Pornography and gender

The relationship between gender and pornography has a long history, beginning with early modern narrative representations of sex written by men but presented from the perspective of female narrators. In the nineteenth century, the representation of sexuality became implicated in the imperial project, serving to define the relationship between colonizer and colonized as gendered. In the decades following the sexual revolution, gender became a central platform in debates about the regulation of pornography, in the opposition between second-wave antipornography feminist activism and what later came to be known as "sex-positive" feminism. Technological developments, such as the invention of the Internet, added new gendered dimensions, such as the emergence of "porn addiction," defined almost exclusively as a male characteristic. Gender, however, never operates as a definer of a position with respect to pornography independently of other parameters of identification, such as race, age, and social class.