Abstract

Any overview or discussion of the various connotations of the term ‘pornographer’ must identify and evaluate the significance of key practitioners in both the soft and hardcore realm. Their socio-cultural profiles have been regularly informed by representations in fictional and non-fictional media spaces, and very often moralists, regulatory bodies and oppositional feminists have deployed the term pejoratively, allowing for an array of colourful, but none-too polite designations - ‘smut peddler’, ‘sleaze merchant’, ‘porn baron’ - suggesting that the conventions of language compartmentalise sexual scenarists and entrepreneurs outside the realms of ‘respectability’, and consigning some to the abject status of social pariah. However, despite low cultural standing, pornographers have shrewdly embraced technological change while operating across the social scale in conspiratorial networks of street level dealers and global business operatives.