I spent this weekend on the mainland at a friend’s wedding where I had the chance to run into David Andrews. I last saw Dave a few years ago where I saw him give a fascinating lecture on softcore pornography. His talk impressed me for a couple of reasons: first, he is one of the first Nabokov scholar I’ve met to admit that his interest in Lolita was really about the porn and not the literature and that his next project was going to be Debby Does Dallas rather than Pale Fire. Second, his point in the lecture (if I remember correctly) was that the literature on softcore tended to treat it as peripheral to the main form of porn, which was hardcore, and which was easily understood by feminist theory as part of the misogynistic power structure in the US that keeps women down. He argued that softcore was it’s own sort of thing and that the messages it sent about men and women were much more ambiguous and deeply rooted in America. Softcore is much more widespread in the US — you can get it at Blockbuster, apparently — and so understanding gender in the US means making sense of softcore as it’s own unique phenomenon. I thought it was a fascinating talk and that Andrews was a guy who had 1) buckets of brain-power and 2) watched a truly mind-boggling amount of softcore pornography.

When I ran into Dave this weekend he told me his new book on this topic was finally out. “Soft In The Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature In Its Contexts”:http://www.amazon.com/Soft-Middle-Contemporary-Softcore-Contexts/dp/0814210228/sr=8-1/qid=1162255403/ref=sr_1_1/002-0199581-3412860?ie=UTF8&s=books is now out from “Ohio State University Press”:http://www.ohiostatepress.org/ (which also has a long list of “open access titles”:http://www.ohiostatepress.org/index.htm?/books/openaccess.htm on their site. OHP++!!). I haven’t had a chance to look at it, but based on hanging out with Dave I really do reccomend the book. OHP has made the “first chapter”:http://www.ohiostatepress.org/books/Book%20PDFs/Andrews%20Soft.pdf available on their website (warning: this is the front and end matter as well, so it’s like a 100 page download). Give it a read and tell me what you think.