Reading sociopornographic books: genre and dirty work

ABSTRACT

During the 1970s, before the rise of freely accessible hardcore pornographies, there was a brief moment of a few years where books and magazines ostensibly sought to ‘teach’ about sex, while providing pornographic imagery to curious readers. These books were often marketed as ‘educational’ and often marketed towards ‘married couples’, or at the very least, committed couples. In this article, I seek to study these books by framing them as ‘sociopornographic’, defining what is meant by that term and outlining key elements of the genre. To these ends, I study books that attended to analism, anality, and anal sex.

KEYWORDS:

• sociopornography
• obscenity
• genre
• dirty work
• education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I would tentatively exclude these from the sociopornographic as they eschew the requisite visuality of the genre, but for the purposes stated earlier they do speak to the relationality between and amongst texts. Case studies were a common generic trope to discuss sexuality, where the reader could seemingly engage with a knowing author’s notes and studies of a given ‘case’. In essence, the reader is admitted into the private clinical space as a voyeur. Further work remains to be done on these kinds of texts.