I can't remember a time when I have more wanted to recommend a single book to everyone I know. You might think that an ethnography of Japan's pornography industry would be a niche topic, or one of interest to only gender scholars, media scholars, or fans. But Akiko Takeyama's Involuntary Consent is instead deeply relatable and fundamentally connected to broad questions that exist well beyond pornography, including the nature of consent, extractive labor, and the assumptions built into legal structures. As an example of what the best ethnographic research can do, Takeyama's close examination of a particular topic reveals much broader truths while never losing focus on the specific context.
The book identifies the titular “involuntary consent” as the ways in which any legal agreement is shaped by social, economic, and political structures surrounding it at the same time those very forces are ignored or elided. People regularly have to...
