Pornography

Question 1

Brownmiller quote

Answer 1

‘Pornography is the undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda’

Question 2

Patricia Hill Collins quote

Answer 2

Pornography must be ‘reconceptualized as an example of the interlocking nature of race, gender, and class oppression’ - race cannot be an additional problematic layer as an afterthought

Question 3

Langton quote

Answer 3

Pornography is the ‘ruling power’ when it comes to the domain of sex

Question 4

Morgan quote

Answer 4

Pornogrpahy is the theory and rape is the practice

Question 5

Stoltenberg quote

Answer 5

Pornography tells lies about women [but] tells the truth about men

Question 6

Willis quote

Answer 6

‘What I like is erotica, and what you like is pornographic’

Question 7

Rea definition

Answer 7

Needs a neutral definition which “respects commonly held views and widely shared intuitions [about pornography] and attempts to capture these in a set of necessary and sufficient conditions

Question 8

MacKinnon and Dworkin definition

Answer 8

Pornography as ‘graphic sexually explicit materials that subordinate women through pictures or words’. MacKinnon (1993) argues that abuse and coercion need not be present in the production of all pornography for it to subjugate women, because all pornography is made under conditions of inequality based on sex.

Question 9

MacKinnon (and response)

Answer 9

Frames pornography as speech
1. Pornography eroticizes male dominance and female submissiveness and puts this forward as the apparent truth about sex. It is not merely what it depicts; it institutionalises the sexuality of male supremacy.
2. Women are hence stripped of authority and credibility and silenced by pornography. When they try and report assaults, they are often not believed. Her locution does not have uptake.
3. Pornography permits men to have whatever they want sexually. It is their ‘truth about sex’.
4. Homosexuality is derived from their mimicry or parody or reversal of the standard arrangements, which affirms rather than undermines or qualifies the standard sexual arrangement
5. All pornography is made under conditions of inequality based on sex and it constitutes sexual harassment - a ‘White Only’ sign is ‘only words’, but it not treated merely as offensive speech but as an act of segregation and discrimination

BUT Willis - MacKinnon’s ‘inability to see women as exercising even limited autonomy leads to the sort of cognitive dissonance whereby MacKinnon can declare women to be definitively silenced, even as she herself is an outspoken and influential public figure.
MacKinnon - crucial difference between verbal sexual harassment and pornography, which she equates - in the former, the words are aimed at a target of abuse, while in the latter, they are aimed at a man, to please, and not to insult

Question 10

Hornsby

Answer 10

Against speech act. A condition of linguistic communication is reciprocity, and pornography fails this because there is no meaningful communication involved

Question 11

Bird

Answer 11

Rebuts Hornsby: uptake of an intention (ie, reciprocity) is not necessary for illocutionary action. A judge passes sentence whether the prisoner knows it or not

Question 12

Langton thesis (3)

Answer 12

1. Rebuts the free speech argument - pornographic utterances have something in common with the ‘performatives’ of speech-act theory: they may authoritatively establish ‘which moves in the sexual game aren’t legitimate,’
2. Pornography is thus like a biased umpire in a game among players of vastly unequal power.
3. Existing ‘liberal debate’ operates on the frail assumption that ‘pornographic utterances are made by a powerless minority, a fringe group especially vulnerable to moralistic persecution,’ whereas in reality ‘pornography’s voice is the voice of the ruling power

Question 13

Langton - effects of pornographic speech

Answer 13

1) subordinates and silences women in ranking them as inferior,
2) in legitimating discrimination against them, and
3) in depriving women of important free speech rights (silencing through illocutionary disablement, where women saying ‘no’ is seen as sexy and not taken as non-consenting)

Question 14

Langton - three types of speech

Answer 14

Pornography’s locutionary actions (depicting subordination) and perlocutionary effects (causing subordination) are less controversial; what is controversial is its illocutionary force, the ‘constitutive subordination’ claim. Illocutionary force’s felicity conditions: 1) where the speaker’s intentions are satisfied; 2) whether the speaker achieves uptake, with the hearer recognising the illocution performed; 3) whether the speaker is authoritative relative to the intended illocution’s domain. Langton argues pornography is authoritative for the hearers who learn that violence is sexy and coercion legitimate.

Perlocutionary - ‘I pronounce you a married couple’. Illocutionary - ‘blacks are not permitted to vote’

Question 15

Saul

Answer 15

Rebuts Langton:
1. She has to reject the speech act approach to provide blanket condemnation of porn
2. Her argument of porn always subordinating women is wrong and offensive, arguing that feminists who enjoy porn are defending the subordination of women
3. Only utterances in contexts can be speech acts
4. Langton’s first and second considerations cannot really hold at once - the audience that holds porn to subjugate women (anti-porn feminists) would not actually be affected by porn’s subjugation of women, so pornography cannot both lead to subordination and be subordination
5. Cannot say porn always constitutes harm - the best that Langton can do is to claim that pornographic viewings can sometimes cause the subordination of women. ‘Feminist porn’ can exist, and only some viewings illocutionarily subordinate women

Question 16

Eaton

Answer 16

Porn is a double-edged sword:
1. Can be responsible for the eroticisation of violence, dominance and inequality
2. Can shape erotic taste in egalitarian ways
3. The burden of proof for pornography being causally linked to violence against women is too high, eg. smoking is neither necessary nor sufficient in causing lung cancer

Question 17

Antony

Answer 17

1. Pornography is not a speech act (which only covers verbal communication).
2. Even if it were a speech act, its problematic effects could not be illocutionary effects.
3. Even when pornography works as Langton says it does, the ‘silencing’ does not involve the violation of any speech right we ought to expect to be protected by law
4. Pornography’s reporting and constructing of women’s sexuality are in tension with one another, and one of them must go. Cannot both falsely report something about women (describe some state of affairs) and make women fit the description (bring about that state of affairs)
5. There is a difference between pictorial and linguistic expression because of ambiguity
6. When a woman’s ‘no’ is rejected, it is not that uptake is disabled, but the recognition that a woman is refusing is part of the turn-on! Same with BDSM porn, arguing it sends the message that it’s okay to have sex with a woman even if she refuses
   (But does the silencing claim justify rape?)

Question 18

Finlayson

Answer 18

Argues for MacKinnon, not Austin!
1. Supports MacKinnon’s silencing argument, but argues it is too extreme - the most that can be argued is pornography may tend to perpetuate subordination, which an empirical matter of cause and effect.
2. It is more likely that the reason why saying ‘no’ to a man doesn’t work is there exists unequal power between men and women, to which porn contributes, so women’s refusal is effectively defused
3. MacKinnon does not need Austin or speech act theory for her theories to hold true

Question 19

Hill Collins

Answer 19

Portrayal of Black women in pornography is particularly bad because Black women’s bodies were often used/displayed as pornographic objects, in a situation of bondage and slavery with white men

Question 20

Bell

Answer 20

The image of Asian women in pornography is almost consistently one of being tortured

Question 21

Zheng

Answer 21

Examines the morality of depicting racial minorities in pornography. Argues that this might allow some women of colour to reclaim their agency and show that they are desirable, BUT there are problems with fetishisation and tokenisation, and women of colour often face asymmetrical balances of power such that their displays of defiance are not real - eg. engaging with hypersexualised stereotypes even for the purpose of resistance often further entrenches those stereotypes, and they run the risk of fetishising or trivialising racial difference. Especially with the unprecedentedly ‘made-to-order’ and widely available nature of Internet pornography

Question 22

Nussbaum

Answer 22

1. Pornography turns women’s sexed bodies into ‘fungible nonhuman things’, though she challenges whether the use of another’s body sexually is always antithetical to her autonomy
2. Should not see pornography as the primary cause of women’s objectification; sexual objectification is caused by general social inequality. If there is a relationship characterised by mutual regard, that sexual relationship is fine

Question 23

Ronald Dworkin

Answer 23

The speech act theory is a ‘dangerous confusion’ between negative and positive liberty - the view that pornography silences women seeks to argue against pornography by appealing to women’s positive liberty to be heard and to make speech acts

Question 24

William Parent

Answer 24

Subordination has to be an action done by human beings as a subject, so pornography cannot subordinate

Question 25

Rubin

Answer 25

1. Violence and pornography have been used interchangeably, and pornography has become an ‘easy, pliant, and overdetermined scapegoat’.
2. Gender inequality is endemic to society and reflected in all media, and pornography is no more violent than mainstream media.
3. We can distinguish between artifice

Question 26

The Journal of Communication

Answer 26

Less than 5% of pornography contains simulated violence

Question 27

Green

Answer 27

1. Pro-porn, discusses why gay porn is different - a) can’t be reduced to hetero variant; b) gay porn does not harm/subordinate women; c) objectification might not be harmful, maybe even beneficial.
2. Takes apart the ‘Honorary Woman thesis’ with homosexual men in porn - if both aggressor and victim are of the same sex, there can be no sex-linked definition of a victim-class
3. Objectification is misleading - people are objects/things! We are embodied and exist in time. Objectification is not reification - it is treating as a mere object something that is also more than an object; it is a matter of denying or devaluing their subjectivity, of failing to recognise them as ‘ends in themselves’
4. Response to anti-porn - the idea that women are mere objects/tools is reinforced through parental pressure, television

Question 28

Shrage

Answer 28

1. Pornography is not unique in its power to degrade and dehumanise individuals
2. Challenges MacKinnon and Kant’s assumption that pornography undermines moral respect. Kant argues that without the motive of procreation or duty, sexual acts involve using another and oneself ‘merely as a means to satisfy an animal impulse’. Shrage argues sexual relationships are assumed an especially significant site for women’s subordination, but so are employment or familial relationships

Question 29

Shrage - responses to other’s arguments

Answer 29

Responses to anti-porn arguments:
1. Porn is violent and violates women - 1) same for many BDSM communities, 2) women can also enjoy it, 3) people know it is simulation and can distinguish between fantasy and real life, 4) there exists a lot of gratuitous violence in other parts of our life too
2. Larger social context can mean pornography is bad - feminists should challenge societal attitudes, instead of opposing prostitutes’ work because of stigma

Question 30

Lawrence

Answer 30

Women need not be desexualised in order to be human and respected as persons - women are dehumanised when respect for women means not recognising their erotic desirability or desires

Question 31

Taormino

Answer 31

Feminist porn:
Porn that is 1) committed to ‘fighting gender oppression and attempting to dismantle rigid gender roles’ - both in terms of production, and its content,
2) where there is an absence of non-consensual violence, contempt for women or sexist stereotypes, such as men ejaculating on women’s faces,
3) where women are initiators and subjects of desire or pleasure

Has a ‘Rough Sex’ series where performers have lengthy interviews, where they discuss their actual fantasies and establishing trust with partner

Question 32

Eaton (feminist porn)

Answer 32

Supports the idea of feminist pornography, arguing that as mainstream/inegalitarian pornography can distort and mould our tastes in favour of female submission, feminist porn can do the opposite in dismantling such structures. The same mechanism of conditioning/habitualising happens

Question 33

Porn awards

Answer 33

Good For Her Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto

Question 34

van Brabandt

Answer 34

1. Argues against the simplistic ‘egalitarian’ pornography, arguing the in/egalitarian distinction is too blurred, and it still upholds patriarchal heteronormative norms and traps
2. Transgressive queer pornography destabilises this and can depict subordination without reinforcing gendered hierarchies, and undoes the heteronormative stability of pornography.
3. ‘Amateur’ pornography allows for a wide diversity of bodies, and transgress the normative standard of female beauty standards.
4. Feminist philosophy’s use of pornography as the subordination of women has contributed to a ‘pornographic’ gaze, similar to the ‘pedophile gaze’ which where images of children become sexualised. In the same way, feminist definitions of pornography construct all pornographic materials as signs of subordination
5. The male gaze in advertising, film etc have a larger impact on the sexualisation and objectification of women than pornography

Question 35

McGlynn

Answer 35

Discusses propaganda and the authority of pornography, arguing that porn is ‘undermining propaganda’ which seems to contribute to public discourse by presenting as an embodiment of certain ideals, yet erodes these very ideals.

Question 36

Langton (authority and response)

Answer 36

Her account of pornography requires the premise that pornography is authoritarive, in that it sets the rules for which speech acts can be performed by women in sexual games

Green and Bauer challenge where pornography’s authority comes from

Question 37

Srinivasan

Answer 37

Pornography has pedagogical authority

Question 38

Langton vs MacKinnon

Answer 38

Rae Langton, in her attempt to make MacKinnon’s framework philosophically palatable, arguably does more harm than good. By identifying pornography as an illocutionary act, and distinguishing between the illocutionary and perlocutionary acts, she misrepresents MacKinnon’s stance. She implies that pornography constitutes a harm in itself, rather than merely causing harm(s).

None of this is necessary for MacKinnon’s framework to operate - it merely hinges on the fact that, like all speech in a social context, pornography has effects and constitutes an act. And this act is grounds for its regulation, speech or not. MacKinnon uses the example of child pornography, which is entirely restricted because 1) it necessary for children to be harmed for its production, and 2) because it may contribute to further harm of children as consumers act out what they have seen

Question 39

Leona Tanenbaum

Answer 39

Cites studies showing <5% of pornography show simulated violence, that violence and coercion are not a given in pornography, with women expressing satisfaction with their work, or even directing films

Question 40

Petra Joy

Answer 40

Feminist porn should ‘spread the message of pleasure and respect for women and sexual liberation in the world’. Women portraying active roles (instigator, guide), as subjects of genuine desire and pleasure, not just objects. Realistic female bodies are represented and themselves eroticised

Question 41

Feinberg

Answer 41

Porn may be the catalyst, but the dispositions may come from elsewhere, with many possible catalysts. Such cruel dispositions may result from men being socialised into a macho culture, where masculinity is tied to being disrespectful, sexual, tough, reckless

Question 42

Max Hardcore

Answer 42

Evidence indicates that even those men exposed to extreme pornography who report disliking it also find it grows on them - even if macho culture is not started by porn, it certainly still has a role in perpetuating it

Question 43

Diana Russell

Answer 43

Multiple causation model, where an event may occur due to various causes, any one of which is potentially sufficient but not necessary. Pornography may:
1. Predispose some men to rape or intensify this predisposition
2. Undermine mens internal/psychological inhibitions against acting out [their desire to] rape
3. Undermine social inhibitions against acting out rape

Question 44

McGowan

Answer 44

Develops an alternative account of silencing. Although the three listed seem to collapse into one another, eg. all of them include the lack of authority granted to the speaker, pornography still seem to be responsible - it conceivable causes consumers to have false beliefs and condition them in ways that hinder communication . Yet these beliefs existed long before pornography

Question 45

Stoltenberg quote

Answer 45

Pornography tells lies about women [but] tells the truth about men