I know some of you are interested in Porn Studies as a serious academic subject

Porn Studies, the "first dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to critically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic," launched on Friday, and it's currently free. For a limited time, non-academics like you and me can peruse it and try to wrap our quivering brains around some hot, throbbing knowledge before a paywall gets draped over all the best parts.

The time was evidently right for the study of porn to take another step toward recognition as an academic field, with not just a journal but also a workshop called "the Pedagogy of Pornography" slated for the Society for Film and Media Studies' 2014 conference in Seattle. Such conferences don't exactly attract media attention, and so there was no public titillation when the giants of porn studies got together for an all-star show. I contacted them to find out how it went.

But first, check out all the action at the journal's website. You can get unfettered access, not just to thumbnails but to full-length essays with titles like "Humanities and Social Scientific Research Methods in Porn Studies," "Positionality and Pornography," "Authenticity and Its Role Within Feminist Pornography," and my personal fave, "Deep Tags: Toward a Quantitative Analysis of Online Pornography." And if you prefer your quantitative analysis completely raw-dog, here's a link to a spreadsheet of the entire dataset from the study. Kinda freaky, but, ya know, some people are into that shit.

The journal itself is published by Taylor & Francis, a 200-year-old British publishing company that lends gravitas to any such title, and it is perhaps this fact that attracted anti-porn activists to take notice and get their hackles up. After all, even though the journal is a compendium of MLA-formatted essays with proper parenthetical citations, and even though it's intended for consumption more or less exclusively by tweedy academics, there's international controversy afoot.

I guess that shouldn't really surprise me, because, after all, the journal discusses videos of naked people fucking....

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