Abstract
This paper begins by exploring the feminist anti-pornography argument proposed by Rae Langton. This argument employs J. L. Austin’s speech act theory to maintain that pornography does not merely harm women (the traditional feminist anti-pornography argument), pornography constitutes harm itself. One outcome of this argument, if successful, would be that feminist porn would not be possible and that the phrase ‘feminist porn’ would be nonsensical. But, I argue, Langton’s argument is problematic and ought to be rejected. This opens up the possibility of feminist porn. Employing philosophical arguments on social construction and what Ian Hacking has called “looping effects,” as well as some writings by people who identify themselves as feminist pornographers, I indicate what such porn looks like and how it represents sexuality in ways that feminists should find less problematic than typical, heterosexual, mainstream porn.
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Notes
It’s important to note that not all anti-pornography feminists call for censorship. In this paper, however, I will be concentrating on the debate between feminists who are in favour of censoring pornography (or treating it via civil law) and those who are not.
I thank an anonymous reviewer from this journal for pointing out the above two passages to me.
See, for example, McGowan (2017), for a discussion of the various ways in which, she argues, women might be silenced by pornography. My responses to Langton’s silencing argument are effective, I believe, whatever sense of silencing is involved.
In her book, Bound and Gagged, Laura Kipnis makes the interesting point that, in her opinion, all porn is transgressive. As she puts it: “Pornography … dedicates itself to offending all the bodily and sexual proprieties intrinsic to upholding class distinctions: good manners, privacy, the absence of vulgarity, the suppression of bodily instincts into polite behavior…. [It presents us with a] theatrics of transgression” (1996, 174). While this may well be true, the type of transgression feminist pornographers discuss is different, even if it is not inconsistent with the transgression Kipnis presents.
I thank an anonymous referee for this journal for raising this issue.
I came across most of the material in the next few paragraphs from an excellent four-part documentary, “Porn-o-nomics,” on CBC Radio (http://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6, 2017). When referring to the points made by people interviewed in the documentary, I have referred to their written works, where available.
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Stewart, R.S. Is Feminist Porn Possible?. Sexuality & Culture 23, 254–270 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-018-9553-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-018-9553-z