At Home with Pornography

Book excerpt: Juffer demonstrates how women's consumption of erotica and porn for their own pleasure can be empowering while simultaneously reinforcing conservative ideals. She shows, for instance, how the Victoria's Secret catalog functions as a kind of pornography whose popularity is enhanced by both its reliance on Victorian themes of secrecy and privacy and by its appeals to the pleasures of modern career women. In her pursuit to understand what women like and how they get it, Juffer delves into adult cable channels, erotic literary anthologies, sex therapy guides, cyberporn, masturbation, and sex toys, showing the degrees to which these materials have been domesticated for home consumption.