Murray Davis' Smut, Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology In the book Smut, Erotic Reality/ Obscene Ideology , by Murray Davis (1983), the author expresses the idea that the best source for studying human sexuality objectively is "soft core", rather than “hard core” pornography. (Davis p. xix). The purpose of this paper is to critique Davis's claim and to study what understanding of human sexuality someone might have if they used some other resource that is available today, in this case the Internet. Davis argues that , "hard core pornography is usually more abstract and less explicit t