Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media.

• Date: 22 September 1992
• Author: McCormick, Chris
• Published date: 22 September 1992
• Author: McCormick, Chris

THIS BOOK BY SIMON WATNEY, A SENIOR LECTURER IN THE SCHOOL OF COMmunications at the Polytechnic of Central London, is mainly an examination of British culture, but much can be generalized to North American culture as well. The book's title is apt, since Watney shows how our private and personal desires are shaped through the influence of the media. For example, the publicity surrounding AIDS has inevitably linked it to sexual promiscuity or deviance and, thus, the prohibitions on how to avoid it often become moral prescriptions on "correct" sex.

To analyze the construction of a social panic is to confront all the prejudices of a society. Even to entertain the idea that diseases are socially constructed involves deconstructing their taken-for-granted factuality. Watney goes underneath the fact of AIDS to disclose how the media and government base their approach to the problem on a not-so-subtle homophobia and an agenda of sexual uniformity and conformity. Policing Desire is an analysis of how the media has handled the AIDS issue, with a grounded analysis of government educational campaigns, media reports, and television...