(4) Simple to interpret? While questions of interpretation arise frequently in relation to works of erotic art, people rarely seem to have interpretive qualms where pornography is concerned. Indeed, if an interpretation typically attempts to account for those elements in a work whose presence is not immediately obvious to the target audience (Carroll 2009), there may seem no need for an interpretation in the case of pornography since it is all too obvious why such films or novels include one sexually explicit scene after another. Still, here too it is important not to jump to conclusions. There are (at least) two different kinds of interpretative projects one could engage in, each with its own set of lead questions. “What is the work about?” is one question one could ask. Another question is “What does the work reveal about the author or the time, place, culture, society in which it was made?” While the former is central to the discipline of art criticism, the latter question will usually be the starting point of interpretations offered by cultural historians, sociologists, psychoanalysts. These latter interpretations, where pornography is concerned, will be everything but simple given the incredible complexity of the pornographic landscape with its huge catalogue of taboos, body types, sex acts, and other things that get people’s blood flowing. Pornography offers us, in the words of Laura Kipnis, “the royal road to the cultural psyche” (2006: 118) and as such can prove to be a gold mine for interpretations. The other question—What is the work about?—seems less pertinent, especially in relation to the formulaic and repetitive video clips one finds on porn websites. Nevertheless, there are other types of pornography where issues about meaning and “aboutness” do seem highly relevant, such as the philosophical pornography mentioned above and the feminist pornography that will be discussed in the next section.