Weeks: WS601-b
Going Deeper
The Politics of Pornography in Feminist Debate
WS601 Final Paper, December 3, 2012
"What is it?" was the lingering question after our tenth week together in class, during which we focused on pornography. The question led to major schisms between feminists in the 1980's and effectively ended second-wave feminism. And yet it remains nearly unanswerable. Does it harm women or empower them? Does it shape or simply mirror reality? There are good and intelligent answers on either side of the debate, but it remains unresolved. For this final paper, I dug more deeply into the authors we read to try to discover what each of them might claim that pornography most fundamentally "is." Andrea Dworkin, perhaps the most radical of the four, wrote in 1980 that pornography is, quite simply, "what men do to women."[1] Catherine Mackinnon, three year later, suggests, "Pornography is the essence of a sexist social order, its quintessential social act."[2] Ellen Willis turns to her trusty dictionary to find that it is "any image or description intended or used to arouse sexual desire."[3] Finally, Laura Kipnis refuses to outright define pornography, but claims, "Historically, pornography was defined as what the state was determined to suppress,"[4] and therefore focuses on its value as "a favored strategy of social criticism."[5]
Do these definitions get us any closer to understanding the fundamental character of pornography? Maybe for some, but my interest here is simply to draw out each writer's convictions about pornography, about the public accessibility and display of sexual images. In what way is the word itself used by Dworkin, Mackinnon, Willis, and Kipnis, and to what end? Many of these authors wrote within highly contentious times and each argument responds to and builds upon the others, so I will address each in the order they were originally published. While their writing styles and reasons vary, but I will not involve myself with interrogating them. My primary concern will be to explore what pornography ultimately "is" for each of the first three authors and to briefly put them into conversation with one another via Kipnis' article on disgust. Hopefully, in so doing, we might arrive at a richer, more nuanced understanding for ourselves.
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Andrea Dworkin originally wrote her article in 1980. The 80's have, in the fields of women's and gender studies, become known as the Sex Wars era, a period of deep division and disagreement within the social and academic worlds of feminism. Known more for her academic reflections, her short piece "A Woman Writer and Pornography" was instead deeply personal. In it, she reflects on research she has been doing in pornography and the effect it has had on her. Known as a radical feminist, she does a good job of sidelining her radicalism momentarily in favor of personalism. In other works, and in our class discussion, it is clear that Dworkin is no friend of pornography. In fact, with other radical feminists of the time, she is deeply critical of sexuality, it having become shaped so thoroughly by pornography that assumes and reflects a patriarchal social order.
The most charitable read of Dworkin is that harm is entirely too closely associated with sexuality. Her own body reflects a conviction that modern Western human sexuality has been "infected"[6] by pornography. There is no escape, an observation over which she laments throughout her article. Pornography has infected and formed minds as well, such that it has created a visual vocabulary capable of turning "any mundane object… into an eroticized object – an object that can be used to hurt women in a sexual context with a sexual purpose and a sexual meaning."[7] Pornography enables for men a triumph over women by showing everything and anything: women hanging from doorways, from light fixtures, having their breasts cut by pliers, and being bound by telephone wires and violated by hairdryers. Even a de-radicalized read of Dworkin leaves us with the clear impression that sexuality and violence (even if they are not necessarily) are, in our culture, one and the same.
Deconstructing this link has left her with severe physical, mental, and moral fatigue, as she "[confronts] the very worst sexual aspirations of men… engendered by sexual cruelty."[8] Her weapon of choice is her writing. It necessitates poring over images that leave her "physically sick,"[9] "nauseous," and "full of fear and trembling." But in speaking so candidly about herself as a woman writer, she reveals a "punishing"[10] profession that hides an ironic and subtle pornographic impulse, the pleasure of which, like the pleasure of pornography, is that "of going deeper, of seeing and knowing, of showing."[11]
Her article seems to paint a troubling link between writing articles and performing pornography. She certainly speaks of herself in terms of violation, evocative of a career in porn. Like an actress in pornography, for the woman writer "There are no weekly wages, no health benefits, no promotions, no cost of living raises, no job descriptions."[12] The pleasure of Dworkin's readers (and of viewers of porn) "is different and cheaper"[13] than the pleasure of the writer (and of the actress). If some pornographic models defend their work as enjoyable, Dworkin's own self-punishing career choice achieves pleasure too. Like the pixelated pleasure of a sex worker on camera, hers "is a pleasure that cannot be shared;"[14] it is experienced remotely in isolation. However similar the thankless and exhausting the work of models and writers may be, the difference remains that "a woman writer's pleasure is not to be measured in orgasms,"[15] but both sex work and "Writing [are] not happy profession[s]. [They are] viciously individual."
For Dworkin, writing is its own reward; it is an end in itself. Pornography, however, cannot be reduced so simply. It is, after all, "what men do to women."[16] Or so she suggests. It is ironic that she makes the case for the socializing nature of pornography but overlooks where her own work overlaps the work she is so quick to condemn. For in the end, she shares with pornography that "greedy, arrogant" pleasure"[17] of "triumph over [her] subject by showing it, remaking it, turning it into something that we define and use rather than letting it remain something that defines and uses us." The offending nature of pornography, the in-your-face-ness of it is not totally unlike her strategy in writing. Her final paragraph reads more like a confession than a conclusion, for she simply "decided [she] wanted women to see what [she] saw."
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Catherine Mackinnon was a strong ally of Andrea Dworkin and they worked together frequently on anti-pornography causes. A legal scholar, Mackinnon concerns herself heavily with obscenity laws, which pornography necessarily falls under. As the title of her article suggests, however, pornography is "Not a Moral Issue." The problem with obscenity laws is that obscenity is intangible; it is "bad manners or poor choice of words;"[18] it is "an idea."[19] The fight between laws regulating obscenity and pornography is misleading and counter productive, she argues. The fight in obscenity laws is over something too obtuse and intangible; it is a fight over something "thought-like"[20] and ultimately unenforceable. Unlike obscenity, "pornography is more act-like than thought-like."[21] It is, in fact, "the quintessential social act."
Mackinnon argues "pornography institutionalizes the sexuality of male supremacy, which fuses the eroticization of dominance and submission with the social construction of male and female."[22] Pornography has tangible and immediate effects on women and therefore is not in the realm of obscenity. For Mackinnon, the primary (if not exclusive) viewers of pornography are men, men who have real and tangible power over women; in the workplace, in the home, and elsewhere. Pornography, in as far as it is built upon the male standpoint, institutionalizes dominance and submission. It "constructs who [men see women as being]. Men's power over women means that the way men see women defines who women can be."[23] Because women are invisible in a patriarchal system, if law is to have any traction for them, it must not reside in the realm of ideas, but the realm of real lives and actual experiences.
Pornography is not "thought-like;" it is not some neutral idea that can be dismissed as innocent. To Mackinnon, it is part and parcel to the social regulation of women as a class. Just like pornography is never depicted from a women's perspective, "obscenity has never even considered pornography a women's issue."[24] Pornographic imagery works upon its viewers, it is active in its institutionalization of male supremacy. Given the socially constructed nature of reality, porn has real power to invent women, to create women as sexual objects to be manipulated, conquered, and discarded. In the end, for her, pornography "is sexual reality,"[25] a force that "participates in its audience's eroticism because it creates an accessible sexual object, the possession and consumption of which is male sexuality, to be consumed and possessed as which is female sexuality."[26]
With Dworkin, MacKinnon wants to argue that violence and pornography are closely, if not necessarily, intertwined. In legal terms, this gives the law credible prohibitive responsibility over pornography, since it can cause real harm in the lives of a nation's citizens. Obscenity cannot. But in her simple and direct equation of pornography and sexual reality, we can sense the other side of the coin she might flip; sexuality per se is construed as being integrally compromised by the dominance/submission paradigm. In fact, she haphazardly references men/male as necessarily one with the hegemonic powers that be, as if all men are guilty of a few men's crimes. Her assumption that the "male point of view"[27] is so curiously uniform, and that "men are turned on by obscenity" raises the questions: "Which males?" and "What men?" Where she otherwise deftly wields a scalpel, here MacKinnon swings a bludgeon. The maxim "pornography is sexual reality" here leaves the reader confused; is all sexuality inherently pornographic? It falls to our next author to propose a distinction between pornographic sexuality and a more healthy erotic impulse not defined by the dominant/submissive paradigm of sex as (exclusively) power.
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Ellen Willis sees MacKinnon's claims as reproducing the false utopian social expectations contemporary second-wave feminists were largely protesting against. Pornography comes in many forms, and while all might not be benign, not all forms are as malignant as Dworkin and Mackinnon have in mind. For Willis, pornography is a "return of the repressed, of feelings and fantasies driven underground"[28] by the kind of "goody-goody" Victorian era sentimentalities of which she accuses the two. The fact of the matter is, for Willis, that we all have sexual desires that are aroused by pornographic images; pornography does not construct desire, it simply expresses the desire we already have in each of us, women included.
The anxiety that the anti-pornography feminists promote, she claims, is unfounded; you cannot create sexuality – it already persists within us all. Furthermore, violence and sexuality are not inextricably tied according to Willis. Sexual violence is caused by "men's hostility toward women – combined with their power to express that hostility and for the most part get away with it."[29] Hostility might be expressed sexually, but that doesn't change for Willis that it is still hostility. After all, it is too easy to lump all pornography in with sexual violence. It is a cheap rhetorical maneuver that attempts to circumvent other subordinate appeals by way of a scapegoat. If pornography is violence, then it means you can skip all the evidence-based deliberation and make it a criminal issue instead of the cultural issue that MacKinnon and Dworkin otherwise agree that it is.
Furthermore, linking violence and sexuality too cavalierly questions the autonomy of women who respond to the sexual desires in them that pornography, in its many forms, does draw out. "If feminists define pornography, per se, as the enemy, the result will be to make a lot of women ashamed of their sexual feelings and afraid to be honest about them"[30] She concedes that pornography can certainly be a physical as well as a psychic assault, "but for women as for men it can also be a source of erotic pleasure."[31] This forces anti-pornography feminists to define the medium more concisely. To accomplish this, Willis claims that Morgan and Steinem's distinction between pornography and "erotica"[32] cannot get away from overly simplistic dichotomy between cheap "porn" and highbrow "erotica," despite their being used, often, for exactly the same purposes.
In the end, Willis is unwilling do to the work of clarifying distinction that she suggests is nonetheless necessary. She concludes her short essay by saying that the challenge of parsing between conflicting notions of "public defamation"[33] is something she would simply rather not pursue. But she also acknowledges that "a plausible case"[34] exists that inescapably public display of anti-woman images might be "a form of active harassment that oversteps the bounds of free speech." So what constitutes reason enough to declare her commitment to abridge said "free speech?" Here we glimpse her own cavalier dismissal of a problem she otherwise agrees merits legal or social response. What might be the threshold for her – when it isn't someone else's daughter in the middle of a public threesome,[35] but her own?
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Of the four authors we have covered, Laura Kipnis most directly presses into the fundamental nature of pornography. She defines pornography politically in a way that leaves room for some of the definitions posed by Dworkin and MacKinnon, focusing on its value as a "strategy of social criticism."[36] Though she admits a certain level of contempt for Hustler and its publisher, Larry Flynt, she sees pornography primarily through a political lens. It can and has been employed as a means to critique social norms that many feminists agree need to be brought under much greater scrutiny. After all, the "unromanticized body"[37] one finds in the pages of Hustler denies the "[transformation of] female genitalia into ersatz objets d'art."[38] After all, if a body and its parts are art, then it is merely an object, one that can be "eroticized,"[39] "consumed and possessed."[40] However, she departs from others in pointing out that
the focus on 'female objectification' in critiques of hard-core pornography also symptomatically ignores the truth of heterosexual hard-core which is that, by definition, it features both women and men, which allows men and women to view male and female bodies in sexual contexts.[41]
Kipnis recognizes that women and men can be and are objectified by pornography. Therefore, pornography cannot possibly be reduced to "what men do to women."[42] Furthermore, she sees pornography as fundamentally critical of the social order, an "oppositional political form" that can "provide a home for those narratives exiled from sanctioned speech and mainstream political discourse." If that is the case, than pornography is by no means "its quintessential social act,"[43] but a direct challenge to the social order, sexist or not. In fact, pornography for her is not at its heart even just about "sexual desire,"[44] but social class. It would be a safe bet that Kipnis would take issue with "the pompously serious and high-minded language that high culture"[45] would put in a dictionary anyway.
Kipnis is not nearly the iconoclast that her subject, Larry Flynt, makes himself out to be, but she recognizes within his methods something that feminisms had already pioneered. In fact, his methods might have even drawn directly from the example of the early second-wave feminist movement, which suggested that "the personal is political."[46] Indeed, "within the pages of Hustler, sex has always been a political, not a private matter." Pornography, Kipnis via Flynt, is ultimately about refusing to distinguish between real bodies and the body politic. Even radical feminists decrying pornography have a kind of pornographic idiom at play, forcing uncomfortable and awkward issues into the faces of those with (and without) political power. It was Dworkin, remember, who simply "decided [she] wanted women to see what [she] saw,"[47] all those bodies hanging, bound, gagged, and mutilated.
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The destruction of the assumed separation of bodies and the body politic has been essential to the broader women's movement since the 70's, if not earlier. Willis and Kipnis both provide us with the perspective necessary to see where radicalism actually has in common a protection of a certain kind of status quo. While the critiques leveled by Dworkin and MacKinnon are important and credible, their heavy-handed condemnation of pornography too easily indicts their own methodology and assumptions about propriety and the socialization process. However, their social constructivist approach has merit; images and acts viewed do indeed act upon us to create sexual reality. But pornography, in the end, is not merely about sex or gender alone, but the class associations tied up in the social and political trough from which everyone feeds; democrat-republican, misogynist-feminist, man-woman, and everyone in between. Hustler, at the very least, has the balls to shine a light on us feeding therefrom.
It certainly must be considered that pornography is different things to different people (and different disciplines). After all, what was once pornographic "smut" two or three generations ago has now magically evolved into "erotica." That is less a statement about the content than it is about how culture has changed, especially for these authors. To radical feminisms, pornography represented the very relationship between men and women, "what men do to women,"[48] producing and reinforcing a dominance/submission paradigm. For social constructivists, that the paradigm maintains a sexist social order for which pornography is "its quintessential act"[49] is also a pressing concern worthy of interrogation. On the other hand, to reduce pornography merely to mediums that "arouse sexual desire"[50] seems too superficial of an examination, and it must be considered for its value as "social criticism."[51] Pornography, therefore, is important to see not as some concrete, definable 'thing' so much as it is an act within a particular context. It is not accurate to generalize, as Dworkin and MacKinnon do, by suggesting that it is all necessarily oppressive. Willis reminds us that it is not just men who consume pornography, but women as well. Finally, if there is social value to pornography, it must be its interest in exposing the false dualities between real bodies and the body politic. In either decrying pornography outright or singing its praises uncritically, we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The question of what pornography "is" is less important than what it "does," and that is a question best left to the particularities of the bodies it presents, suggests, affects, and also harms.
Footnotes
[1] Andrea Dworkin, "A Woman Writer and Pornography," in Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1989 (New York, NY: E.P. Dutton, 2003), 35.
[2] Catherine Mackinnon, "Not a Moral Issue," in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 154.
[3] Ellen Willis, "Feminism, Moralism, and Pornography," in Living With Contradictions: in Feminist Social Ethics, ed. Alson M. Jagger (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 161. Unfortunately, Willis does not cite the dictionary upon which she relies.
[4] Laura Kipnis, "Desire and Disgust; Hustler Magazine" in Prostitution and Pornography: Philosophical Debate About the Sex Industry, ed. Jessica Spector (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 312.
[5] Kipnis, 311.
[6] Dworkin, 35.
[7] Ibid., 34.
[8] Ibid., 34.
[9] Ibid., 33.
[10] Dworkin, 31.
[11] Ibid., 32.
[12] Ibid., 32.
[13] Ibid., 32 (emphasis my own). It is ironic that many less-then-intrepid voyeurs can now access pornography for free with a broadband internet connection. As for readers, there are a flurry of articles decrying Amazon.com's aggressive pricing scheme and the ironic impotence of U.S. anti-trust laws to address the monopolization of the publishing industry.
[14] Ibid., 32.
[15] Ibid., 32.
[16] Dworkin, 36.
[17] Ibid., 36.
[18] MacKinnon, 154.
[19] Ibid., 154.
[20] Ibid., 154.
[21] Ibid., 148.
[22] Ibid., 148 (emphasis added).
[23] Ibid., 153.
[24] Ibid., 149.
[25] MacKinnon, 150.
[26] Ibid., 148.
[27] Ibid., 150.
[28] Willis, 161.
[29] Ibid., 163.
[30] Ibid., 162.
[31] Ibid., 162.
[32] Ibid., 163.
[33] Ibid., 164.
[34] Ibid., 164.
[35] Sarah R. Armaghan, "Calvin Klein 'Threesome' Billboard in SoHo Too Sexy, Say Some," The Daily News, June 14, 2009, http://articles.nydailynews.com/2009-06-14/local/17925564_1_calvin-klein-new-billboard-soho
[36] Kipnis, 311.
[37] Ibid., 317.
[38] Dworkin, 34.
[39] MacKinnon, 150.
[40] Kipnis, 316.
[41] Dworkin, 35.
[42] Kipnis, 311.
[43] MacKinnon, 154.
[44] Willis, 161. It would be more accurate to cite her dictionary, but she doesn't.
[45] Kipnis, 332.
[46] Ibid., 315.
[47] Dworkin, 36.
[48] Dworkin, 35.
[49] MacKinnon, 154.
[50] Willis, 161.
[51] Kipnis, 312.
