A Philosopher Looks At The Porn Debate

January, 1988

How many times have you sat through an antiporn diatribe or listened to a fundamentalist rail against erotica and wondered, Who will stand up for pornography? We asked Canadian philosopher Dr. F. M. Christensen to respond to some of the clicheed antiporn arguments.[Q] Playboy: Is pornography a recent phenomenon?[A] Christensen: Humans have produced pornography for thousands of years. The artists of ancient Greece, India and Japan produced quite a bit of sexually explicit art. In ancient Tahiti,...