AN INCREDIBLE SPIRITUAL ADVENTURE A dying man's final brushstrokes create an image that shatters another man's life, sending him on a pilgrimage of self-discovery. He must cross the barriers of time, space, death, and even individuality. The prize? Joy beyond all darkness: a spiritual radiance of inner bliss and completeness, an all-consuming love: the ultimate human experience. How many of us are called to undertake this pilgrimage? How many are strong and fearless enough to complete it? ...

Written for a broad audience and grounded in cutting-edge, contemporary scholarship, this volume addresses some of the key questions asked about pornography today. What is it? For whom is it produced? What sorts of sexualities does it help produce? Why should we study it, and what should be the most urgent issues when we do? What does it mean when we talk about pornography as violence? What could it mean if we discussed pornography through frameworks of consent, self-determination and perf...

`Alan McKee presents a student friendly introduction to the analysis of cultural texts. The book highlights the cultural differences in interpretation with an array of fascinating examples. Textual Analysis is written in an accessible style with several useful case studies. Each chapter also includes exercises for classroom′ - Jane Stokes, London Metropolitan University`McKee is a gifted practitioner of the skills he would teach in this book, as well as a lively an...

This book presents an innovative cross-disciplinary report on research across the humanities and social sciences about the relationship between pornography and its consumers.For policy makers and the wider public it can be difficult to obtain a clear understanding of the current state of knowledge on pornography and its relationships with audiences, due to the often-contradictory nature of research spanning the various and politically diverse academic disciplines. The cross-discipl...

True or false: Most porn users are uneducated, lonely and sad old men All porn is violent Pornography turns people into rapists and/or paedophiles Pornography uniformly portrays women as passive objects of men's sexual urges The Porn Report debunks these and many other misconceptions about porn consumers, producers and the industry at large. In the first comprehensive examination of the production and consumption of pornography in Australia, Alan McKee, Kath Albury and Catharine L...

This is a concise and accessible introduction into the concept of objectification, one of the most frequently recurring terms in both academic and media debates on the gendered politics of contemporary culture, and core to critiquing the social positions of sex and sexism.Objectification is an issue of media representation and everyday experiences alike. Central to theories of film spectatorship, beauty fashion and sex, objectification is connected to the harassment and discriminat...

Combining media effects with aesthetic approaches this book offers the first substantial, systematic and coherent account of fun and its importance. But what exactly is fun and what purposes does it serve? Fun is a vital element of entertainment, and entertainment is the most important form of culture in modern Western democracies. It demonstrates that fun is at the heart of entertainment's effects – entertainment both offers its consumers fun and provides them with the intellectual materi...

Entertainment Industries is the first book to map entertainment as a cultural system. Including work from world-renowned analysts such as Henry Jenkins and Jonathan Gray, this innovative collection explains what entertainment is and how it works.Entertainment is audience-centred culture. The Entertainment Industries are a uniquely interdisciplinary collection of evolving businesses that openly monitor evolving cultural trends and work within them. The producers of entertai...

Professor Gail Dines has written about and researched the porn industry for over two decades. She attends industry conferences, interviews producers and performers, and speaks to hundreds of men and women each year about their experience with porn. Students and educators describe her work as “life changing.”In Pornland—the culmination of her life’s work—Dines takes an unflinching look at porn and its affect on our lives. Astonishingly, the average age of first viewing porn...

This book brings together a huge range of material including academic articles, film scripts and interplanetary messages adrift on space probes with supporting commentary to clarify their imporatance to the field. Communication Studies: The Essential Resource is a collection of essays and texts for all those studying communication at university and pre-university level.Individual sections address:* texts and meanings in communication* themes in personal comm...

Porno? Chic! examines the relationship between the proliferation of pornography and sexualised culture in the West and social and cultural trends which have advanced the rights of women and homosexuals.Brian McNair addresses this relationship with an analysis of trends in sexualised culture since 2002 linked to a transnational analysis of change in sexual politics and sex/gender relations in a range of societies, from the sexually liberalised societies of advanced capitali...

An urgent account of sexual politics, feminism, and the rules of power in America-and a potent vision for the way forwardAs a veteran feminist and agenda-setting sex educator, Jaclyn Friedman is on the frontlines of the war for equity between the sexes. In Unscrewed, Friedman brings her sharp expertise and incisive observations on the state of sexual politics to the fore, sparking a culture-wide rethink about sex, power and what we accept.With repor...