How to Look at Porn
Will be published approx. on 1. February 2030
Book
Hardback
320 pages
978-1-78873-121-8 (ISBN)
Description
1 in 5 mobile internet searches are for porn. $3000 a minute is spent on content. But this does not describe the ways that porn has seeped into all corners of modern culture. From Fifty Shades of Grey, to METOO, to the sculptures of Jeff Koons and the posed selfies of instagram influencers, porn is deeply enmeshed in how we think and everything we do. How should we attempt to understand this phenomenon: it is economic question of labour and markets? Of supply and demand? An aesthetic question of perception and composition? A way to organise society or a legal issue about what is acceptable? What does an addiction to pornography actually mean? In How to Look at Porn, Mark Greif urges us not to turn away but see how a society built upon pornography - our society - works.
Reviews / Votes
Mark Greif writes a contrarian, skeptical prose that is at the same time never cynical: it opens out on to beauty and the possibility of change. -- Zadie Smith The ideas and images I discover in Mark Greif's essays stay with me for years, and become part of the way I experience and understand the world. I couldn't be happier that this book is being published so I can read them all over again -- Sheila Heti Mark Greif is the best essayist of my generation. No one is more modern or more classical-or more stylish. -- Adam Thirlwell No living essayist effects the destruction of everything other people hold dear with a lighter or more elegant touch. An unmitigated delight. -- Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed Politically engaged, coolly stylish and often drily funny . The unflinching intelligence of his writing can be exhilarating. * Guardian *More details
Person
Mark Greif is a founder and Editor of the journal n+1. He lives and works in New York, where he is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the New School. He is the highly acclaimed author of The Age of the Crisis of Man, and his criticism and journalism have appeared in publications including the London Review of Books, Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, and New Statesman.