ABSTRACT
Christine's Secret and other Femme productions have led the way in legitimizing a new phase o f porn production aimed at consumption by women and by couples in the home. They also mark the latest phase in the history of pornography's bid for respectability. Back in the midfifties, the upmarket Playboy had attracted an audience o f aspiring preexecutive men, for whom its philosophy of "fun" and "swinging" pro moted and celebrated the good life, ushering in a culture of consumption that represented a revolt against the stability of suburban breadwinning l ife. 1 Increasingly, Playboy's patronage by intellectuals and glitterati brought to its readers the kudos o f cultural authority; in the mid-sixties, for example, a single issue included new work by the following writers: Vladimir Nabokov, P.G. Wodehouse, Harold Pinter, Jack Kerouac, Woody Allen, Terry Southern, Ray Bradbury, Budd Shulberg, Julian Huxley, Will iam Saroyan, A r t h u r C. Clarke, Kenneth Tynan, and Jules Feiffer.^ I n fact, the success o f Playboy's commercial empire was founded upon a libertarian idea of "art," and "free expression," primarily literary, which could contain and be sustained by the philosophy o f recreational sex for men of means. By 1980, over 200 hard-core and 165 soft-core straight male magazines (50 hard-core and a dozen soft-core gay) were established in more or less legitimate markets and submarkets that had surfaced and flourished by democratizing elements o f the Playboy dis course for more popular or speciality audiences.3
