Public, Private, and the New Terrain

Abstract

I started out this book by offering my initial set of curiosities and preoccupations. Porn, pornified sexual practices among young people, and my young daughter’s entanglement with Hannah Montana sparked my interest in the pornification trend. At the end of this book I am in a very different place. The stories and issues I started out with would now be put to the reader in another way. At the outset porn was the issue, as was the way in which pornography was thought about by young people. Similarly, the panics were of great interest, insofar as they were based on a false set of assumptions about porn as danger and children as naïve. However, as argued throughout, pornography as a discrete entity is not what is at issue, but rather, what it symbolizes and produces. Just as Hall et al. (1978, vii) argued in Policing the Crisis—that the moral panics about mugging “are about other things than crime, per se”—pornification and the accompanying panics are only useful insofar as they shed light on how sexuality is imagined more generally.