Kind Of Blue Carrying on from Spike’s recent po…
Kind Of Blue
Carrying on from Spike's recent porn articles , I found another couple of worthwhile related books while hunting around my somewhat chaotic shelves.
Blue Period is Nicholas Whittaker's account of his time working on English girlie mags such as Fiesta, Razzle and the like. It's an amusing and typically British puncturing of the glamour myth which surrounds such publications - dealing with acres of naked flesh soon loses its appeal amongst the madness of deadlines and shoestring budgets.
Whittaker is refreshingly honest about his own liberal guilt concerning his work and raises issues about exploitation but inevitably, you won't find a Andrea Dworkin-esque condemnation here. I'd make Dworkin's Pornography a compulsory text I reckon, just to see how twisted hate and logic can become - truly one of the most appalling books ever published under the guise of academia.
More intelligent and certainly more reasonable is the short and sweet Pornography And Feminism from Feminists Against Censorship - featuring, you guessed it, consise and cogent arguments about why censorship sucks and porn doesn't really destroy people. Unfortunately the book is out of print, but it's well worth tracking down - there's more info about the book and the issues on the FAC website.
On a lighter note, That's Sexploitation! is a glossy photobook packed full of saucy film stills and poster pictures from the history of the sex film - Babs Windsor included. The text is well-researched and written, but it's undoubtedly the treasure trove of pictures that make this difficult to find book tracking down - not for their erotic appeal necessarily but just for the audacity of some of the innuendo that enterprising sex film publicists managed to get away with in earlier times.
Personally, all I want is a copy of How To Be A Porn Star. Purely for research purposes, natch.
