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The word pornography derives from the Greek 'pornographia' ('porne' meaning 'prostitute', 'grapho' - 'to write' and the suffix 'ia' - 'state of', 'property of', or 'place of'), thus meaning 'a place to write about prostitutes'.
"Pornography is sexually explicit material (verbal or pictorial) that is primarily designed to produce sexual arousal in viewers. This definition is frequently employed in discussions of pornography and censorship. What is viewed as 'sexually explicit' does vary from culture to culture and over time.
Moral conservatives and some feminists may also define pornography as sexually explicit material that is bad, although they differ as to the relevant source of its badness and so about what material is pornographic. A particularly dominant approach has been to define pornography in terms of obscenity. The obscenity might be taken to be intrinsic to the content of the material itself (e.g. that it depicts deviant sexual acts that are immoral in themselves) or it may lie in contingent effects that the material has (e.g. that it tends to offend "reasonable" people, deprave and corrupt viewers, or erode traditional family and religious values).
But the badness of pornography need not reside in obscenity. Pornography might be defined, not as sexually explicit material that is obscene, but as that sexually explicit material that harms women. Thus many contemporary feminist definitions define "pornography" as sexually explicit material that depicts women's subordination in such a way as to endorse that subordination." [1]
Pornography uses a variety of mediums and the development of the mass media has increased the distribution of such material. Magazines, television and video technology have contributed to the accessibility of pornography, although the greatest development to pornography has come from the Internet. Internet-based pornography sales, grew 14% to $2.8 billion in 2006. [2]
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Editor: Karene Jade Howie
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