Obscene Material Research Articles

SBMYv3: Improved MobYOLOv3 a BAM attention‐based approach for obscene image and video detection

AbstractCountless cybercrime instances have shown the need for detecting and blocking obscene material from social media sites. Deep learning methods (DLMs) outperformed in recognizing obscene content flooded on many online platforms. However, these contemporary DLMs primarily treat the recognition of obscene content as a simple task of binary classification, rather than focusing on the labelling of obscene areas. Hence, many of these methods could not pay attention to the fact that misclassification samples are so diverse. Therefore, this paper focuses on two aspects (i) developing a deep learning model that could classify and label the obscene portion, and (ii) generating a labelled obscene image dataset with a wide variety of obscene samples to minimize the risks of inaccurate recognition. We have proposed a method named S3Pooling based bottleneck attention module (BAM) embedded MobileNetV2‐YOLOv3 (SBMYv3) for automatic detection of obscene content using an attention mechanism and a suitable pooling strategy. The key contributions of our article are: (i) generation of a well‐labelled obscene image dataset with a variety of augmentation strategies using Pix‐2‐Pix GAN (ii) modifications to the backend architecture of YOLOv3 using MobileNetV2 and BAM to ensure focused and accurate feature extraction, and (iii) selection of an optimal pooling strategy, that is, S3Pooling strategy, while taking the design of the feature extractor into account. The proposed SBMYv3 model outperformed other state‐of‐the‐art models with 99.26% testing accuracy, 99.39% recall, 99.13% precision, and 99.13% IoU values respectively.

Crime against Women in Cyber World

Information technology is like two side edge of human development, progress and profit as well as humiliation, suppression and subjugation especially in related to women it get more spiky and spiny. The cyber world is a virtual reality where everyone conceals their own identity. There are several crimes known and an unknown to normal person who is mostly women get victimized. Several criminal like hackers, crackers, and stalkers have institute methods and measures to hamper with internet accounts got access to user’s computer system may stole the important data of the user. If user is women then crimes like harassment through mail, cyber stalking, cyber sex, cyber defamation, photo morphing, non-consensual pornography, child pornography, cyber bullying, cyber grooming, publishing obscene material in electronic form etc. Present article will highlight especially about the nature and category of cyber crimes which may take place against women while using internet. The most important is the kind of measures and technique, skills used by the criminals through which victim may easily trap. It also will discuss about procedure for remedy to the women when they trapped under these kind cybercrime and legal provision and procedural aspect to get redress of this kind of situation. It is very indispensable that what kind key measures will be functional for online safety while using the internet.

Serial Encounters: Ulysses and The Little Review by Clare Hutton

Reviewed by: Serial Encounters: Ulysses and The Little Review by Clare Hutton Joseph Brooker Serial Encounters: Ulysses and The Little Review. Clare Hutton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 288. $80.00 (cloth). We know Ulysses as a lengthy book, published in 1922 and then in numerous differing editions thereafter. Its bulky unity contributes to the sense of its monumental quality, an item designed to enter the modernist canon. Yet its first readers knew it as a serial: sections of text appearing alongside other items in a magazine. The first episode, nineteen pages long, opened the Little Review of March 1918. A small number of episodes were also published in the London-based Egoist magazine in 1919, but this venture was more halting, while the Little Review, once of Chicago and now of New York, steamed ahead. Later, longer episodes were spread across multiple issues. Episode thirteen, “Nausicaa,” occupied three issues in mid-1920, and led to the magazine’s editors being tried for publishing obscene material in February 1921. Consequently, the book (that is, “volume,” rather than serial) publication of Ulysses was an unusual enterprise, a limited edition published in Paris. The outlines of this story are familiar enough, but its critical consequences have taken time to be fully investigated. Critics have understandably focused on the volume publication and on the various, contested attempts to improve it—most notably Hans Walter Gabler’s in the mid-1980s. As Clare Hutton notes early on in Serial Encounters: “[U]ntil recent years readers have struggled to access this [magazine] version of Ulysses because original copies of the Little Review, printed on cheap and highly acidic paper, tend to be scarce, and only available in research libraries” (4). Yet, as she insists: “That a significantly different version of Ulysses was being published and read so long in advance of the work’s eventual completion is a fact of evident critical interest. After all, Ulysses as serialized in the Little Review is a text which Joyce consigned for publication, and not a manuscript which he might have thrown away” (4). This is a crucial rationale for Hutton’s book. Study of the Little Review text, she notes, has been abetted by the Modernist Journals Project’s publication of the entire run of the magazine online, and by the associated publication of The Little Review “Ulysses” by [End Page 853] Yale University Press in 2015, complete with valuable critical commentary. It is now far more feasible for any reader to assess the magazine text, typos and all; to compare it to the volume text; and to consider the place of Joyce’s writing amid the numerous other writings appearing alongside it in the magazine, and the cultural connotations that the Little Review might have lent to anything in its pages. Such is Hutton’s mission in Serial Encounters. Given the importance of both Ulysses and the Little Review to the development of English-language modernism, their conjuncture is an important critical topic. Hutton cites extant considerations of it including essays by David Weir and Amanda Sigler, but no other critic has come close to the scale of her inquiry.1 Serial Encounters is the closest thing we may ever need to a comprehensive account of the relations between Joyce and the magazine, discussed through a series of distinct approaches. Chapter one, “The World of the Little Review,” is an extensive account of the magazine itself: its locations in Chicago and New York; its shaky finances and appeals for support; its editors Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, their personalities and the shifting relationship between them; the political stances taken by the magazine in the context of the First World War; and its relations to significant contributors and influences such as Ezra Pound. The chapter also contains one of Hutton’s distinct archival discoveries, a four-page letter from Richard Aldington to Anderson describing his experiences fighting in the trenches (51–52). In a subsection called “Sample Copy,” Hutton takes the issues of September 1918 and July–August 1920 as case studies, situating Joyce’s contributions alongside others by W. B. Yeats and Djuna Barnes. These juxtapositions offer ways to imagine Joyce’s reception, in a...

Cast(e)ing and translating sex in the vernacular: the writings of Santram BA in Hindi

ABSTRACTSantram BA (1887–1998), a Shudra caste reformer, wrote several articles and books in Hindi on sex and birth control, including translations of Mary Stopes’ writings, in the early twentieth century. This article places Santram’s vernacular writings in a larger historical context of the growth of print, which facilitated the widespread production of so-called obscene material as a commodity. Santram’s writings not only contribute in creating an archive for the study of sexual sciences, they also help in addressing the vernacular as a significant, if ambivalent, site for the reproduction, transformation and contestation around matters of sex. The article argues that Santram straddled multiple terrains, as on the one hand he drew from classical works on kamashastra, referring to them as beneficial sexual sciences, and on the other he relied on western sexologists to underline pleasure and desire as important facets of modern sexual life. Using the medium of vernacular and translation, Santram created spatial-intimate spaces to celebrate sexual relationships, not only conjoining the private–public, but also opening up an ancillary terrain of textures of touch and sexuality and registers of transgressive sexual norms.

Newton Arvin and the Police: Contexts for The Scarlet Professor

Newton Arvin and the Police: Contexts for <i>The Scarlet Professor</i>

ETHIC CYBER STRENGTHENING ASCRIMINAL LAW POLICY FORMULATIONS IN RESPONSE CYBERPORN

&lt;p&gt;Cyber Porn is an act of using cyberspace to create, display, distribute, publish pornography and obscene material. Cyberspace with technology that carries pornography, so that pornography provides more feature-rich form of pornography, pornografipun experienced media translation and making pornography created with multi features. The lack of regulations on the provision of criminal sanctions for internet access service providers (ISP /Internet Service Provider)are not filtering out pornographic content so that they can be accessed internet users. Cyber ethics required for casting activity that is passed by internet users. Ideal criminal Legal policy of studies necessary legal substance of law reforms in the fight against cyberporn.&lt;/p&gt;

Difusión de contenido obsceno dentro del Horario de Protección al Menor en el Perú: Análisis del reality show Esto es Guerra

En el presente artículo se analiza el contenido que difunde Esto es Guerra, el reality show peruano con alto índice de preferencia en la audiencia infantil durante el 2014, acusado de transmitir escenas con contenido sexual. El objetivo de esta investigación es determinar si existen rastros de material obsceno en este bloque televisivo y si este transgrede el Horario de Protección al Menor, reconocido en el marco legal peruano. Su justificación se enmarca en la escasez de estudios que se han realizado sobre realities en el Perú, los constantes pedidos de la sociedad para que este programa deje de transmitirse y las sanciones que ha recibido de parte de organismos estatales. La metodología empleada se basa en un análisis de contenido de la séptima temporada de Esto es Guerra, en el que se tendrán en cuenta los mensajes que transmiten los conductores y participantes a través de su comportamiento. La investigación determinó que el reality show de competencia presenta segmentos que podrían ser considerados como obscenos, aunque su duración es muy limitada y no representativa en relación a todo el programa.

‘The Social Picture of Our Own Times’: Reading Obscene Magazines in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain: Table 1.

The market in what was regarded as obscene literature, 1940s and 1950s Britain was dominated by magazines containing female nudes and risque fiction. What can we know about the readers and consumers of this type of pornography before the 1960s? We can never have anything more than a very fragmentary picture of this market and its consumers owing to the nature of the archive. However, a police investigation from 1950 into the records of one dealer, along with other surviving fragments, do give us a hint about how some readers of this material responded to it. When confronted, they sought to justify their consumption and reading practices by dividing the obscene into categories that separated the harmless from the perverse. They rejected the latter category, even though they were interested in it. In that sense, the obscene shared elements with the wider culture of legal but erotic print that was characterized by a ‘naughty but nice’ ethos of what Peter Bailey has called the ‘parasexual’. By arguing that what they consumed was little different from that which appeared legally in the wider culture, producers and readers of obscene material justified and normalized their own reading of pornography.

Gatekeeper Liability and Article 19(1)(A) of the Constitution of India

This paper argues that access to information and free flow of information need to be seen as significant parts of our freedom of expression jurisprudence. In particular, it highlights the role played by information gatekeepers in the free circulation of information. Starting from Ranjit Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra in which the strict liability of gatekeepers was used to restrict the circulation of obscene material, up to the current system for government-ordered blocking of content by internet intermediaries in India, information gatekeepers are used to control information.Our freedom of expression norms need to take this into account in addition to their focus on the rights of primary speakers, since information gatekeepers gatekeepers can be used to censor speech in an opaque fashion that leaves little room for accountability.

The Impact of Sexual Media on Second Language Vocabulary Retrieval.

Both Islam and Christianity warn their adherents not to view or to display obscene matter. Aside from religious consequences in the afterlife for such behavior, this study was conducted to determine if viewing sexual media has a detrimental effect in earthly life. Adolescents (n = 64) 17-22 years were exposed to two types of visual stimuli containing sexual or neutral content for 30 min. The participants, seated in rooms with comfortable chairs and provided with snacks, were shown a selection of 18 German words via a PowerPoint slideshow, which included a picture, an audio recording, and the written form of each word. The experimental group, which was exposed to arousing visual stimuli with mild sexual content (movie trailers, music video clips, and TV commercials), remembered significantly fewer words than the control group, which viewed a nature documentary without sexual content. T-test scores revealed that exposure to sexually arousing media impaired memory for second language (L2) vocabulary. Apart from leading to dire consequences in the hereafter, the results of the study demonstrate that viewing obscene material also causes harm in this life.

Book Review: The FBI’s Obscene File: J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau’s Crusade against Smut, by Douglas M. Charles

The FBI's Obscene File: J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau's Crusade against Smut. Douglas M. Charles. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012. 200 pp. $24.95 hbk. plank: Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced. Indeed, in July of that year, the Daily Caller reported that a top adviser for Mitt Romney promised Patrick Trueman, current head of Morality in Media and former chief of the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, that if elected president, Romney would ramp up federal obscenity prosecutions after years of relaxed oversight.If Romney had prevailed and, in turn, made good on his promise, it certainly would not have been the first time that politicians, moralists, and federal law enforcement officials triangulated around sexually explicit expression during times of sociocultural shifts. Douglas M. Charles makes that abundantly clear in his fascinating and wellwritten new book, The FBI's Obscene File.Charles, assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania State University who describes himself in the preface as an FBI scholar, charts, in chronological fashion, a century of involvement and intervention by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with all varieties of sexual materials. These range from filthy images on playing cards to nudity in plays like Oh! Calcutta to sexual acts in movies like Deep Throat and even to the generally unintelligible lyrics of the Kingsman's song Louie Louie. Some of the more notable public figures who play prominent roles in The FBI's Obscene File include J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, and Charles Keating, the last of whom gained widespread attention in the 1980s not for his assault on sexual content, but for his role in the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association scandal.The centerpiece of the documentation from which Charles draws much of his material is the administrative portion of the FBI's Obscene File, which Charles obtained in redacted form via a Freedom of Information Act request. The other portion of the Obscene File, which was created in 1942 and eventually abandoned during the administration of President Bill Clinton and FBI head Louis Freeh, consisted of a vast library of sexually explicit material housed in the FBI's vaunted crime laboratory. The fact that the FBI possessed its very own large collection of pornography-it was so large that, on several occasions, parts of it had to be incinerated to make way for newer material-was always a source of potential embarrassment for the Bureau. One of the primary purposes of this collection of content was as a reference point against which to compare new specimens of obscene material to identify their sources.But the Obscene File was often misused and abused over the years by the FBI, from cracking down on the of African Americans during the 1940s-so-called race music featuring suggestive lyrics-to ferreting out gays in government service. …

Chaucerian Obscenity in the Court of Public Opinion

Chaucerian Obscenity in the Court of Public Opinion

Fashioning readers: canon, criticism and pedagogy in the emergence of modern Oriya literature

Through a brief history of a widely published canon debate in nineteenth century Orissa, this article describes how anxieties about the quality of ‘traditional’ Oriya literature served as a site for imagining a cohesive Oriya public who would become the consumers and beneficiaries of a new, modernized Oriya-language canon. A public controversy about the status of Oriya literature was initiated in the 1890s with the publication of a serialized critique of the works of Upendra Bhanja, a very popular pre-colonial Oriya poet. The critic argued that Bhanja’s writing was not true poetry, that it did not speak to the contemporary era, and that it featured embarrassingly detailed discussions of obscene material. By unpacking the terms of this criticism and Oriya responses to it, I reveal how at the heart of these discussions were concerns about community building that presupposed a new kind of readership of literature in the Oriya language. Ultimately, this article offers a longer, regional history to the emerging concern of post-colonial scholarship with relationships between publication histories, readerships, and broader ideas of community – local, Indian, and global.

The Sense and Nonsense of Criminalizing Transfers of Obscene Material: Criminalizing Privacy Violations

The recent distribution of nude photos of a number of high profile Hong Kong celebrities has provoked intense discussion about the state of Hong Kong's obscenity and indecency laws. In this paper, I argue that Hong Kong's laws prohibiting the transfer of obscene and indecent information and images between consenting adults are both under-inclusive and over-inclusive. The Control of Obscene and Indecent Articles Ordinance is under-inclusive in that it does not adequately criminalise grave violations of privacy. It is also over-inclusive because it is a blanket prohibition against the transfer by all parties (including consenting adults) of all forms of obscene and indecent materials. The laws unnecessarily violate the free expression rights of both the producer and consenting viewer of the offensive materials. The producer/publisher of such materials does not harm his or her audience as they willingly view such materials. The justification for maintaining a blanket prohibition against all transfers of such materials is invalid and utterly and totally out of touch with modern life in Hong Kong. The proponents of such laws have used Victorian positive morality considerations to justify continued criminalisation. These laws should be abrogated and replaced with a new piece of legislation that is narrowly tailored to deal with those types of offensive displays that are wrongful in a critical rather than a mere positive morality sense. Criminalisation should be limited to those offences that target children or use children in the production process, violate the rights of non-consenting adult audiences not to receive certain intimate information in certain public contexts, and violate privacy rights by publishing a person's private and intimate information without consent. If x obtains y's profoundly private information and publishes it without y's consent, then x violates y's privacy rights in a grave way. The violation in the right circumstances will justify a criminal law response rather than a mere civil law response. Similarly, if x and y copulate on a public bus they subject the captive audience to an offensive display which violates the non-consenting audience's right not to receive certain intimate information. I argue below that these types of privacy violations give the lawmaker a legitimate justification for invoking the criminal law.

&lt;i&gt;The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism Cindy Murillo The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism. Florence Dore. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. ix+167. $50.00 (cloth). In The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism, Florence Dore sets out to redefine our current understanding of obscenity laws' impact on the modern novel. This relatively short book covers a lot of ground. As Dore points out in her introduction, many scholars tend to read literature as informed by law, which serves as "the historical key that will unlock the ambiguous literary text" (10). At the turn into the twentieth century, issues regarding free speech contributed to the weakening of obscenity laws and modernist texts were regarded as part and parcel of this ultimate rejection of sexual prudery with their forthright explicitness of sexuality. Dore, however, challenges such assumptions through a re-positioning of silence, what the author terms a "negative narration" (2), that resists sexual explicitness and conversely reproduces censorship. In this respect, Dore's book is unique in that she suggests that modern novels convey silence at the moment of what appears on the surface to be an explicitly sexual scene. Dore begins her argument by drawing on Michel Foucault, whose theoretical contributions have also questioned law as the primary characteristic of power. She dismisses other critical assumptions that associate Foucault's concepts of power with a culturally constructed text, which limit our understanding of the novel in purely socio-political terms. Placing herself within the framework of Marxist, psychoanalytic, and feminist thought, she revises these theories to fit her purpose. Dore relocates cultural influence onto the notion of a "phallic logic" (5), demonstrating that Marxist terminology can't completely explain the reaffirmation of conventional gendered categories during a time considered sexually progressive. Theoretical assertions of sexuality are read into the discussed texts, which show how gender categories, and thus a "phallic logic," persist regardless of the emergence of free speech and the weakening of obscenity laws at the turn [End Page 195] of the twentieth century. This ideology works against feminist scholars, such as Elaine Showalter, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, to name only a few, who have asserted that the modern novel was preoccupied with gender and can be seen as giving rise to a new and assertive femininity. Conversely, Dore sees these feminist theories as misconstrued. To demonstrate her theory, Dore examines four modernist works, Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), Willa Cather's The Professor's House (1925), William Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931), and Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), and she looks at how sexuality is mollified at points which might be considered obscene. Her discussion centers around three obscenity cases—Queen v. Hicklin (1868), which established as obscene a text that could "corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" (12); U.S. v. One Book Called "Ulysses" (1933), which renamed obscene material as that which could potentially cause "lustful thoughts" in a "person of average sex instincts" (12); and the infamous phrase spoken by Justice Potter Stewart in 1964, "'I know it when I see it.'"(15). Her justification for using these modern novels in her analysis is based on their historical status as openly illicit in terms of sexual representation whether heterosexual, homosexual, or interracial. Dore's book is broken into two sections: Knowing and Seeing, the first two chapters devoted to issues of obscenity law and knowledge, and the later two chapters concerned with analyzing obscenity with respect to sight. In her analysis of Sister Carrie, Dore conceptualizes the sexuality rendered absent in terms of Carrie's stupidity and Ames's inability to associate Carrie's body with anything sexual. Drawing on both Hicklin and One Book's definitions of obscenity, the author argues that the descriptions of Carrie's emotions undermine any attempt on Carrie's part to demonstrate the ability to reason. Dore asserts that "Carrie's move away from morality delivers her into a physical realm that reproduces feminine sexual innocence as innocence of mind" (31). Sexual freedom is not unleashed; rather, Carrie is unable to achieve independent subjectivity...

Undoing Sexual Objectification in the Japanese Socio‐Juridical Context: The Human‐Rights‐Oriented Transmutation of the Conception of “Obscene” Material

Abstract: This article argues that in the socio‐psychic phenomenon of the sexual objectification of girls and women manufactured by certain media and the majority of conventionally so‐called pornography, woman is represented, perceived, and treated as a sexually materialized object ready to be exploited exclusively as a means to produce sexual gratification, but not at all as an end in herself, i.e. a human subject with her own sexual will and human dignity. The article exposes the social role of sexually objectifying merchandise in rendering the viewer's sexuality compulsive and addictive, and in producing the viewer's psychic desire for sexual violence especially against those who are most vulnerable (such as children, women who were sexually abused as children, women with intellectual disabilities, etc.) by referring to a number of sociological data and actual evidences collected in Japan and North America. As an alternative modality of sexuality, the article proposes sexual intersubjectivity. In light of sexual objectification, this article qualitatively analyzes and criticizes the conventional definition of “obscene” material, which revolve around discipline and order, and that of “pornography”, and proposes the human‐rights/equality‐oriented transmutation of the conception of obscene material. The article argues that merchandise which produces the desire for sexual violence is disqualified as a concretion of the freedom of expression. This article then attempts to examine the constitutionality (referring specifically to the freedom of expression) of Japanese Obscenity Law by delineating the precise criteria of judgment for obscenity itself and the very method of its enforcement.

Edmund Curll, Bookseller (review)

Reviewed by: Edmund Curll, Bookseller Winfried Schleiner Paul Baines and Pat Rogers , Edmund Curll, Bookseller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). Pp. x, 388. $55.00. This is a solid and detailed book worthy of the significance of its subject matter, the controversial but unquestionably central eighteenth-century bookseller Edmund Curll. The "abominable" or "unspeakable" Curll, as he came to be known by his contemporaries (mainly because he published at the margins of what was acceptable, but also because he repeatedly published private papers without permission), was the subject of a monograph in 1927 by Ralph Straus, The Unspeakable Curll. The present book, however, compares to the earlier one as does a modern Cadillac to a Model T. It is based on Herculean new work in archives, eighteenth-century newspapers and similar publications, in state papers and Treasury papers (relating to Curll's activities as a government informer), in Chancery records (relating to Curll's many legal problems), and in the House of Lords Records Office. However, while the new book offers a wealth of research and hitherto unknown material, its attitude toward its subject remains surprisingly similar to that of the earlier biography. The 1927 book presented Curll essentially as a negative influence, a purveyor of scandalous and obscene material, and as an antagonist of Pope; Straus appears to have been embarrassed by the subject matter, using euphemisms and obfuscations that obscure the contents of some of the most notorious of Curll's publications. The present book retraces the publisher's activities with a wealth of new facts and evidence: about his punishment to stand in the pillory, for example, and how he was prepared to turn the event in his favor by supplying printed broadsheets to passersby. Baines and Rogers offer hitherto unexplored information from the House of Lords Records Office relating to the bookseller's petition for clemency and his kneeling at the bar of the House. While the earlier book does not even mention the Chancery suit, Pope v. Curll (1741), for instance, the modern authors argue the suit's tremendous significance; it "remains a leading case in English law as the first important test regarding copyright in personal letters" (285). Despite such crucial clarifications, however, a reader of Baines's and Rogers's book might feel that the information about the contents of many—particularly the offending or controversial—publications remains slim and sometimes lacks precision. Could a certain bashfulness linger on? For instance, although the authors once refer to "erotic flagellation" in the context of describing De usu flagrorum [End Page 275] or The Treatise of the Use of Flogging (116), it would be close to impossible to reconstruct from their many references to the work what this little book by Johann Heinrich Meibom, a physician from Lübeck, was all about. (The Protestant doctor discussed the question—it is unclear how seriously—of whether it was licit for a husband to have himself beaten if that was the only way of readying himself for intercourse with his wife.) Similarly, the contents of the surprisingly explicit Treatise of Hermaphrodites, attributed to Giles Jacob and published by Curll in 1718, is summarized in one sentence: "But much of the material is not only explicitly sexual but borderline pornography, cast in the form of romance tales, anecdotal and voyeuristic narratives of lesbian adventures with a sprinkling of cross-dressing and sex toys" (117). This is 100 percent more information than offered in the previous book, but why balk at explaining something of the tales and anecdotes? Historians of gender and sexuality, among others, would surely profit from greater specificity about the content of Curll's publications. Although Baines's and Rogers's book offers a wealth of valuable research on Edmund Curll and in every important respect outdistances the 1927 book on this controversial eighteenth-century literary figure, a reader might question whether it was really primarily graft, desire to make money, that animated Edmund Curll. Despite three clearly positive references to Curll (that he helped the poet Pattison, was not unduly spiteful, and was careful and learned in his antiquarian pursuits), the overwhelming attitude of this new biography reinforces the dismissive disdain of the earlier book: that...

Soft in the Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature in its Contexts (review)

Soft in the Middle:The Contemporary Softcore Feature in Its Contexts Kevin John Bozelka (bio) David Andrews . Soft in the Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature in Its Contexts. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. 334 pp. $41.95. David Andrews has set himself an unenviable task—to write a critical history of a film genre that often works overtime to make itself unnoticeable. A genre whose producers either remain tight-lipped about their wares or aspire to a supposedly higher class of filmmaking. A genre whose fans rarely if ever greet their objects of desire with anything but anxiety or exhausting rituals of deflation. In many crucial ways, softcore pornography gets even less respect (or even simple attention) than hardcore due to its perceived compromise of hardcore's pure, unblinking eye. Lacking the organic codes of the "high" art film on one end and the "low" scientia sexualis of the hardcore porno on the other, softcore occupies an amorphous middle ground, and Andrews's fantastic book Soft in the Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature in Its Contexts offers a long overdue tour of this at times ungraspable genre. Andrews might balk at the classification of his book as a history. But even when he is wiping off his theoretical lens in the first two chapters, he does so to register the evolution of softcore and its various subgenres. In fact, it becomes clear throughout Soft in the Middle that softcore itself grew out of the larger category of sexploitation, which he defines as "as any narrative feature that, by foregrounding nudity, makes sexual titillation its most credible commercial appeal" (2). Softcore, by contrast, pivots around a crucial narrative-number dichotomy reminiscent of hardcore and the Hollywood musical: "Only when such spectacle achieves a certain duration, regularity, density, and activity does sexploitation yield numbers . . . creating a pluralist whole—and only then does it merit softcore designation" (2). But according to Andrews, classical softcore enjoyed an extremely short vogue, roughly from 1968 to 1973, due to a variety of factors: the popular ascendancy of hardcore; the increasing explicitness of the New Hollywood Cinema; court decisions like Miller v. California (1973) that gave states the right to determine obscene material; and rising real estate values, causing the decline of the grindhouses, which provided sexploitation with its primary exhibition outlets. And thus softcore virtually disappeared until the early 1990s, its period of greatest popularity due to the funding of Showtime and HBO. Andrews uses consumerism as a theoretical tool to explain these historical shifts, first from classical exploitation to classical sexploitation and then to contemporary softcore. If classical exploitation betrayed a "productivist" ideology in the excessive moralizing of, for example, drug or VD films, then classical sexploitation embraced the consumerist ethos of the 1950s and dovetailed snugly with the greater sexual freedoms of the 1960s. But those freedoms usually upheld an unbridled male desire. Contemporary softcore, by contrast, runs on a consumerist, postfeminist female desire that corresponds to late capitalism's ever more precise lifestyle marketing. Thus it flourished on cable in the 1990s rather than video in the 1980s, since video rarely organized around a coherent taste bundle (also, cable opted to program older sexploitation items rather than fund new softcore features in the 1980s). Apart from consumerism and postfeminism (really two sides of the same [End Page 72] coin in a softcore context), Andrews powers much of his book through analyses of softcore's narrative-number format. After all, it is this dichotomy that lends softcore not only its middle, or, more pejoratively, middling status (too many sex "numbers" to qualify for art cinema or mainstream film and yet too much narrative for hardcore pornography), but also its ability to travel through a variety of outlets (e.g., mainstream video chains and cable channels) via timid to nonexistent advertising (and hence little controversy as well). With this understanding of softcore's essential weightlessness as a foundation, Andrews moves into unpacking the use of concepts such as "soft" and "middle" to ridicule softcore's gauzy, heavily stylized aspiration towards the "harder," more solid gestalt of the art film. His critique here reminds us that all narrative genres evince some sort of hybridity, some...

Magister Amoris: The 'Roman de la Rose' and Vernacular Hermeneutics by Alastair Minnis

MLR, 98.2, 2003 455 the impact ofthe article at the end with an over-hasty and sketchy examination of other female characters. Donald Maddox concentrates his attention upon the Bel Inconnu and upon the 'Fier Baiser' theme in particular. Of special note is the exploration of the significance of the heraldic emblems contained in the text, where Maddox's persistence has brought important results. Sara Sturm-Maddox is concerned with the fortunes of the Arthurian tradition in Sicily and more specifically with Floriant et Florete, and tries to tease out the meaning ofthe end of the verse romance. The article not so far mentioned is a study by Louis Gemenne, which describes an experiment centred on the reading of Marie de France's Bisclavret by a group of mainly 16-yearold pupils in a Belgian school. This essay perhaps illustrates the strengthand weakness of the whole collection: it has its own interest, but does not relate to or genuinely invite reflection on the other contributions. The Arthurian theme suggested by the title loosely covers all the essays printed here, the individual contributions are all worthy in their differentways, but the collection remains a miscellany, lacking a truly distinctive theme which would have increased the resonances of its separate parts. University of Durham Geoffrey Bromiley Magister Amoris: The 'Roman de la Rose' and Vernacular Hermeneutics. By Alastair Minnis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2001. xv + 352pp. ?50. ISBN o19 -818754-8 With this book Alastair Minnis makes another substantial contribution to the study of medieval concepts of authorship and literaryhermeneutics. This detailed examination of the reception of the Roman de la Rose in the later Middle Ages situates the Rose and the diverse reactions it provoked in the context of medieval theories of language and meaning and the study of erotic and satiric literature, particularly the works of Ovid. Minnis stresses Ovid's importance as a learned poet of love, a magister amoris, whose literary oeuvre comprises seemingly contradictory elements. Works attributed to Ovid during the Middle Ages, the Amores, the Ars amatoria, the Remedia amoris, and the De vetula, as well as the Metamorphoses, variously incite the reader to erotic love, instruct him or her in how to proceed, warn against its dangers, and portray it as a moral pitfall to be avoided at all cost. The complexities and ambiguities of Ovid's love poetry stimulated a lively commentary tradition that was already well developed by the time of Jean de Meun's continuation of the Roman de la Rose. Minnis shows that medieval readings of the Rose must be read in the larger context of medieval literary studies in general, and in particular with reference to the reception of Ovid. As Minnis states with regard to the celebrated querelle initiated by Christine de Pizan, Jean de Meun was widely viewed as a medieval vernacular Ovid; the question was whether the Rose should be read as an art or a remedy of love. In his analysis of the Rose and the controversies that itaroused, Minnis explores the poem's unstable mix of competing discourses: the use of integumentumor decorous concealment of harsh and obscene material on the one hand, and on the other the 'naked truth' of satire, in which all is bared foran effectthat is both comic and didactic . It is the very instability and inconsistency of the Rose, a masterful and brilliant inconsistency, that accounts both forthe fascination with which it gripped its readers and forthe horror with which some of them reacted. Minnis shows that Jean's critics and his defenders alike drew on scholastic commentary traditions, differingonly in their means of applying these techniques to the Rose. Thus for some it was a bold satire, and for others a shameful treatise on seduction. Minnis's own view is that Jean's humour in the Rose is not subversive but utterly mainstream. Its comedy derives from a perspective that completely accepts the 456 Reviews dominant culture while none the less seeing and perhaps even revelling in its inter? nal tensions, paradoxes, and absurdities. Minnis points out that a paradox central to medieval education, in which Ovidian love poetry played a prominent role, was that boys were simultaneously...

Telephone scatologia: Comorbidity with other paraphilias and paraphilia-related disorders

The term scatologia is derived from the Greek word, skato, for dung and logos for speech (Gayford, 1997). Thus, telephone scatologia, also referred to as telephone scatophilia and telephonicophilia, is a paraphilia (PA) characterized by a pattern of sexual arousal associated with exposing an unsuspecting victim to sexual and obscene material over the phone (Milner & Dopke, 1997; Schewe, 1997). Telephone scatologia remains classified as a PA not otherwise specified (NOS) in the DSM-IV, because there has been insufficient description of the disorder in the literature to merit a separate category (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Although specific PAs are distinguished by a characteristic paraphilic focus, all PAs feature recurrent, socially deviant, highly arousing sexual fantasies, urges, and activities that have a duration of at least 6 months and cause clinically significant distress or impairment (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). These latter diagnostic criteria would distinguish true telephone scatologists (TS) from telephone callers who just make a few obscene calls as a prank. Obscene telephone calling is a common behavior with more than 22,000 obscene phone call complaints filed in the Washington, DC area alone in 1989. This is particularly impressive considering that only 7–20% of sexually provocative calls are actually reported to the telephone company (Herold, Mantle, & Zemitis, 1979; Smith & Morra, 1994). Surveys