I need some reader feedback before I go in and bitch to a professor. Help within.

For my sociology class on deviance, I had to write a research/lit review paper on any topic of my choosing. I chose to look at the link between sex as portrayed in porn and sex as practiced in society (best topic ever, btw - how many times do you get to legitimately type "girl on girl" into an academic journal search engine?). Anyway, my paper includes the following paragraph, which starts my section talking about pornography through history:

What exactly constitutes pornography is a question for which every person may have his or her own definition. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once wrote in his concurrence for Jacobellis v. Ohio in regards to pornography "I shall not today attempt further to define [pornography]...but I know it when I see it" (1964). For the purposes of this paper, we shall look to Malamuth and Huppin's view on pornography, which states that not only must the material in question be sexually explicit, but it must have been created so that sexual arousal is the primary goal of production (2005), and we shall further limit our research on pornographic films and movies. Defining pornography as such eliminates such things as Victoria's Secret catalogs or issues of Maxim magazine - things that, although there is a sexual component to their content, are not created for the sole purpose of sexual arousal.

My prof is telling me that I can't/shouldn't include the "I know it when I see it" quote because A)that wasn't what the Supreme Court found in the case about obscenity, it had to do with community standards, therefore it doesn't matter legally, and B)culture is defined by shared meanings - nothing that has a different definition to everybody truly has any meaning.

I'm including it (and I think most other readers would interpret it as such) because it shows that while each person can tell you what they feel is pornography, just because one person says it's porn (like the Victoria's Secret catalog) doesn't mean other people will, leading to me defining what the paper is going to consider porn for the purpose of the study.

I need somebody(s) to tell me how you interpret the inclusion of that quotation.

Well.

While I understand the prof's opinion, given the position of the quote, it makes sense. You JUST said that it's something that's difficult to define because people have different thresholds. And immediately afterward you give the standard - if imperfect - definition that you will be using in your paper.

In regards to objection A), correct me if I'm wrong but aren't "community standards" just Justice Stewart's opinion writ slightly larger? Substitute "I" for "My/Our community".

As for objection B) is he saying that since obscenity is relative, porn doesn't exist? Because if so I have an internet to show him.

I really don't know what she's going for bringing up community standards. Granted, I'm probably tackling this from more of a psychological and less of a sociological angle than she's looking for, but still.

My paper goes like this:

* Raises the question of "are porn and sexual practices linked?
* Explores the history of pornographic films, from stag films through internet porn
* Explores the history of sex, and who does what, from the Kinsey studies through present times
* Talks about the difficulty of determining whether porn influences sex, sex influencing porn, or a combination of both, and the possibility of creating a study to determine what direction the relation goes, as well as the difficulty in teasing out the causal relationships in these "which came first, the chicken or the egg" situations.

One of the suggestions I received is to partial paraphrase the quote, only directly quoting the "I know it when I see it" part.