Pornography, Then and Now

Even at women’s expense, men’s sexual expression has been protected as what presumably secures women’s rights.

Dangerous Relationships (1998) and “He Chose Porn over Me” (2022)

Born in 1996, I entered a world long saturated in pornographic images, where Hustler and Playboy propagated. Here I am not merely referring to just sexuality in any media, broadly understood, but rather sexuality coupled with heightened violence. And, further, the pattern in most pornography, that which drives the almost entirely male consumer base, has appeared to be male violence against women. “Sexy” defined by women’s degradation has defined prostitution and pornography as what Robert Jensen refers to as “the sexual-exploitation industries.” Present conditions of consumption differ from reading, say, either birth control material from Margaret Sanger in 1917 or D.H.  Lawrence’s censored 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. 

Recently, I had talked with the staff at The Distance about pornography and speech. In particular, we noted the position of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), as expressed by its former president Nadine Strossen in her 1995 book Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights. Critiquing Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, as well as the feminist antipornography movement, Strossen writes:

Far from advancing women’s equality, this growing tendency to equate any sexual expression with gender discrimination undermines women’s equality. Women are, in effect, told that we have to choose between sexuality and equality, between sexal liberation and other aspects of ‘women’s liberation,’ between sexual freedom and economic, social, and political freedom. This dangerous equation of sexual expression with gender discrimination, which is at the heart of the feminist antipornography movement, is a central reason that movement is so threatening to the women’s rights cause. (pp. 24-25)

I certainly would like nothing better than to find a simple fast route to equality and safety for women. But censoring sexual speech is really a detour or, worse, a dead end. For without free speech, where can we go but backward along our hard-forged path? (p. 279)

Certainly, Strossen’s framing makes her argument look sensible—and, importantly, casts Dworkin and MacKinnon as being the new Puritans. As many do, Strossen presents brief quotes illustrating the presumed insanity of radical feminists. Feminist concerns around pornography, she argues, have been misguided and ultimately undermine “free speech” in such areas as fine art. According to Strossen, women essentially benefit by the promotion of freer “sexual expression”—which, not coincidentally, tends to expand male sexual expression more so than female sexual expression. But the pornographic imagination, like the industry, has not been “gender-neutral.” And the dynamic involving consumers being primarily men and the consumables being primarily women seems to slip from notice in this paradigm.

The only difference between Strossen and Leo, who both dismiss feminist critiques of pornography and what they see as the overreach of sexual harassment law, is that one claims feminism and the other does not.

Bypassing the graphic content of films like Deep Throat and magazines like Hustler, Strossen begins her book, the new 2000 edition, with an image titled Second Child Coming in which a child reaches for the mother’s exposed breast. Censorship, she writes, endangers us all—including female artists who are not, in fact, being sexually exploited. To add, long in opposition to Dworkin and MacKinnon, Betty Friedan, author of the 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, endorsed Strossen’s book, claiming that it “[p]roves without a doubt that free expression is an essential foundation for women’s liberty, equality, and sexuality.” Perhaps it also proves of some interest to consider how the ACLU has transformed into an organization that sues a private citizen for seeking public records on the number of male inmates moving into female prisons.

Now, the argument from Strossen, which assumes more “sexual expression,” in abstract terms, to produce more freedom, has been far from unique, repeated over and over again. A long-time columnist for U.S. News & World Report, John Leo, for example, equates creating any civil rights legislation related to women exploited by pornography with prohibition. According to Leo, in the second edition of his 1994 book Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police:

The vast expansion of the porn industry is very troubling, but censorship won’t stop it, any more than prohibition stopped alcohol (or any more than official punishment for racial jokes helps whites and blacks get along better). And if MacKinnon thinks all women are oppressed by men, why does it make sense to have the male-dominated government decide what sexual materials women get to see? Instead of calling in the cops, a free society ought to try discrediting and stigmatizing people who deal in violent pornography. (pp. 254-255)

Ironically, although “Thought Police” in his title alludes to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Leo does not consider how Pornosec—and the production system of pornography—factors into the further subjection of the dulled and desensitized masses. One cannot help but recognize similarities in framing, with many arguments repeating themselves over multiple pages, maybe only reworded slightly. The only difference between Strossen and Leo, who both dismiss feminist critiques of pornography and what they see as the overreach of sexual harassment law, is that one claims feminism and the other does not. Both utilize the same general argumentation put forth by civil libertarians around the concept of “free speech.”

In critique of Strossen, it must be noted that she excludes any discussion of the work of Diana E.H. Russell, namely Russell’s 1988 essay “Pornography and Rape: A Causal Model.” Nor does Strossen engage the body of quantitative and qualitative research, including work by Russell, that discusses the relation between increased aggressiveness among male consumers of pornography toward females depicted in the pornography consumed. For examples of the images critiqued by Dworkin and MacKinnon, one may refer to Russell’s 1993 book Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm, which features images from Hustler, Penthouse, and Playboy. There are no fine art images of mothers breastfeeding to be found—and it seems like a stark contrast from the popular analogies, in the abstract, drawn between any nudity in art and graphic depictions of female bodies in the above magazines. Russell later published a fuller textual analysis in 1998 titled Dangerous Relationships: Pornography, Misogyny, and Rape.

With our immersion—perhaps our sinking—into the online world, Dworkin’s critique of pornography actually has been proven truer by the growing industry. Her 1981 book Pornography: Men Possessing Women appeared decades before the rise of Pornhub in 2007—and her analysis holds true to the content that has proliferated since then. Indeed, the uncritical defense of pornography and the longstanding promotion of “sex positivity” has laid the groundwork for what, now, we find increasingly harmful. Such a drastic turn toward “sex positivity” has involved universities, like Durham University, offering students, disproportionately female ones, “sex work” training. That is, concerns about sexual harassment be damned, a university can tell female students how “best” to be “sex workers”—that is, to be prostituted. Strossen and Leo may well oppose this turn, but civil libertarianism, the kind that equates civil rights law with prohibitionism, has made it possible.

Let us now turn to consciousness raising. Melinda Tankard Reist has a newly edited collection, published by Spinifex Press, titled “He Chose Porn Over Me”: Women Harmed by Men Who Use Porn. This work includes the narratives of women who, contrary to the above claims from Strossen and Friedan, have found their humanity and integrity negatively impacted. Much existing research has focused on male “sex addiction,” or any neurosis brought out, if not intensified, by a man’s continuous use of pornography.

Beyond radical feminists who have cared, little attention has gone to the victimization of women, particularly the partners of men who use pornography. What happens in the lives of these women, I think, deserves greater understanding and compassion. For the issue has not just been nudity, in some abstract sense—or even, say, a mother breastfeeding in fine art. Going against the grain here, I argue that we have been faced with men’s so-called “civil liberties” overriding women’s civil rights. Marked by a theocratic dominion, the orthodoxy of modern transgenderism has posed much the same problem. Even at women’s expense, men’s sexual expression has been protected as what presumably secures the rights of women. But, in reality, this framing has severely undermined the rights of women.