Soft in the middle Book

I read this in preparing to teach a Human Sexuality course, as some of my professional interests are in media psychology, specifically the portrayals of psychological issues in movies and on television. This was a fascinating, reasonably "balanced" look at how sexuality has been portrayed in moving images from 1896 to 2006, beginning with the scandalous nature of portraying even a closed-mouth kiss, all the way up to "interactive" pornography. The author fortunately moves the argument past the typical "it's all good" vs. "it's all the devil" debate (there are many many books and articles that cover that), and onto other areas, such as how liberation doesn't necessarily mean "better" like many progressives would like us to think, and how liberation doesn't necessarily mean "worse" like many conservatives would like us to think. It depends! There are benefits, new problems, and unknowns to the changes that have occurred. One notable issue - ensuring that sexually explicit material was kept out of mainstream film literally stripped (no pun intended, ha) pornography of artistic merit, reducing it to the singular goal of assisting in achieving orgasm. Kids today (most of whom are exposed to porn before they're ready to understand what they are seeing) learn so much about sex through explicit pornography that actually "conceals" more than it reveals about sex and relationships.

A note to readers who have children around - there are a few explicit images in some of the chapters related to the examples that are discussed.