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Dangerous Relationships: Pornography, Misogyny, and Rape, by Diana H. RusselL Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998. 206 pp. $48.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-7619-0524-3. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 0-- 7619-0525-1.
In this revised and expanded version of her 1994 self-published book, Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm (still available from the author), Russell's objectives are to educate women about the content of pornography and to expose the scholarly community to her theory that pornography is a cause of rape. By pornography Russell specifically means "material that combines sex and/or the exposure of genitals with abuse or degradation in a manner that appears to endorse, condone, or encourage such behavior" (p. 3). Although her definition embraces gay and child pornography, the focus in this book is the abuse of women.
Changed from the original volume, verbal descriptions of pornographic images, including racist and anti-Semitic images now replace pictures and are interspersed with interpretive commentary. Russell's approach-to educate by shocking the reader-does work. I have shown the film Not A Love Story...