1. As I hope to demonstrate, the serious genre could serve as a check on objectionable themes of coercion, particularly the subjugation of women, though these lapses could and possibly should be censored in the mainstream media with equal validity. John B. McConahay, "Pornography: The Symbolic Politics of Fantasy," Law and Contemporary Problems 51.1 (1988): 31-69, affords a concise history of pornography and censorship. Jeffrey G. Sherman, "Love Speech: The Social Utility of Pornography," Stanford Law Review 47.4 (1995): 661-705, makes the case that objectionable aspects of pornography are symptoms, not causes, of "the same evil," homophobia and misogyny (705). On the question of genre bending, Richard Dyer, "Coming to Terms," in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 289-298, sees redemption in the romantic thrust of gay porn where "the underlying narrative is often romantic, the ultimate goal is to make love with the man
2. but along the way a free-ranging, easy-going promiscuity is possible" (295). Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), makes a case for the structural similarities between feature-length pornography and musical comedy, though she nowhere excludes the possibility of tragic pornography. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), includes "priapic" episodes having the "logic of obscenity" in his chronotope of the "ancient adventure novel of everyday life" (127-128). He treats ancient parody, which was often obscene, as a "corrective" to such serious genres as epic and tragedy (51-61).
3. This is not to say that simulated action cannot have pornographic effect, only that any film restricting action to simulation would belong to the sub-genre, soft core. McConahay defines pornography as “any sexually explicit verbal (written/oral) or visual material (including films, plays, and other performances) created with the intention of producing sexual arousal” (37). Dyer more broadly defines a pornographic film as “any film that has as its aim sexual arousal in the spectator” (289). As in the law, however, intent is an elusive criterion. I contend that an image ceases to be pornographic when its intent is so obscured by cultural and linguistic differences as to be unapparent to the spectator. Sexual prowess, however, is less likely to be obscured. The illustrations in a sex manual, for example, may be pornographic despite (or in some cases because of) the medical or educational intent.