pornotopia

pornotopia

English

Etymology

Blend of pornography +‎ utopia; originally coined by literary scholar and author Steven Marcus in his book The Other Victorians: a Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (1966) to describe the setting in Victorian pornography.

Noun

pornotopia (usually uncountable, plural pornotopias)

1. A fantasy world in which everyone is ready and willing to indulge in all kinds of sexual activity.
   • 1990, Bruce J. Ellis and Donald Symons (November 1990), "Sex differences in sexual fantasy: an evolutionary psychological approach", Journal of Sex Research, 27(4):527–555, page 544:

     Whether written or pictorial, pornotopia overwhelmingly depicts or evokes visual images of female bodies (or male bodies, in the case of male homosexual pornography), particularly the genitals.

   • 1994, Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover (1994), "The pornographic state", Harvard Law Review, 107:1374–1399 – via Seattle University School of Law Digital Commons, page 1375:

     Pornotopia emerges as the forces of self-gratification, mass consumerism, and advanced technology merge.

   • 2012, Roger Bellin (21 May 2012), "Pornotopia", Los Angeles Review of Books (retrieved 2017-10-31; archived from the original 2017-10-31):

     Pornotopia, it turns out, has the same narrative problem all utopias do—a perfectly happy place is more fun to live in than it is to read about.

   • 2012, Catherine Salmon (June 2012), "The pop culture of sex: an evolutionary window on the worlds of pornography and romance", Review of General Psychology, 16(2):152–160, DOI:10.1037/a0027910, page 155:

     Pornotopia is a fantasy realm, made possible by evolutionarily novel technologies (film, DVDs, the Internet, things that did not exist for most of human history), in which impersonal sex with a variety of high mate value women is the norm rather than the rare exception.

Derived terms

• pornotopic
• pornotopian

Related terms

• intimatopia
• romantopia