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The conditions for these fertility declines show both similarities to and differences from the Western declines. It appears critical for couples to accept the idea that it is appropriate to intervene in the procreative process. In Pakistan, for example, it is commonly held that the number of births, as well as their gender and survivorship, is in the hands of Allah, and it would be wrong to interfere with his will. (It must be noted that a stated religious rationale for high fertility often masks other factors, such as a subordinate role for women. In other Islamic countries, such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, and even Iran, family planning is considered to be consistent with Islam.) Contraception tends to be found where the concepts of political and economic self-determination are better established, particularly among women. Female education is the single strongest correlate of fertility change.

In contrast with the Western experience, however, it also appears critical to have institutional support for contraception. The countries that have shown the clearest declines in fertility had national family planning programs with visible support from the highest levels of the government. The most effective programs have integrated family planning services into a general program of maternal and child health, and provide couples with easy access to a range of alternative methods (see Lapham and Mauldin 1987). Many countries are actually passing beyond this phase of the contraceptive transition, beginning in the 1990s, so that government-subsidized programs are being replaced by privatized services, at least for the middle class.

The consequences of population growth for economic development have been much debated (Simon 1977; Birdsall 1980). There have been some cases, such as Japan and South Korea, in which rapid economic expansion occurred simultaneously with rapid increases in population. Virtually all such cases were transitional, and the fertility of those countries is currently at replacement level, so the debate is now of mainly historical interest. There is a general consensus that low growth facilitates development. A growing population has a young age distribution, with many new entrants to the labor force and relatively few old people in need of pensions and health care. These factors may stimulate economic growth, but they must be balanced against the costs of supporting

and educating large numbers of children. In several countries, such as the Philippines, the economy is unable to employ large cohorts of young people satisfactorily, especially those who are better educated, and they emigrate in large numbers. In addition, household welfare can be adversely affected by large numbers of children, even in situations of economic expansion at the macro level. The negative consequences of rapid growth extend beyond the economy and into the areas of health, social welfare, political stability, and the environment. (See the end of this article for relevant cross-references.)

CHANGES IN POPULATION

DISTRIBUTION

Enormous changes in geographical distribution have been superimposed on the major trends in population size described above. Many of the social problems attributed to rapid population growth are more accurately diagnosed as consequences of increasing concentration. Urban areas, in particular the megalopolises of developing countries such as Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and New Delhi, have been growing during the twentieth century at more than twice the rate of the countries in which they are located. Cities are centers of concentration of economic, intellectual, and political life (see Hawley 1981), but rapid growth has exacerbated the problems of inadequate housing, sanitation, transportation, schooling, unemployment, and the crime associated with urban life. It is estimated that, in the year 2000, 76 percent of the population of developed countries is urban (compared to 26 percent in 1900 and 55 percent in 1950). In the developing countries, 41 percent is urban in 2000 (compared to 7 percent in 1900 and 18 percent in 1950).

The growth of cities has resulted in part from the excess of births over deaths in rural areas. With out-migration serving as one of the householdlevel valves for population regulation, individuals have been displaced from areas that cannot absorb them and have moved to cities, which are perceived to have better economic opportunities. Often that perception is incorrect. With a few exceptions, fertility is lower in cities than in rural areas.

A second major type of population redistribution in recent centuries has, of course, been across

national borders. Movement to the Americas was greatest during the half-century between 1880 and 1930, and continues to the present. There are many streams of both short-term and long-term international migration, for example out of South and Southeast Asia and into the Middle East, Europe, and North America, and from Africa into Europe and North America, and the economies of several sending countries are strengthened by monthly remittances from their emigrants (United Nations 1979, 1997). (See the end of this article for relevant cross-references.)

POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES

The United States has a population of approximately 278 million in the year 2000 and a growth rate of somewhat less than 1 percent annually, roughly one-third of which is due to immigration and two-thirds to natural increase. Fertility is slightly below replacement level, but there are more births than deaths because of the large size of the baby boom cohort, born from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. Age-specific fertility rates are increasing gradually for women in their thirties and forties, mainly because of postponed first and second births rather than later births. Otherwise, rates have been remarkably stable since the early 1970s. Rates below age 20 were dropping in the late 1990s but are still higher than in most other developed countries. For several excellent articles on fertility levels, differentials, and trends in the United States, see Casterline and colleagues (1996). See also National Center for Health Statistics (1999) and more recent annual reports in the same series.

Perhaps the most serious issues related to fertility are the large numbers of unplanned births to young women and the high numbers of abor- tions—about 2 for every 5 births—that could have been averted by contraception. Few developed countries have a range of contraceptive methods as limited as that of the United States. For example, intrauterine devices (IUDs) and progesteronebased pills are the two main nonsurgical methods in the rest of the world, but IUDs are not available in the United States. As mentioned earlier, most of the fertility decline in the West occurred while contraception was considered immoral and was explicitly illegal. Although contraception and even abortion are now legal, deep cultural ambiguities

remain in the linkage between sexuality and procreation. A litigious environment has inhibited both the development of new contraceptives by American pharmaceutical companies and the marketing of new contraceptives developed elsewhere, and the U.S. government plays a minimal role in such development.

Life expectancy in the late 1990s was 73 years for males and 79 years for females (PRB 1998). Although life expectancy is increasing for both males and females, the female advantage is also gradually increasing. The female advantage was nearly 3 years at the beginning of the twentieth century, nearly 4 years at the middle, and nearly 7 years at the end of the century (Gelbard et al. 1999). The greatest improvements in mortality are in the highest age groups, especially after age 85. Because of increases in the number of elderly and projected changes in the age distribution of the labor force, the age at receipt of full Social Security benefits is scheduled to increase gradually, from 65 to 66 by the year 2009 and to 67 by the year 2027 (Binstock and George 1990).

Among males, whites have approximately a 5- year advantage over nonwhites, and among females, whites have approximately a 4-year advantage (National Center for Health Statistics 1989; and more recent annual reports in the same series). Life expectancy for black males is falling, due mainly to deaths by homicides to black males in their twenties and a greater prevalence of cardiovascular disease among blacks (Keith and Smith 1988). Infant mortality rates for nonwhite babies are increasing, due to low birth weights and inadequate prenatal care. These reversals of earlier long-term improvements are indicators of worsening conditions among poorer Americans. (For more description of the population of the United States, see Bogue [1985]; Lieberson and Waters [1988]; Sweet and Bumpass [1988]; Nam [1994].) (See the end of this article for cross-references to articles containing more discussions of the population of the United States.)

FUTURE POPULATION

The overriding concern of world population policy in recent years has been the achievement of a new equilibrium between fertility and mortality,

so that growth will be slowed or stopped. Sometimes this policy is stated in terms of enabling couples to have the number of children they want to have, and no more, because surveys in most developing countries indicate that couples desire smaller families than they actually have (see the country reports published by Macro International [1985–2000].).

The concept of replacement fertility is important for understanding population projections. Normally stated in terms of the female population, the reproductive value of a woman of a given age is equal to the number of daughters she will have who will survive to (at least) this same age. If the average reproductive value is exactly 1, then fertility is at replacement level. This occurs when the average woman has about 2.1 births in her lifetime (a little above 2.0, to compensate for children who do not survive). If there has been a history of higher fertility, then the population has been growing and is relatively young, with many women in the peak ages of childbearing. As a result, there can continue to be more births than deaths (i.e., population growth) for a very long time after the net reproduction rate has reached or even fallen below the replacement value of 1.0. However, in the long term, replacement fertility will lead to a no-growth population, and below-replacement fertility will lead to population decline.

Strictly speaking, reproduction is intergenerational, but it is estimated with the net reproduction rate, a synthetic measure calculated from agespecific fertility and survival rates within an interval of time such as one year. If an artificial cohort of women is subjected to these rates and does not replace itself, then current fertility is interpreted to be below replacement.

Projected improvements in mortality would have a relatively low impact on population growth. For reproduction, it is survivorship up to and through the childbearing ages that matters. Improvements in survivorship after age 45 or so have little impact. Projections do require some assumptions about the future of the human immunovirus (HIV) and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa and also in South and Southeast Asia.

In the year 2000, world population is estimated to be 6.1 billion, with a growth rate of about 1.8

percent annually. If the current rate were to continue, world population would reach 9.2 billion by the year 2025. Even if reproduction immediately came into balance with mortality, as just described, world population would continue to increase. Population momentum, due to the youthful age distribution, would produce an excess of births over deaths (i.e., growth) for more than a century. World population would reach 7.5 billion by 2025, eventually stabilizing at nearly 10 billion. Substantial future growth is inevitable, but there is a wide range of possible scenarios.

Projections developed by the United Nations (United Nations 1998) for the year 2025 range from a low variant of 7.3 billion to a medium variant of 7.8 billion and a high variant of 8.4 billion, depending on assumptions about about future mortality and (more important) future fertility. By comparison, ten years earlier (United Nations 1988) the low projection for 2025 was 8.5 billion, slightly above the current high projection. This substantial downward revision reflects a general optimism that the threat of a world population explosion has largely receded. (It also implies that little credibility should be attached to longerterm projections, and for that reason this article will not cite projections beyond 2025.)

All the current projection scenarios assume that fertility will decline. The lowest estimate is based on an assumption that it will decline to below-replacement levels very soon, after 2005, and will decline steadily thereafter. This assumption is highly improbable, but even the medium variant assumes that worldwide fertility will be below replacement by 2030. This is a remarkable change from earlier projections, because prior to the late 1990s almost all scenarios assumed that fertility would ultimately converge to replacement level, with uncertainty only about when that would occur. Now that better data are available on actual changes during the 1980s and 1990s, it is considered likely that fertility will fall below replacement level early in the twenty-first century.

The net reproduction rate is currently less than 1.0 (that is, fertility is below the long-term level needed to balance mortality) in virtually all the more developed countries. The one-fifth of the world’s population that resides in those countries will increase scarcely at all, and much of that growth will be the result of immigration from

developing countries. Around the year 2000, compared to a standard of replacement fertility, Europe is at 68 percent of replacement level and North America is at 93 percent, while Asia is 10 percent above replacement, Latin America is 20 percent above, and Africa is 84 percent above. (These percentages come from estimates and me- dium-variant projections for 2000 by the United Nations [1998].) It is projected that low growth in Europe will cause the median age to rise to the mid-forties by 2025, with a fifth of the population above 65 years of age, a situation that the United States will approach a few years later. An excellent discussion of the causes and effects of future population change, and of many of the other topics in this article, can be found in Gelbard and colleagues, Haub, and Kent (1999).

Although world growth has been the preoccupation of recent decades, the possibility of population decline has long been acknowledged in Europe. In the United States, fertility has been below replacement since approximately 1970, and if it were not for high levels of immigration, this country would also face the prospect of population decline. Policies directed at increasing fertility in European countries have met with little success (see Calot and Blayo 1982; van de Kaa 1987). In urban settings with a high standard of living, children lose much of their earlier value as a source of economic activity, household wealth, and security in old age. They become increasingly expensive in terms of direct costs such as clothing, housing, and education, and in terms of opportunity costs such as forgone labor force activity by the mother.

In brief, there are probably two main reasons why fertility has not declined even further in the developed countries. One is the adherence to a powerful norm for two children that was consolidated around the middle of the twentieth century. Surveys show an overwhelming preference for exactly two children—preferably one boy and one girl, especially in the United States—with little flexibility either above or below that number. Actual childbearing often departs from the norm, more commonly by being below two children, so that fertility is below replacement. A high proportion of childbearing beyond two children is due to a desire for at least one child of each sex. Reliable methods to achieve the desired sex composition would result in a noticeable reduction of third and later births.

Second, children provide parents with a primary social group. There is no longer an expectation that they will provide support in old age, nor an important concern with carrying on the family name, but children do provide psychic and social rewards. To bear children is to emulate the behavior of one’s parents and to replicate the family of orientation. However, this goal can be largely attained with only one child, as is being demonstrated in the lowest-fertility countries of Europe and in urban China. As increasing numbers of women opt for no children or only one child, it is possible that the widespread preference for two will weaken, even in the United States. For further discussion of fertility preferences in the United States, see Schoen and colleagues (1997).

Although the world as a whole is far from experiencing a decline in population, the low reproductivity of some countries and subpopulations raises questions about future mechanisms for restraining an indefinite decline in fertility, and eventually in population (see Teitelbaum and Winter 1985; Davis et al. 1986). It is reasonable to speculate on whether the cultural and social props for replacement fertility will continue to hold, or whether, as in the low and medium UN projections, worldwide fertility will decline to belowreplacement levels early in the twenty-first century.

Major reductions in fertility in the past have been the result of delayed marriage and contraception and have been motivated at the level of the household. Maintenance of equilibrium in the future will require an increase in desired family size and less use of contraception. Many house- hold-level factors associated with economic development would seem to support a projection of continued decline in fertility—for example, increased labor-force participation and autonomy for women, declines in marriage rates, increased costs for the education of children, and increased emphasis on consumption and leisure. It is easier to project a continued decline in fertility, rather than a significant upturn, in the absence of major changes or interventions in the microeconomy of the household. However, it also seems plausible that children will take on an increased (noneconomic) value as they become scarcer, or that subpopulations that favor high fertility will come to dominate, in which case the world will return to the previous pattern of long-term homeostasis at some level, or

will establish a new pattern of very gradual growth, rather than allowing an inexorable decline.

(SEE ALSO: Birth and Death Rates; Demographic Transition; Demography; Ethnicity; Family Planning; Infant and Child Mortality; Internal Migration; International Migration; Life Expectancy; Race; Retirement; Urbanization)

Goody, Jack 1976 Production and Reproduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

——— 1983 The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Greenhalgh, Susan 1996 ‘‘The Social Construction of Population Science: An Intellectual, Institutional, and Political Hisory of Twentieth Century Demography.’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 38:26–66.

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THOMAS W. PULLUM

PORNOGRAPHY

Most societies have some kinds of sexually explicit words, images, and other materials that are disapproved, prohibited, illegal, or restricted in circulation; that are portrayed in a manner that is generally unacceptable; and that are classified as pornography. The term pornography often denotes subjective disapproval of materials rather than their content or effect.

Historically, attitudes toward pornography tend to be cyclical. The most recent expansion in the United States of the availability of such materials began in the 1960s, as a result of larger social trends, including the civil rights movement, the counterculture and antiwar movement, approval of the contraceptive pill, and liberal U.S. Supreme Court decisions providing access to previously banned novels and films. These trends contributed to continuing discussion on whether new forms of social control would be necessary to cope with pornography, and federal government investigations into pornography’s impact were launched in 1968 and 1985.

Both the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (1971) and the Attorney General’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (1986) felt that it was not possible to define pornography clearly. The term has no legal definition, although certain sexual content is not protected by the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and can be prosecuted under federal and state laws regulating obscenity.

Over the last several decades, the connotations of pornography have changed from a generic descriptor of explicit sexual content to more pejorative representations of sexual material. Pornography is often distinguished from erotica, which is

a more tender, humanistic, and artistic type of sexual representation.

The divergence in opinion on how to deal with the pornography problem could be seen in the different recommendations of the two federal commissions established to examine it. The President’s Commission recommended that the laws on obscenity should be repealed, because the material represented an insignificant social problem and had no lasting negative effect on its users. The report of the Attorney General’s Commission urged that the obscenity laws should be strictly enforced, because the material had significant negative impact and constituted an important national problem. One possible reason for this disagreement was the change in the market for explicit materials between 1970 and 1986, but another factor could have been differences in the time available, composition, and resources of the two commissions.

Because sexually explicit content is often initially excluded from mainstream channels of communication, its creators have usually been alert to newly emerging outlets for distribution. One of the first books to appear in print after Gutenberg developed printing around 1448 was Boccaccio’s erotic masterpiece, The Decameron. Soon after Edison developed moving pictures in 1891, underground ‘‘blue’’ movies began to appear. Super 8mm movies presenting sexually explicit content could be found in 1970, the very first year that the new technology appeared.

In the 1980s, soon after deregulation of the telephone business, many sex telephone services offered both recorded messages and the opportunity to have individualized ‘‘audiotext’’ conversations. Around the same time, sexually explicit movies became available via pay-per-view cable systems servicing homes and hotel chains.

In 1979, when fewer than 1 percent of American homes had videocassette recorders (VCRs), 80 percent of VCR owners bought or rented sexually explicit tapes. Some stores boosted sales of VCRs by giving a sexually explicit videotape as a gift with every purchase. During the 1990s, perhaps onethird of adult males and one-fifth of adult females have seen a sexually explicit videotape in a given year. The VCR is especially popular for viewing sexual content because it permits the user to speed up, slow down, replay, or freeze images. America is

the world’s largest producer of sexually explicit videotapes, churning out approximately 7,500 per year. The huge growth in the explicit video market during the 1980s and 1990s paralleled an increase in the number of large strip clubs around the country. The videos have become a way of promoting the careers of the actresses who appear at the clubs, who also can be seen in men’s magazines.

CD-ROM and Internet income from sex-relat- ed content cannot be accurately measured but is believed to be enormous. A series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions has established the Internet as a public forum that is entitled to the highest level of protection by the First Amendment, including the representation of sexually explicit materials. Several laws that restricted access of children to the Internet have been declared unconstitutional by federal courts.

Rating systems represent one approach to social control of sexual content. The 1968 original movie rating system, by assigning sexually explicit materials to a special Adult X category and the development of similar kinds of ratings for television programs and popular music, further helped legitimate sexual content.

Within several years after the movie rating system began, X-rated films began to be shown at major theaters. The X-rated Last Tango in Paris, starring Marlon Brando, the country’s most celebrated actor, was one of the most popular films of 1973, the same year in which Deep Throat became a national sensation because of its enormous commercial success and humor. The X-rated Midnight Cowboy had already received an Academy Award as Best Picture in 1969.

In addition to ratings, technological approaches have been used as a way of regulating children’s access to sexual content. A special chip was developed so that parents could block children’s access to objectionable materials on television. Such approaches attempt to strike a balance between the American abhorrence of censorship and parents’ concern about their children’s exposure to inappropriate material.

The ultimate weapon in blocking the availability of offensive sexual material has always been the application of the laws against obscenity. Three

criteria for obscenity were promulgated by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Miller v. California (413 U.S. 15, 1973): the material had to be patently offensive; it must appeal to the prurient interest of the average adult applying contemporary standards; and it must have no literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Because the Court no longer wanted to deal with the stream of cases that it had been handling, ‘‘community’’ was newly defined to be a local county, state, or federal court district, so that each area could have whatever level of sexual material it found acceptable. The number of indictments and convictions declined after 1973 because of juries’ reluctance to convict, prosecutorial predictability, changes in the political climate that led to antipornography becoming a less salient and less attractive political theme, and communities’ views that criminal justice resources should give less attention to obscenity and focus more on crimes against persons.

The decline in implementation of criminal justice sanctions encouraged new entrepreneurs to produce and distribute sex-oriented materials. Another spur to entrepreneurs, in the 1980s, was the Federal Communications Commission’s decision not to regulate cable television, and this was followed in 1984 by the television networks’ decision to eliminate their national code of broadcast standards. The continuing competition for audiences between media further increased the likelihood that sexual content would receive more prominence, in a situation in which administrative barriers to representation of sex content were clearly diminishing.

Instead of criminal prosecution of materials for violation of the obscenity laws, a number of cities adopted a totally different approach in the 1990s. These communities use zoning laws against theaters, strip clubs, bookstores, and other sexrelated industries in order to break up their concentration and minimize visual pollution. The new approach accepted these establishments’ right to sell sexually explicit products or services but challenged their right to maintain their location.

The zoning laws rely on a U.S. Supreme Court decision which held that if ‘‘adult’’ businesses could be shown to have adverse secondary effects

(decline in real estate values and quality of life and increase in crime), the community could make zoning changes, provided that reasonable alternative avenues of communication were available to the businesses (Playtime Theatres v. City of Renton, 106 U.S. 925, 1986).

An example of the zoning approach could be seen in New York City where a 1997 law required that ‘‘adult’’ bookstores, strip clubs, peepshows, and theaters be at least 500 feet from each other and at least 500 feet from residences and public buildings, thus eliminating the concentration of such establishments in Times Square. Any challenges to such zoning changes have been handled in the civil rather than the criminal courts.

One way in which producers of these materials attempt to minimize legal problems is to make publications, movies, and videotapes in both hardcore and soft-core versions, for targeted distribution to specific markets. The hard-core materials usually show some form of actual sexual interaction and the soft-core content generally presents simulated interaction. Any representation of sexual material involving children has been the target of intensive law enforcement and is very scarce.

There seems to be no relationship between sexually explicit materials and prostitution; consumers of these materials are not likely to be customers of prostitutes, because of differences in the gratifications provided by the two activities. There also seems to be no significant relationship between the production and distribution of such materials and organized crime. There are now so many producers and distributors and the prices are so competitively low that organized crime groups cannot make a large enough profit to justify participation in the business.

Although there is no unified and consistent feminist attitude toward pornography, feminist opposition to pornography has generated much attention. One sustained feminist attack on pornography, jointly led by writer Andrea Dworkin and attorney Catherine A. MacKinnon, argued that pornography is misogynistic and dehumanizing, graphically presenting the sexually explicit subordination of women. They developed a model ordinance for Indianapolis that represented a civil rights approach, which identified pornography as

a violation of the equality guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, the ordinance was found to be unconstitutional by a federal appeals court (American Booksellers Association v. Hudnut, 771 F. 2d, 7th Circuit, 1985). A comparable approach was upheld by the highest court in Canada (Butler v. The Queen, 1 SCR 452, 199, 1992), where it has been primarily used to prosecute gay publications.

A collateral approach involved dissemination of feminist writer Robin Morgan’s slogan, ‘‘Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.’’ Around the same time that feminist theorists were arguing that the growing availability of misogynistic pornography was the direct cause of increasing rates of rape, a number of mass communication researchers conducted laboratory experiments that attempted to prove the connection between exposure to such materials and the development of callous attitudes toward women and rape. One of the problems with these studies is that they were usually conducted with college students, who were exposed to materials that they would not ordinarily see. There is also the possibility of an experimenter effect and the difficulty of proving the carrying over of an attitude from viewing a film to a real rape situation. Several researchers have expressed the view that to interpret their largely laboratory-based studies as confirming a causal nexus between exposure to sexually explicit films and subsequent sexually violent behavior would represent overgeneralization.

Another problem in arguing for such a nexus is that no large-scale content studies prove that there has been any increase in the amount of sexual violence in the media. An examination of the available data suggests that there has been a decline since 1977 in the amount of sexual violence in the media, but there has probably been an increase in violence in nonpornographic fare, such as action, slasher, and horror films. To single out pornography for stringent legal action and to ignore ideas about rape and violence that are otherwise so pervasive in our culture is not justified by the available evidence.

A number of natural experiments have provided information on the possible relationship between media sex content and rape and other sex crimes. In the United States, four states that eliminated all obscenity statutes and had a concomitant

increase in the availability of sexually explicit materials for varying periods between 1973 and 1986 were studied. During the period of obscenity nonprosecution, the mean annual arrest rates for sex offenses in these four states declined significantly in comparison to the other forty-six states. A study of the first three countries to legalize sexually explicit materials (Denmark, Sweden, Germany) concluded that legalization did not lead to increased sexual violence in any of them.

Researchers using other indirect measures have similarly attempted to correlate sex offenses with previous exposure to sexually explicit materials. A large-scale study by the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research of convicted sex offenders found no relation between sex crimes and offenders’ exposure to such materials. Another study of nonincarcerated sex offenders reported no significant differences between the exposure to such materials of the offenders and the general adult male population. Whether on an individual, a regional, or a national basis, empirical studies have failed to find any consistent correlation between availability of and exposure to explicit materials and sex crimes against women.

A number of producers are actively distributing sexually explicit materials targeted for women consumers, and other producers have developed such materials for feminist audiences. Some feminists have produced their own explicit films and others have made videotapes for women and couples that are sold in mainstream superstores and direct mail catalogs. A number of performers who became known from appearing in explicit movies and tapes are obtaining roles in mainstream studio or independent films.

Research has identified a number of functions served by sexually explicit materials. They provide information that is not otherwise available, as well as fantasy outlets and sexual stimulation. They also provide reassurance about one’s body and about shame or guilt relating to specific practices. The materials can desensitize people so that they are better able to consider and discuss sexual matters, and can facilitate communication between sexual partners. The materials may provide a socially acceptable functional equivalent for masturbation and for acting out otherwise socially harmful sexual behavior. For members of a group audience, as

in a strip club or a movie theater, the social context can reinforce the experience. The materials and performers also may provide a vehicle for connoisseurship.

Plausible next steps in sociological investigations of pornography could include cross-media content analyses, naturalistic studies of effects, systematic case studies of the role of the various interest groups involved in promoting or blocking pornography, investigation of the structure of the pornography industry, and studies of the role of the home environment in contributing to how explicit materials are used.

In Denmark, the first country to legalize pornography (1969), the market for such materials declined sharply, as a result of satiation of the audience. Tracking the cycle of acceptance of pornography in America, to see whether the Danish experience is relevant, could represent an important study. A collateral study could determine whether there are specific subgroups in the population for whom these materials are becoming more or less important. The extent to which pornography continues to be a feature of the political culture wars and a vehicle for obtaining support for larger economic and policy initiatives represents an important social indicator, as is the alliance between feminists and moral conservatives in opposing pornography. Another activity that will surely bear watching in the future is how the effort to regulate pornography on the Internet, for children or adults, can be accomplished by a state or a country that does not have legal jurisdiction over the global information network that is the Internet.

REFERENCES

Attorney General’s Committee on Obscenity and Pornography 1986 Final Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Gebhard, P. H., J. H. Gagnon, W. B. Pomeroy, and C. Christenson 1965 Sex Offenders. New York: Harper and Row.

Kimmel, M. (ed.) 1989 Men Confront Pornography. New

York: Crown.

Lederer, L. (ed.) 1980 Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography. New York: William Morrow.

MacKinnon, C. A. 1993 Only Words. Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press.

President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography 1971 Final Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Strossen, N. 1995 Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights. New York: Scribner.

Winick, C. 1977 ‘‘From Deviant to Normative: Changes in the Social Acceptability of Sexually Explicit Material.’’ In E. Sagarin, ed., Deviance and Social Change. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage.

Zillman, D., and J. Bryant (eds.) 1989 Pornography: Research Advances and Policy Considerations. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.

CHARLES WINICK

POSITIVE MENTAL HEALTH

The concept of positive mental health was developed by Marie Jahoda, who argues that positive mental health can be viewed as an enduring personality characteristic or as a less permanent function of personality and the social situation (Jahoda 1958). This article summarizes Jahoda’s approach to positive mental health, reviews other discussions of the concept, describes a challenge to the assumption that positive mental health requires the accurate perception of reality, examines the value assumptions inherent in the concept, and compares the notions of normality and positive mental health.

In her classic book, Current Concepts of Positive Mental Health (1958), Jahoda identified the following six approaches to the definition of positive mental health, which are described in detail below:

(1) attitude toward own self; (2) growth, development, and self-actualization; (3) integration; (4) autonomy; (5) perception of reality; and (6) environmental mastery.

1.Acceptance of self, self-confidence, and selfreliance characterize the mentally healthy person. An important attribute of positive mental health includes the understanding of one’s strengths and weaknesses, coupled with the conviction that one’s positive characteristics outweigh the negative traits. Independence, initiative, and self-esteem are other indictors of positive mental health.

2.The realization of one’s potential is the underlying assumption of this dimension of positive mental health. Maslow (1954) explains that