war world responding to growing demands to respect a diversity of individual desires. Democracies which hold to faith traditions promote a more traditional view of sex as contained within marriage. The promotion of a responsible sex life has become part of the commitment of many secular liberal democracies to ensure the health and welfare of citizens, particularly in light of AIDS and HPV. Countries have put laws in place to protect citizens from sexual abuse. The global nature of the digital realm, however, makes sexually exploitative visual material difficult to police.

This chapter deconstructs the history of erotic art from prehistory to the twenty-first century. Instead of holding as self-evident the meanings of “art” and “eroticism,” it traces a history of how and why some forms of representation have been deemed erotic and the ambiguities of “art” versus “pornography.” Four related phenomena are used as anchors to explore erotic art’s long history: script, sustained long-distance contact, print, and the use of lenses and photography. These relate in turn to three important dimensions of world history: networks, or physical and informational connections between different regions of the world; technologies, mainly the means for creating and circulating visual representations but also including the pivotal technology of contraceptives; and ideologies, or how sex, eroticism, and art are defined and regarded. Contemporary conceptions of erotic art are in many ways directly traceable to key paradigm shifts in sexuality that originated in cultural, intellectual, and material interactions since the early modern period (approximately the sixteenth century). Like human history generally, the history of erotic art has been riven by hierarchies – including gendered ones usually privileging the perspectives of men – exploitation, and violence. But artistic representations of sex have also challenged long-defended hegemonies.