Pornography and the Sexual Revolution: A Comparative Study Between West Germany and the United States

The main objective of this work is to investigate the legal and academic definitions of heterosexual pornography during the 1960s and 1970s in West Germany as a means of exploring treatment of the genre. This time period is particularly noteworthy due to the emergence of the "German sex film" genre, which was considered by the films' directors separate from pornography. Additionally, the current laws that define what pornography is were formulated during this time. It is also important to say that this work will only discuss what happened in West Germany and not the German Democratic Republic (GDR) because they were two different countries with contrasting cultures. Information regarding pornography and sexuality in the GDR is relatively difficult to find and what is available is distinctly different than the events and information in West Germany. This work will compare the German legal and academic definitions of pornography to those in the United States.