CHAPTER 2:  ACCESS TO “PORNOGRAPHY”

There is an academic and research need for access to sexually explicit materials.  Gay and lesbian librarians have been the vanguard of this project, working to collect and preserve materials relevant to gay lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) history and culture.  The social history of this diverse group includes numerous sexual manifestations, and to their credit these librarians have not shirked their responsibility to collect, preserve, and provide access to the sexual portions of GLBT culture.  Their thesauri and collections are often strongly politicized and rooted in the cultural world of GLBT experience.  These organized librarians have critiqued Library of Congress Subject Headings effectively enough to make some changes.

Other academic disciplines such “(m]asters of studio art and scholars of art history, law, literature, folklore, philosophy, anthropology, history, psychology, sociology, journalism, gay studies, gender studies, and film studies”[1] and of course sexology produce and need to access "pornographic" materials in an orderly and rational manner. 

Rebecca Dixon, in her article “Bibliographic Control of Erotica,”  elaborates historical reasons behind the poor bibliographic control of 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th century sexually explicit materials.  Firstly, most of the works were printed “sub rosa,” or privately, secretly, underground.  Publishers would disguise themselves with title page information that included false author and publisher names, cities, and publication dates.  This has become a “noteworthy characteristic of the literature itself.”[2]  Networks of private persons gathered this literature, which was usually uncollected by libraries.  Heirs to collections would often destroy them, or, if given to libraries, they might never be cataloged or acknowledged by them.  A set of bibliographies were produced by these collectors, but

There is no certainty as to the comprehensiveness of these bibliographies relative to the extent of publishing of their day.  Scholars will probably never know how much erotic literature has been lost forever.[3]

Dixon went on to examine materials available in “adult” bookstores in 1974.  Only about half had complete bibliographic information; some lacked publication dates while some had no information at all.  Cataloging these materials, she notes, leaves the librarian “responsible for a considerable amount of original, descriptive cataloging(.]”[4] 

Katz, making a case for libraries to carry pornography, says that libraries can “draw the line at (carrying) ‘hard core’ because it is not cataloged on OCLC or elsewhere.”[5]   But Dixon notes that catalog records of explicit “hard core” materials has long been engaged in at the Kinsey Institute library, so catalog records for some sexually explicit materials are available. Precedents for the sharing of these catalog records has already been set.  SIECUS, for example, cooperatively obtained a number of their catalog records from the Kinsey library.

Research Need for Access to “Pornography”

A scientific problem of poor bibliographic access to “pornographic” materials is that research on the “effects” of pornography is not replicable.  In Donnerstein, et. al’s review of psychological experiments on the effects of pornography,  

the stimuli used by researchers in studying this category of materials have ranged from pictures of female nudes, such as those found in Playboy magazine, to films of explicit sexual behavior such as intercourse, fellatio, and cunnilingus.[6]

To their merit, Donnerstein et. al. recognize the importance of what materials are being showed, and in their review say

We have tried, whenever possible, to point out exactly what materials have been used by researchers whenever we discuss a particular research study.” [7]

Although some of the studies quote the exact film or other material used, often this is not the case. For instance, a descriptor like “pictures of nude men taken from Playgirl magazine,”[8] will be referring to different kinds of pictures over time. With an issue and page number reference a researcher might be able to find the proper issue of Playgirl.  Unfortunately, most studies refer to things like “8-minute sexually explicit films” or a “standard set of slides or films”[9] which, with the ever-changing styles of pornographic film over time, lacks any effective descriptiveness, leaving it almost entirely to the reader’s imagination.  Without bibliographic control of these items, including standard description and a collection to refer to, there is no way for a researcher to scientifically evaluate the items for themselves, let alone reconstruct a study. 

There are a number of feminist scholars who have been using “pornographic” materials as part of academic courses in film studies, gender studies, and cultural studies.  Reviews of this literature can be found in articles “Porn Utopia,”[10] and “The Loose Canon.”[11]    “Scholars of Smut”[12]  discusses some of these academics in an amusingly negative review of the World Pornography Conference that generated the controversial book Porn 101.[13] These researchers, scholars and journalists use and quote “pornographic” materials extensively.  Without proper bibliographic control these materials will be lost to future research too. 

"Pornography" is not a single monolithic entity.  A huge variety of types of materials and topics are addressed:  academic studies, popular descriptions, instruction manuals, and depictions of the activities themselves; all in their endless genres, formats, and motivations.  What counts as “pornographic” has changed dramatically over time.  For example, educational materials about contraception were once considered contraband, and people who tried to disseminate this information could be imprisoned.[14]

Serious Academic Studies of Pornography

“Pornography” is beginning to be taken seriously in academia.  For example, I found several current theses and dissertations by bona fide students writing on aspects of “pornography.”  Robert V. Bienvenu II recently published The Development of Sadomasochism as a Cultural Style in the Twentieth-Century United States,[15] a study using inductive methods similar to this work.  He used the Kinsey library and Leather Museum and Archives, interviewed erotica book dealers, community leaders, and makers of goods, as well as engaging in participant observation for this sociology dissertation.  Robin Hamman published a thesis entitled Cyborgasms:  Cybersex Amongst Multiple-Selves and Cyborgs in the Narrow-Bandwidth Space of America Online Chat Rooms.[16]  Although this was accepted in the Department of Sociology, he took a multi-disciplinary approach using sociology, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, communication studies, plus computing, literary criticism, science fiction, and journalism.  It is an excellent example of how to do ethnographic research in AOL chat rooms.  Margaret M. Hohman wrote an English dissertation at Harvard University entitled When She Was Bad:  A Study of Sex-Positive Pornographies.[17]  A working writer and journalist of erotica, this is a history and criticism of styles of erotic writing.  She defines the genre of “Avant-Pop Neo-Porn,” a combination of sex-positive feminism, leather and fetish writing.   She points out “porn’s dirty little secret” – the fact that people get many pleasures of searching for, collecting and reading these materials that are not directly related to masturbation.  Finally, Jane Ann Juffer’s English dissertation The Pornographic Home:  Women, Sex, and Everyday Life[18]  discusses “what kinds of pornography are routinely available for women, where they can find it, and what are the conditions of consumption within the routines of everyday life.”  This was quickly published as a book.[19]  The kinds of materials she examines are women’s literary erotica, masturbation discourse, adult cable programming, couple’s video porn, cybersex, sex toys for women, and lingerie catalogues. 

This brief review shows that academic study of the production and consumption of pornographic images does exist in several interesting, new perspectives.  I firmly believe that the information science fields of human information behavior, user studies, classification, subject analysis, management, and reference would all benefit from study of the special case of “pornography.”  Indeed, the availability and popularity of sexually explicit materials on the Internet creates urgency for libraries and academia to find ways to take this topic seriously.  People – the general public, the media, advice columnists, researchers, professionals, and the rest -- need access to information about sexually explicit materials.  As information organizers, specialists, and providers, we need to take this information need, including the need to view “pornography,” seriously. 

The Pornography Collection

Bill Katz posits the question of how would one build a pornography collection in his paper “The Pornography Collection.” This is my larger question too, though for the purposes of this paper the topic has been narrowed to the subject analysis of pornography.   The bulk of Katz’s paper is concerned with discussions of censorship, using discussion of how to build a pornography collection in a library as a touch point.  He notes, "what follows may seem absurd, but it would be highly effective in tackling the essentially negative attitude of some librarians and too many of the public."[20]  He concludes with the thought,

Why shouldn’t the larger public libraries have a section devoted to pornography?  (This is not to overlook the smaller and medium-sized libraries, only to acknowledge that for them matters of budget and community interest might be better served in other ways.)  The proposition may be justified on two counts.  First, a pornography collection would tend to blunt the censor’s interest in other, possibly more exacting and controversial areas of the library.  Second, and more important, it would be a move toward the future before the future caught up with and passed the library.[21]

The future is indeed passing up the library, as later analysis of Web Directories will show.

Unlike Katz, who posits that the “pornographic” materials should be held in open stacks, but spine out and not obviously displayed, Perper wants to see sexually explicit materials not only held in libraries, but also celebrated with displays, as historic and interesting as any other human topic. 

When shall we see books on sexuality presented openly and displayed as the library’s proud possessions, not hidden away as dirt, filth, and garbage?  We are no longer dealing with raggedy smut.  Indeed, such “smut” has become the prized possessions of archivally oriented libraries.[22]

The Kinsey collection illustrates Perper’s point.  This private library became infamous through Alfred Kinsey showing it to visiting scholars, and the word traveling informally.  The collection was opened to qualified outside researchers in 1960.  Although it remains controversial, it is also one of the most significant collections of sexually explicit materials in the world.  The Kinsey Library is currently working to open the collection more widely to researchers, and it is easier than ever for qualified scholars to access their services. 

The collection at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality is not yet fully cataloged, though steadily succumbing to organization.  This collection is a similarly significant cultural treasure, and will be even more so with a computerized catalog organized with careful subject analysis.

The sexologist Vern Bullough notes in his article “Research and Archival Value of Erotica/Pornography,”

Some of the most valuable research tools in any library are found in those sections of special collections where erotic/pornographic materials are kept.  Such collections not only give us insights to the mindsets of past librarians, but they are also one of the major sources of information about sexual practices in the past.  Moreover, they give data about certain kinds of social problems - data that cannot be found anywhere else.[23]

As Bullough points out the value of "erotic/pornograhic materials," his using a dual term demonstrates the academic ambivalence about using the term “pornographic” on its own.  He also points out that the comparative subject analysis of sexually explicit materials tells us a lot about librarians themselves – an important part of the present study.

The variety of sexually explicit materials, and uses of these materials, has permeated our culture.  It is not the question that that these things exist, or even whether they have a right to exist.  They do exist, in immense variety and every technological format.  What kind of work do existing subject heading systems do, and what kind of world do they make possible?  What kinds of activities are rendered invisible, criminal, or normal through these thesauri?  How do we, seriously and professionally, build and provide access to a library that consists primarily of pornographic materials?