One of the many academic
books that cite Beaver Street.
In the years since my book Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography was published, academia has become a sizzling hotbed of pornographic studies. Beaver Street, in fact, has been referenced in more than a dozen academic books and has become required reading in a number of college courses, mostly in the UK, but also in Italy. If you look up Beaver Street on Perplexity, an AI search engine, you'll find this surprisingly accurate information:
Robert Rosen's book Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography has gained recognition in academic circles and has been included on college reading lists. The book has been embraced by academia for its unique perspective on the pornography industry.
A review of Beaver Street appeared on H-Net, a site for humanities and social sciences, comparing it to academic works on pornography.
Peter Kenneth Alilunas, a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, placed Beaver Street at the top of his "Essential Reading" list.
Alilunas's PhD dissertation, Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video, 1976-1986, contains numerous references to the book.
The Ethics and Politics of Pornography by David Edward Rose, a lecturer in philosophy at Newcastle University, references Beaver Street in its sixth chapter. This inclusion in a textbook published by Palgrave Macmillan further solidifies the book's academic relevance.
Rosen's book stands out for its approach to the subject matter: It provides a serious history that reads like a comic novel.
The book is neither pro-porn nor anti-porn, offering a balanced view.
It covers significant events in the porn industry, such as the advent of phone sex and the Tracy Lords scandal.
This combination of insider knowledge, historical context, and engaging writing style has made Beaver Street a valuable resource for academic study in fields such as sociology, history, and gender studies.
Meanwhile, a trickle of dissertations about porn has become a flood. Check out Academia.edu, a site that classifies these dissertations as "social and cultural anthropology." Here's a list of some of the papers that have popped up in the past few weeks:
The Hardest of Hardcore: Locating Feminist Possibilities in Women's Extreme Pornography, by Jennifer Moorman
Does the Porn-Star Blush?: Performing the Real in Post-Transgressive Cinema, by Charlie Blake with Beth Johnson
Sex, Erotic Art, and the Repression of Alternative Movements: The Strange Case of an Esoteric Movie Director, by Massimo Introvigne
Sex on Camera: A Postmodern Feminist Critique on Pornography, by Joe Carl Castillo
The Queer Porn Mafia: Redefining identity, sex and feminism through commodified sexuality, by Laurenn McCubbin
Exploitation, Empowerment, and Ethical Portrayals of the Pornography Industry, by Julie Davin
The Porn Wars [from draft chapter of manuscript, Feminism: an introduction], by Lorna Finlayson
Digital gender-sexual violations and social marketing campaigns, by Matthew Hall
Upskirting, homosociality, and craftmanship: A thematic analysis of perpetrator and viewer interactions, by Matthew Hall
It has been my privilege to contribute to this growing body of knowledge.
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