Interview Pornography and International Relations

Interviewed by Christian Scheinpflug about pornography studies and superpower politics for the website e-international relations

“Also, it becomes an issue sometimes that China will accuse America of spreading porn. That’s one of the reasons why they wanted to shut down Google besides other reasons e.g. Google storing information about political dissidents. So porn always plays into this kind of mutual distrust. There’s a history of mistrust in diplomatic relations and right now we’re getting in one of these periods and porno easily plays into that. China accuses America of bringing porn into that country where there is supposedly no porn. This though is not really the case since research shows that China has its own kind of porn. China uses this because pornography stands for American corrupted values. It goes back in Chinese history a long time that porn consumption is a western bourgeois value. So porn plays into this cliché and become part of the stand-off between these two political nations, but the reality is that porn has already conquered both nations.”