Browsing by Subject "Pornography"
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Item Congregants' responses to clergy pornography addiction(Texas Tech University, 2008-05) Joiner, LynnAnne MichellePornography addiction has been identified as a form of sexual addiction and, although no solid prevalence rates exist, it is believed to be one of the most common forms of sexual addiction among clergy. Even though pornography addiction involves no direct offense against others, congregants are considered secondary victims of clergy’s sexual difficulties. This is supported by bioecological and systems theories which assume that individuals (clergy) are impacted by and have an influence on the systems and contexts in which they operate (church congregations). Despite this, no empirical investigations on congregants’ reactions to clergy pornography addiction exist. This is an exploratory study designed to gain initial information regarding congregants’ judgments and beliefs about clergy addicted to pornography. This study involved 233 surveys from undergraduate students at a private Christian university. Participants were surveyed about their perceptions of the character of clergy with no addictions, pornography addiction, and alcohol addiction. Their beliefs about how the clergy member should respond to the addiction and how the congregation should respond to the clergy member’s situation were also assessed. Results suggest that congregants give clergy with addiction lower trait ratings than those without addiction. However, they do not judge the character of clergy with pornography addiction more harshly than those with alcohol addiction. Surprisingly, participants rated married clergy more highly than single clergy on scales of character traits regardless of the presence of addiction. In addition, congregants believed clergy with both types of addiction should disclose their struggle to another person and receive professional help. They did not believe the addiction should be disclosed to the entire congregation, nor did they think the congregation’s funds should be used to help pay for professional treatment. Participants believed the cleric’s ability to do his job would be affected by his addiction, but did not think he should be removed from his position. These beliefs did not differ between types of addiction, as hypothesized. The study has several implications. Participants’ willingness to remain under the leadership of clergy with addictions may provide a sense of acceptance for clergy dealing with shame from their addiction and provide opportunities for open dialogue. This conversation, however, may be mitigated by congregants’ reluctance to have the addiction disclosed to the congregation. Thus systemically trained mental health professionals may play a vital role in facilitating healthy discussion among congregations affected by clergy pornography addiction. Further conclusions and implications of this study are given.Item From reel to virtual : the U.S. adult film industry, production, and changes in women's labor opportunity (1957-2005)(2010-05) Tibbals, Chauntelle Anne; Charrad, M. (Mounira)Women work in the adult film industry in a variety of behind-the-scenes occupations and executive roles. Moreover, women can often negotiate the terms of their employment, pay scales have been standardized, and protecting women’s health is conventional practice. As would be expected, women were not always integrated into every level of the adult film industry workplace. This process occurred over time, as it occurred over time in myriad other workplaces; however, unlike many other workplaces, neither advocacy from an external social movement nor activism from workers within the industry itself initiated this integration. With the magnitude of the adult film industry, the apparent integration of women workers, rhetorical assumptions, and scholarly oversights in mind, two core questions are posed in this research. First, have women’s incorporation and opportunities for participation in the United States’ adult film industry changed since the 1950s? Second, has the content of adult films changed since the 1950s? The evidence suggests that women’s labor rights and opportunities have been expanded internally, from the top-down. Company owners, film producers, and powerful industry leaders began expanding women’s rights in response to legal and cultural pressures from regulators and industry-wide structural changes occurring during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this study, I explore the processes responsible for these developments. The central argument is that the historical development of the adult film industry has been shaped by dynamic multidimensional tensions existing between producers, consumers, and regulators. These tensions are partially reflected in the content of key adult films. The historical development of the adult film industry has led to the emergence of a closely interconnected occupational network. This network and what I call “industry protective practices” –endeavors initiated by adult film industry business leaders, owners, and producers that protect both the welfare of workers and the industry itself— operate synergistically and are responsible for the top-down expansion of women workers’ labor rights and opportunities over time. Industry protective practices, including mandatory and centralized HIV/STI testing and the development of a production code itemizing sex depictions to be avoided, tell us much about strategic rights expansion from the top down.Item Perceived powerlessness and pornography use among men(Texas Tech University, 1990-08) Himmel, Kelly F.The lack of power and prestige for many males through the disparities of social and economic locations combined with the potential for reasserting that power in the sexual arena, presents us with the opportunity to look at the relationship between perceived male powerlessness and male pornography use. This thesis intends to test the research hypothesis that men with greater feelings of perceived powerlessness are more likely to view X-rated movies than those men with lesser feelings of perceived powerlessness.Item Pornification of America: The bachelorette party as a symptom of raunch culture(2007-05) Foster, Wendy Erin; Check, Ed; Fehr, Dennis; Akins-Tillett, FutureThis paper examines the epidemic of raunch culture in the youth of the United States, specifically examining the phenomenon of the bachelorette party as a symptom of raunch culture. I examine the development of raunch from the Women’s Liberation Movement to the early twenty-first century, and discuss how the bachelorette party is evidence of the infiltration of raunch into the culture of the United States. I discuss the impact of raunch in schools and provide examples of how teachers, specifically in the art classroom, can counter raunch culture in day-to-day activities with youth. With awareness and intention the art teacher is in a prime position to impact youth and address issues of raunch in their lives.Item "The primacy of discourse" : language lessons in Samuel Delany's Hogg(2011-05) Dechavez, Yvette Marie; Richardson, Matt, 1969-; Pritchard, Eric D.In this Master’s Report, I examine Samuel R. Delany’s use of language in his pornographic novel, Hogg. Through a postcolonial lens, I investigate the ways Delany employs white colonizers’ language to subvert white dominant patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies. As theorists Frantz Fanon and Hortense J. Spillers posit, language is essential to black identity. The arrival of Europeans on the African continent and the subsequent enslavement of blacks resulted in the loss of an indigenous African name. For blacks, the loss of this name serves as a larger metaphor by which one can uncover various wrongdoings committed by white colonizers, such as forcing Africans to learn a foreign language, refusing to acknowledge and respect an established African culture, and the physical violence enacted upon black bodies during slavery. In Hogg, the eleven-year-old black narrator negotiates his existence as a voiceless object and sex slave. I argue that through this narrator, one can see the devastating effects of colonization. Further, by creating a fictional world--the Pornotopia--Delany temporarily creates a space in which patriarchal boundaries no longer exist. Thus, the narrator challenges patriarchal, heteronormative discourse by taking advantage of the assumption that the narrator lacks the ability to master language.Item What lies beneath : medical imaging and the erotic in public culture(2012-08) Wise, Rebecca Louise; Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle, 1957-; Browne, Simone A.The anatomic human body is increasingly visible in public culture. Representations of the body sourced from or imitative of the images produced by medical imaging technology are bloodless depictions that highlight the body’s internal structures and elide its viscerality. Despite the deliberate exclusion of the flesh, many of these images are saturated in erotic potential, both implicitly and explicitly. These images emerge in a culture preoccupied with the visualization and control of women’s bodies and sexualities. Feminist scholars have long been critical of the ways in which popular media constructs the body as an object for erotic consumption;; the anatomic images I consider here go one step further. The mainstream gaze has previously been limited to the exterior surfaces of the body, with the penetrating gaze into the body’s interior restricted to the medical and legal establishments. The penetrating gaze is increasingly democratized as x-ray and other interior views of the body become more prevalent.The texts under discussion in this thesis traverse the opaque barrier of the skin and serve to construct the totality of the human body as an object to be examined and consumed. While X-rated x-rays can, sometimes, offer a potential site of resistance to gen- dered surveillance of the anatomic body, their increasing ubiquity demonstrates the escalation of a dominating surveillant regime intent on penetrating and controlling the anatomic body. The images’ uncritical public consumption provides an insidious route by which that regime may be normalized, furthered and even glorified.