Susanna Paasonen’s admonition above, I use “pornography*” – i.e., with an appended asterisk – to signal that this term is intrinsically ambiguous and open to a wide range of interpretations. The intention is thereby to remind us that we always need to specify more precisely what we mean when speaking of pornography*, rather than uncritically assuming that the term is obvious and unambiguous.
2 Again: the whole complex of our lives as meaning-making and relational beings, thoroughly informed by our co-evolving technologies.
3 I am grateful to Elisabeth Staksrud for making this data from the EU Kids Online 2018 survey available in preliminary form.
4 See the further discussion of contemporary feminism.
5 The doctrine of Original Sin is historically associated with patriarchal control of women: as the doctrine lays the responsibility for the introduction of sin and death into the world upon Eve, it thereby works to demonize women, the body, and sexuality. This interpretation of the second Genesis creation story (Genesis 2.4– 3.2), while orthodox in Western Roman Catholicism and subsequently among some Protestant reformers, is directly contrary to earlier Christian and Jewish readings of the text, which emphasize instead the positive nature of Eve’s choice: acquiring “the knowledge of good and evil” is specifically understood as the attainment of the distinctively human capacities of moral understanding and free choice – capacities that, in turn, early Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke see as foundational to arguments for democratic polity – i.e., the political arrangements of human beings capable of rational self-rule.
6 My very great thanks to Mia Consalvo, Rikke Toft Nørgård, and Joshua Ess for these suggestions.