ISSUEDo People Have a Right to Pornography?
ISSUE SUMMARY
Many people are concerned about the prevalence of pornography in society. This is especially true today, due to the growth of the Internet, which brings words and pictures to millions of people. But, it is worthwhile to stop and ask: Why is there such a concern? Didn't the sexual revolution loosen people's ideas about sex and stretch the boundaries of what was socially acceptable? Why then should there still be any concern about pornography? There has indeed been a social and sexual revolution. Much of the current objection is not that pornography involves "dirty pictures," but that it subordinates women. Pornography is said to be an integral part of a social system that allows for the objectification of women. Pornography has been said by some to be a causal factor in crimes against women. This turns out to be a difficult thesis to support with scientific evidence, however, and it is very easy for someone to say, "I could watch a video of a woman being raped but I'm not going to go out and do it." But, consider another case. One can watch a commercial for a product and laugh at the humorous aspects of the commercial, but he or she may never buy the product simply because of a commercial. And yet the people who market a product are serious about the market research they do. They believe (and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the basis of their belief) that commercials are effective in getting consumers to buy their product. So maybe there are some influences on behavior that people are not even aware of. But perhaps a more useful way of making an objection against pornography Would be to state that it itself is part of the second-class status of women, that it is one of the manifestations of this status. In this view, what is objectionable about pornography is not what it causes or brings about, but what it is. In the readings that follow, Ronald Dworkin asserts that people do have a right to pornography because one should be able to decide what he or she wants to view and experience. People should be able to choose what is morally acceptable for themselves. Rae Langton argues that people do not have a right to pornography because pornography subordinates women and silences them by restricting their ability to act in protest against it. YESRonald Dworkin Do We Have a Right to Pornography?GoalsThe Williams StrategyIt is an old problem for liberal theory how far people should have the right to do the wrong thing. Liberals insist that people have the right to say what they wish on matters of political or social controversy…. Pornography in its various forms presents another instance of the same issue. The majority of people in [the United States and the United Kingdom] would prefer (or so it seems) substantial censorship, if not outright prohibition, of "sexually explicit" books, magazines, photographs, and films, and this majority includes a considerable number of those who are themselves consumers of whatever pornography is on offer. (It is part of the complex psychology of sex that many of those with a fixed taste for the obscene would strongly prefer that their children, for example, not follow them in that taste.) If we assume that the majority is correct, and that people who publish and consume pornography do the wrong thing, or at least display the wrong sort of character, should they nevertheless have the legal right to do so? Some lawyers and political philosophers consider the problem of pornography to be only… the problem of freedom to speak unpopular or wicked thoughts. But we should be suspicious of that claim, because the strongest arguments in favor of allowing Mein Kampf to be published hardly seem to apply in favor of the novel Whips Incorporated or the film Sex Kittens. No one, I think, is denied an equal voice in the political process, however broadly conceived, when he is forbidden to circulate photographs of genitals to the public at large, or denied his right to listen to argument when he is forbidden to consider these photographs at his leisure. If we believe it wrong to censor these forms of pornography, then we should try to find the justification for that opinion elsewhere than in the literature celebrating freedom of speech and press. We should consider two rather different strategies that might be thought to justify a permissive attitude. The first argues that even if the publication and consumption of pornography is bad for the community as a whole, just considered in itself, the consequences of trying to censor or otherwise suppress pornography would be, in the long run, even worse. I shall call this the "goal-based" strategy. The second argues that even if pornography makes the community worse off, even in the very long run, it is nevertheless wrong to censor or restrict it because this violates the individual moral or political rights of citizens who resent the censorship. I shall call this the "rights-based" strategy. Which of these strategies, if either, does the 1979 Report of the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship (the Williams Report) follow? The Report recommends that the present law on obscenity be revised radically and provides an important distinction as the centerpiece of the new legal scheme it suggests. Certain forms of pornography are to be prohibited altogether. These include live sex shows (actual rather than merely simulated copulation, fellatio, and the like performed live before an audience) and films and photographs produced through the exploitation of children. Other forms of pornography are to be, not prohibited, but restricted in various ways. These restrictions include rules about offensive displays or advertising in public places, limitation of the sale of pornography to special shops, and an elaborate scheme of previewing and licensing of films…. I want first to identify the justification the Report offers. It sets out and endorses what it calls the harm condition, that "no conduct should be suppressed by law unless it can be shown to harm someone." It notes the popularity of that condition, but rightly adds that either the popularity or the power of the condition evaporates when it is made less ambiguous. Everything turns on what "harm" is taken to be. If "harm" includes only direct physical damage to particular people, or direct damage to their property or financial interests, then the condition is much too strong, since it would condemn a large part of standing British and American law. It would forbid regulating the commercial development of certain parts of cities, or restricting the private use of natural resources like the seashore. Almost everyone would reject the harm condition interpreted in that way. But if "harm" is broadened to include mental distress or annoyance, then the condition becomes much too weak to be of any use in political theory, since any kind of conduct likely to be made criminal in a democracy, at least, is conduct that causes annoyance or distress to someone. Suppose "harm" is taken to exclude mental distress, but to include damage to the general social and cultural environment. Then the harm condition is in itself no help in considering the problem of pornography, because opponents of pornography argue, with some force, that free traffic in obscenity does damage the general cultural environment. So the harm condition does not in itself recommend a permissive attitude toward pornography, except in a form much too strong to be accepted, and the Report places little weight on that condition. Its argument begins instead in a special and attractive theory about the general value of free expression. [Nineteenth-century philosopher] John Stuart Mill suggested, in On Liberty, that society has most chance to discover truth, not only in science but about the best conditions for human flourishing as well, if it tolerates a free marketplace of ideas. The Report rejects Mill's optimistic (not to say complacent) ideas about the conditions most propitious for the discovery of truth. But it nevertheless accepts something close to Mill's position in the following important passage.
This account of the value of free expression requires some supplement before it can provide a justification for much of contemporary pornography, because the offerings of Soho and Eighth Avenue—close-up glossies and Beyond the Green Door—are not patently expressions about desirable human development. The Report finds that supplement in the topology of the slippery slope. It is difficult, if not impossible, to devise a form of words that we can be confident will in practice separate useless trash from potentially valuable contributions. Any form of words will be administered by prosecutors, jurors, and judges with their own prejudices, their own love or fear of the new, and, in the case of prosecutors, their own warm sense of the political advantages of conformity. In any case, writers and publishers, anxious to avoid risk and trouble, will exercise a self-censorship out of abundant caution, and themselves extend the constraint of any words we find. If we recognize the general value of free expression, therefore, we should accept a presumption against censorship or prohibition of any activity when that activity even arguably expresses a conviction about how people should live or feel, or opposes established or popular convictions. The presumption need not be absolute. It might be overcome by some showing that the harm the activity threatens is grave, probable, and uncontroversial, for example. But it should nevertheless be a strong presumption in order to protect the long-term goal of securing, in spite of our ignorance, the best conditions that we can for human development. This general strategy, which I shall sometimes call the "Williams strategy," organizes the more specific arguments and distinctions of the Report. The Committee concedes, for example, the relevance of the question whether an increase in the amount of pornography in circulation in the community is likely to produce more violence or more sexual crimes of any particular sort. If harm of this sort can be demonstrated, then the presumption can be overcome. But the Committee finds no persuasive evidence of this causal influence. The same strategy supports the crucial distinction between outright prohibition and various forms of restriction of pornography. Restriction does not so severely curtail the contribution that pornography might make to the exchange of ideas and attitudes, though it will change the character of that contribution. So the slippery slope is not so much of a threat when the question is whether some book must be sold only in special shops as it is when the question is whether it can be published at all. The Williams strategy is a version of the goal-based strategy that I earlier distinguished from the rights-based strategy…. The Report speaks… of human development, and insists that some social, moral, and intellectual developments are more "desirable" than others. We would not go far wrong, I think, to summarize the Report's conception of the best society as the society that is most conducive to human beings' making intelligent decisions about what the best lives for them to lead are, and then flourishing in those lives. The Williams strategy emphasizes, however, an important idea latent in that description. It would be wrong to think of social and political decisions as aimed only at producing the best society at some particular (and therefore arbitrary) future time, so that the acts and forbearances of people now are merely parts of a development to be judged for its instrumental value in producing the best society then. How a society develops is itself an important part of that society, now conceived in a longer perspective that includes the present and the indefinite future as well. In particular, the social development of ideals of human flourishing must be "conscious" and "rationally understood," and "a process itself properly constituted in part by free expression and the exchange of human communication." Human development must be self-development or its value is compromised from the start…. RightsConsider the following suggestion. People have the right not to suffer disadvantage in the distribution of social goods and opportunities, including disadvantage in the liberties permitted to them by the criminal law, just on the ground that their officials or fellow-citizens think that their opinions about the right way for them to lead their own lives are ignoble or wrong. I shall call this (putative) right the right to moral independence, and in this part I shall consider what force this right would have on the law of pornography if it were recognized. In the next part I shall consider what grounds we might have to recognize it. The right to moral independence is a very abstract right (or, if you prefer, the statement of the right I gave is a very abstract statement of the right) because this statement takes no account of the impact of competing rights. It does not attempt to decide whether the right can always be jointly satisfied for everyone, or how conflicts with other rights, if they arise, are to be settled. These further questions, along with other related questions, are left for more concrete statements of the right. Or (what comes to the same thing) for statements of the more concrete rights that people have in virtue of the abstract right. Nevertheless, the questions I wish to put may usefully be asked even about the abstract statement or the abstract right. Someone who appeals to the right of moral independence in order to justify a permissive legal regime of obscenity does not suppose that the community will be better off in the long run (according to some description of what makes a community better off like, for example, the description offered in the Williams strategy) if people are free to look at obscene pictures in private. He does not deny this. His argument is in the conditional mood: even if conditions will not then be so suitable for human flourishing as they might be, for example, nevertheless the right must be respected. But what force does the right then have? When does the government violate that right? It violates the right, we may say, at least in this case: when the only apparent or plausible justification for a scheme of regulation of pornography includes the hypothesis that the attitudes about sex displayed or nurtured in pornography are demeaning or bestial or otherwise unsuitable to human beings of the best sort, even though this hypothesis may be true. It also violates that right when that justification includes the proposition that most people in the society accept that hypothesis and are therefore pained or disgusted when other members of their own community, for whose lives they understandably feel special responsibility, do read dirty books or look at dirty pictures. The right is therefore a powerful constraint on the regulation of pornography, or at least so it seems, because it prohibits giving weight to exactly the arguments most people think are the best arguments for even a mild and enlightened policy of restriction of obscenity. What room is left, by the apparently powerful right, for the government to do anything at all about pornography? Suppose it is discovered that the private consumption of pornography does significantly increase the danger of crimes of violence, either generally or specifically crimes of sexual violence. Or suppose that private consumption has some special and deleterious effect on the general economy, by causing great absenteeism from work, for example, as drink or breakfast television is sometimes said to do. Then government would have, in these facts, a justification for the restraint and perhaps even for the prohibition of pornography that does not include the offending hypothesis either directly, by the assumption that the hypothesis is true, or indirectly, in the proposition that many people think it true. After all (as is often pointed out in discussions of obscenity, including the Williams Report), the Bible or Shakespeare might turn out to have these unfortunate consequences, in which case government would have a reason for banning these books that did not require a comparable hypothesis about them. This possibility raises a slightly more subtle point. Suppose it were discovered that all forms of emotionally powerful literature (including Shakespeare, the Bible, and many forms of pornography) contributed significantly to crime. But the government responded to this discovery selectively, banning most examples of pornography and other literature it considered worthless, but allowing Shakespeare and the Bible nevertheless, on the ground that these were of such literary and cultural value that it was worth the crime they caused to preserve them. Nothing in this selection and discrimination (as so far stated) violates the right to moral independence. The judgment in question—that pornography does not in fact contribute enough of literary value, or that it is not sufficiently informative or imaginative about the different ways in which people might express themselves or find value in their lives, to justify accepting the damage of crime as the cost of its publication—is not the judgment that those who do enjoy pornography have worse character on that account. Any judgment of literary or cultural value will be a judgment about which honest and reasonable people will disagree. But this is true of many other kinds of judgments that government must nevertheless make. The present judgment is no doubt special because it may be used as a screen to hide a different judgment that would offend the right to independence, the judgment that pornography should be treated differently from the Bible because the people who prefer it are worse people. That danger might be sufficiently strong so that a society jealous of the right of moral independence will, for prophylactic reasons, forbid officials to make the literary judgment that would distinguish Sex Kittens from Hamlet if both were found to provoke crime. That does not touch the present point, that the literary judgment is different, and does not itself threaten the right of independence; and it is worth adding that very few of the people who do admit to enjoying pornography claim distinct literary merit for it. They claim at most the kind of merit that others, with more conventional ideas about amusement, claim for thrillers. But this is, in any case, only academic speculation, because there is no reason to suppose a sufficiently direct connection between crime and either Sex Kittens or Hamlet to provide a ground for banning either one as private entertainment. But what about public display? Can we find a plausible justification for restricting the display of pornography that does not violate the right of moral independence? We can, obviously, construct a certain argument in that direction, as follows. "Many people do not like to encounter genital displays on the way to the grocer. This taste is not, nor does it necessarily reflect, any adverse view of the character of those who do not mind such encounters. Someone who would not like to find pornography in his ordinary paths may not even object to finding it elsewhere…. He may find or believe, for example, that his own delight in other peoples' bodies is lessened or made less sharp and special if nakedness becomes either too familiar to him or less peculiar to those occasions in which it provides him special pleasure, which may be in museums or his own bedroom or both. Or that sex will come to be different and less valuable for him if he is too often or too forcefully reminded that it has different, more commercial or more sadistic, meaning for others. Or that his goal that his children develop certain similar tastes and opinions will be thwarted by the display or advertising that he opposes. None of these different opinions and complaints must be the product of some conviction that those with other opinions and tastes are people of bad character, any more than those who hope that state-supported theater will produce the classics exclusively must think that those who prefer experimental theater are less worthy people." This picture of the motives people might have for not wanting to encounter pornography on the streets is a conceivable picture. But I suspect… that it is far too crude and one-dimensional as a picture of what these motives actually are. The discomfort many people find in encountering blatant nudity on the hoardings is rarely so independent of their moral convictions as these various descriptions suggest. It is at least part of the offense, for many people, that they detest themselves for taking the interest in the proceedings that they do. It is a major part of the offense, for others, that they are so forcefully reminded of what their neighbors are like and, more particularly, of what their neighbors are getting away with. People object to the display of naked men and women in erotic poses, that is, even when these displays occur (as for commercial reasons they inevitably do) in those parts of cities that would be in no sense beautiful or enlightening even without the pornography. Even if we took the descriptions of peoples' motives in the argument I set out at face value, moreover, we should be forced to recognize the substantial influence of moral convictions just in those motives, for someone's sense of what he wants his own attitudes toward sex to be, and certainly his sense of what attitudes he hopes to encourage in his children, are not only influenced by, but constitute, his moral opinions in the broad sense. We therefore encounter, in peoples' motives for objecting to the advertising or display of pornography, at least a mix and interaction of attitudes, beliefs, and tastes that rule out any confident assertion that regulation justified by appeal to these motives would not violate the right to moral independence. We do not know whether, if we could disentangle the different strands of taste, ambition, and belief, so as to winnow out those that express moral condemnation or would not exist but for it, the remaining strands would justify any particular scheme of regulation of display. This is not just a failure of information that would be expensive to obtain. The problem is more conceptual than that: the vocabulary we use to identify and individuate motives—our own as well as those of others—cannot provide the discrimination we need. A society anxious to defend the abstract right to moral independence in the face of this complexity, has two option sat least. It might decide that if popular attitudes toward a minority or a minority practice are mixed in this way, so that the impact of adverse moral convictions can be neither excluded nor measured, then these attitudes should all be deemed to be corrupted by such convictions, and no regulation is permissible. Or it might decide that the case of mixed attitudes is a special kind of case in the administration of the abstract right, so that more concrete statements of what people are entitled to have under the right must take the fact of mixed attitudes into account. It might do this, for example, by stipulating, at the more concrete level, that no one should suffer serious damage through legal restraint when this can only be justified by the fact that what he proposes to do will frustrate or defeat preferences of others that we have reason to believe are mixed with or are consequences of the conviction that people who act in that way are people of bad character. This second option, which defines a concrete right tailored to the problem of mixed preferences, is not a relaxation or compromise of the abstract right, but rather a (no doubt controversial) application of it to that special situation…. If society takes the second option just described in the case of pornography (as I think it should, for reasons I describe later), then its officials must undertake to decide what damage to those who wish to publish or read pornography is serious and what is trivial. Once again reasonable and honest officials will disagree about this, but we are trying to discover, not an algorithm for a law of obscenity, but rather whether a plausible concrete conception of a plausible abstract right will yield a sensible scheme of regulation. We should therefore consider the character of the damage that would be inflicted on consumers of pornography by, say, a scheme of zoning that requires that pornographic materials be sold and films shown only in particular areas, a scheme of advertising that prohibits in public places advertisements that would widely be regarded as indecent, and a scheme of labeling so that those entering cinemas or shops whose contents they might find indecent would be warned. There are three main heads of damage that such a regime might inflict on consumers: inconvenience, expense, and embarrassment. Whether the inconvenience is serious will depend on the details of, for example, the zoning. But it should not be considered serious if shoppers for pornography need travel on average only as far as, say, shoppers for stereo equipment or diamonds or secondhand books need travel to find the centers of such trade. How far this scheme of restriction would increase the price of pornography is harder to predict. Perhaps the constraint on advertising would decrease the volume of sales and therefore increase unit costs. But it seems unlikely that this effect would be very great, particularly if the legal ban runs to the character not to the extent of the advertising, and permits, as it should, not only stark "tombstone" notices, but the full range of the depressingly effective techniques through which manufacturers sell soap and video cassette recorders…. I conclude that the right to moral independence, if it is a genuine right, requires a permissive legal attitude toward the consumption of pornography in private, but that a certain concrete conception of that right nevertheless permits a scheme of restriction rather like the scheme that the Williams Report recommends. It remains to consider whether that right and that conception can themselves be justified in political theory…. EqualityA Trump Over Utility… Rights, I have argued elsewhere, are best understood as trumps over some background justification for political decisions that states a goal for the community as a whole. If someone has a right to moral independence, this means that it is for some reason wrong for officials to act in violation of that right, even if they (correctly) believe that the community as a whole would be better off if they did. There are many different theories in the field about what makes a community better off on the whole; many different theories, that is, about what the goal of political action should be. One prominent theory (or rather group of theories) is utilitarianism in its familiar forms, which suppose that the community is better off if its members are on average happier or have more of their preferences satisfied. Another, and in certain ways different, theory is the theory we found in the Williams strategy, which argues that the community is better off if it provides the most desirable conditions for human development…. We need rights, as a distinct element in political theory, only when some decision that injures some people nevertheless finds prima facie support in the claim that it will make the community as a whole better off on some plausible account of where the community's general welfare lies. But the most natural source of any objection we might have to such a decision is that, in its concern with the welfare or prosperity or flourishing of people on the whole, or in the fulfillment of some interest widespread within the community, the decision pays insufficient attention to its impact on the minority; and some appeal to equality seems a natural expression of an objection from that source. We want to say that the decision is wrong, in spite of its apparent merit, because it does not take the damage it causes to some into account in the right way and therefore does not treat these people as equals entitled to the same concern as others. From Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Harvard University Press, 1985). Reprinted from "Do We Have a Right to Pornography?" Oxford Journal of Legal Studies,vol. 1 (1981), pp. 177–212. Copyright © 1981 by Ronald Dworkin. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press and the author. Notes omitted. NORae Langton Pornography, Speech Acts, and SilencePornography is speech. So the courts declared in judging it protected by the First Amendment. Pornography is a kind of act. So [legal scholar] Catharine MacKinnon declared in arguing for feminist laws against it. Put these together and we have: pornography is a kind of speech act. If pornography is speech, what does it say? If pornography is a kind of act, what does it do? Judge Frank Easterbrook, accepting the premises of anti-pornography legislation, gave an answer. Pornography is speech that depicts subordination. Pornography depicts women "dehumanized as sexual objects, things or commodities; enjoying pain or humiliation or rape; being tied up, cut up, mutilated, bruised, or physically hurt; in postures of sexual submission or servility or display; reduced to body parts, penetrated by objects or animals, or presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture; shown as filthy or inferior; bleeding, bruised or hurt in a context which makes these conditions sexual" (MacKinnon, 1987, p. 176). Pornography is a kind of act that has certain effects: depictions of subordination, said Easterbrook, "tend to perpetuate subordination. The subordinate status of women in turn leads to affront and lower pay at work, insult and injury at home, battery and rape on the streets." Easterbrook's conclusion was that pornography should be protected, since this effect "simply demonstrates the power of pornography as speech".1 Pornography, on this view, depicts subordination, and causes it. A closer look at the feminist ordinance shows us that MacKinnon is saying something more. Before describing what pornography depicts, the ordinance begins: "We define pornography as the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women in pictures or words…". Besides depicting and causing subordination, pornography is, in and of itself, a form of subordination. This aspect of the feminist legislation irritated judges and philosophers. When the drafters of the ordinance said that pornography actually is subordination, they were tricksters, guilty of "a certain sleight of hand", said Judge [Sarah Evans] Barker.2 They were guilty of conceptual confusion, and their claim was "philosophically indefensible", said William Parent (1990). It is all very well to talk about what pornography depicts; and it is all very well to talk about the effects it has on the lives of women. Those ideas are not, at least, incoherent. But MacKinnon wants to say something more: she wants to attend, not simply to the content of pornographic speech, nor simply to its effects, but to the actions constituted by it. What she says may strike a chord of recognition amongst those who recall a philosopher who said that "to say something is to do something". In How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin complained of a "constant tendency in philosophy" to overlook something important: a tendency to consider the content of speech, and its effects on hearers, but to overlook the action constituted by it. Words, he said, are used to perform all kinds of actions (warning, promising, marrying…) which philosophers have blithely ignored. To say something is to do quite a few different things. Here is an imaginary example (adapted from Austin, 1962, p. 101). Two men stand beside a woman. The first turns to the second, and says "Shoot her". The second man looks shocked, then raises a gun and shoots the woman. You witness the scene, and you describe it later (perhaps to the police): "The first man said to the second, ‘Shoot her’ meaning by ‘shoot’ to shoot with a gun, and referring by ‘her’ to the woman nearby." That report describes one aspect of what was done with those words: it captures what Austin called the locutionary act. To perform a locutionary act is to utter a sentence that has a particular meaning, or content. However, there is more to what you witnessed, so you describe the scene again: "By saying ‘Shoother’, the first man shocked the second; by saying ‘Shoot her’, the first man persuaded the second to shoot the woman." That report describes what was done by saying those words, the effects of what was said: it captures what Austin called the perlocutionary act. But if you stop there, you will still have left something out. You will have left out what the first man did in saying what he said. In saying "Shoot her", was he making a suggestion? giving a word of advice? ordering the second man to shoot? You describe the scene yet again: "In saying ‘Shoot her’, the first man ordered the second to shoot." That report describes what Austin called the illocutionary act, the action performed in saying those words. The actions listed earlier—warning, promising, marrying—are illocutionary acts. Nearly every time we say something, we do things with our words in all three ways that Austin described: we say something that has a certain content (the locution), has a certain effect (the perlocution), and is a certain act (the illocution). Austin's complaint was that the illocutionary aspect of speech is often ignored: that there is "a tendency in philosophy to elide [illocutions] in favour of the other two" (p. 103). Now pornography is not always done with words. Yet Easterbrook's description fits the tendency of which Austin complained. Pornography depicts subordination, and causes it. That is to describe its locutionary and perlocutionary aspects. When MacKinnon says that pornography is an act of subordination, she supplies what is missing in Easterbrook's description: she describes its illocutionary force. Like Austin, MacKinnon wants to undermine the division between word and action. "Which is saying ‘kill’ to a trained guard dog, a word or an act?" she asks, in a passage that echoes Austin's example (MacKinnon, 1987, p. 156; cf. 1993, pp. 12, 21). MacKinnon has something in common with Austin, as she acknowledges (1993, p. 121), and in this [selection] I draw on Austin to illuminate and defend her feminist work. I focus on two claims. First is the claim we just saw, that pornography subordinates women. Second is a claim that pornography silences women. This idea has an important role to play in a feminist reply to the traditional "free speech" defence of pornography. "[The] free speech of men silences the free speech of women. It is the same social goal, just other people," says MacKinnon (1987, p. 156), arguing that if the law protects free speech, it should protect the speech of women. This second claim, that pornography silences women, has also been regarded as problematic: its detractors describe it as "dangerous confusion", while even sympathizers have reservations, conceding that the silence in question is "figurative", "metaphorical" (Dworkin, 1991, p. 103; Michelman, 1989, p. 294). But I want to show that the silence is literal, and that the second feminist claim is as defensible as the first. If pornography subordinates women, it determines women's inferior civil status. Seen this way, anti-pornography legislation poses a conflict between liberty and equality: the liberty of men to produce and consume pornography, and the rights of women to equal civil status. That is how the case was seen by the courts. The claim that pornography silences women expresses a different conflict, within liberty itself. Seen this way, the ordinance poses a conflict between the liberty of men to produce and consume pornography, and the liberty of women to speak. One liberal philosopher, Ronald Dworkin, says that only the latter feminist approach has any chance of success. Showing that pornography silences women is the only way to justify censorship, in a legal system that "assigns a preeminent place to free speech" (Dworkin, 1991, p. 108). He thinks that the feminist "silencing" argument doesn't work—it is a "confusion". I will show that it is not a confusion. Nor is the silencing argument the only possible feminist argument—there are other ways of arguing for censorship than by saying pornography silences women. Indeed, Dworkin's own liberal theory provides a way to build a different argument for censorship, as I have shown elsewhere (Langton, 1990). We can give what Dworkin calls an argument of principle, a rights-based argument, for the conclusion that pornography ought to be prohibited. It goes something like this. A policy that permits pornography relies on the fact that many people like pornography, and would like to be able to read and watch it. (Remember that we are talking about the pornography of MacKinnon's definition, that depicts women "dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities; enjoying pain or humiliation or rape", etc.) These preferences for pornography are what Dworkin would call "external" preferences, because they are preferences that depend on views about the inferior worth of other people, in particular, women. Dworkin says that when a policy relies on external preferences, the policy violates the rights of those other people. So women have rights against a policy that permits pornography. Although Dworkin himself says pornography should be permitted (1981; 1991), his own principles apparently imply that pornography should be prohibited. My strategy in this [selection] is different, and it divides into two parts, addressing the two feminist claims about subordination and silence. What I propose, in a nutshell, is this. Once we think of pornographic images and texts as speech acts, these feminist claims are intelligible and even (on certain assumptions) plausible. Understanding how pornographic utterances are speech acts will help us understand how pornography might subordinate. Understanding how potential speech acts can be made unspeakable for women will help us understand how pornography might silence. If pornography subordinates women, it presents a conflict between liberty and equality. If pornography silences women, it presents a conflict between liberty and liberty: the free speech of men, and that of women. I. "Pornography Subordinates"Before seeing whether pornographic speech acts can subordinate, we need to think about speech acts, and whether they can subordinate. Our interest is in the illocutionary speech act: the action performed in saying something. A perlocutionary act (by contrast) is the action performed (not in but) by saying something: the utterance considered in terms of its effects. Austin took care to distinguish illocutions from perlocutions, and he thought that the phrases "in saying" and "by saying" were typical—though not infallible—markers of the two. Recall the earlier example. In saying "Shoot her", the first man ordered the second to shoot: that was the illocutionary act. By saying "Shoot her", he shocked the second man, and persuaded him to shoot: those are some of the perlocutionary acts. Another example: In saying "I do" I was marrying; by saying "I do" I greatly distressed my mother. Saying "I do" in the right context counts as, constitutes, marrying: that is the illocutionary act. It does not count as distressing my mother, even if it has that effect: that is the perlocutionary act. Austin said that an utterance has illocutionary force of a certain kind when it satisfies certain conditions for success: he called them felicity conditions. Whether or not in saying "I do" the speaker is marrying depends on the felicity conditions of marriage: that the speaker intends to marry, the utterance takes place in a conventional procedure, with appropriate participants (e.g. adult heterosexual couple, unmarried, plus priest or registrar). And the hearers should recognize that an illocution of a certain kind is being performed; Austin called this reconition necessary for the illocution, the uptake…. … Can speech be an illocutionary act that subordinates? Yes, surely. Consider this utterance: "Blacks are not permitted to vote." Imagine that it is uttered by a legislator in Pretoria [South Africa], in the context of enacting apartheid legislation. It is a locutionary act ("Blacks" refers to blacks, etc.). It is a perlocutionary act: it will have the effect, for example, that blacks stay away from polling booths. But it is, first and foremost, an illocutionary act: it makes it the case that blacks are not permitted to vote. It subordinates blacks. So does this utterance: "Whites Only". It too is a locutionary act ("Whites" refers to whites, etc.). It has some important perlocutionary effects (keeps blacks away from white areas, etc.). But it is also an illocutionary act: it orders blacks away, welcomes whites, permits whites to act in a discriminatory way towards blacks. It is an illocutionary act that subordinates blacks. If this is right, then there is no sleight of hand, no philosophical mistake, in the idea that speech can be an illocutionary act of subordination (cf. MacKinnon, 1987, p. 202; 1993, pp. 12–14). The speech acts of apartheid subordinate because of (at least) the following three features. They rank blacks as having inferior worth. They legitimate discriminatory behaviour on the part of whites. And they deprive blacks of some important powers: the power to go to certain places, the power to vote…. We can be glad that the example is now anachronistic. Speech acts of this kind belong to an important subset of speech acts, authoritative illocutions. Some illocutions involve the authoritative delivery of a finding: for example, actions of ranking, valuing, giving a verdict. Imagine an umpire calls "Fault" at a tennis match. What does he do, in saying that word? He describes the world as he sees it. But he does more: he gives his verdict. Imagine a mere bystander says "Fault". He describes the world as he sees it. He says the same thing as the umpire says: they perform the same locutionary act. But the bystander's word makes no difference to the score. The umpire's does. The umpire can do more things with his words. Other authoritative illocutions confer powers and rights on people, or deprive people of powers and rights…. You can't order someone, or fire someone, unless you have authority…. The authority of the speaker gives an utterance an illocutionary force which would be otherwise absent (cf. Austin, 1962, pp. 152–6). It is because of their authority that the speech acts of apartheid subordinate. As MacKinnon herself puts it, "authoritatively saying someone is inferior is largely how structures of status and differential treatment are demarcated and actualized" (MacKinnon, 1993, p. 31, emphasis added). This already tells us something about subordinating speech acts: they are speech acts whose conditions for success (felicity conditions) require that the speaker has authority…. We can turn now to the main question. Pornography is said to subordinate women. It is also said to rank women as sex objects, "defined on the basis of [their] looks… [their] availability for sexual pleasure", and to represent degrading and abusive sexual behaviour "in such a way as to endorse the degradation" (MacKinnon, 1987, p. 173; Longino, 1980, p. 29). MacKinnon herself provides a range of additional illocutionary verbs:
These descriptions are relevant to the claim that pornography subordinates. Recall why the speech acts of apartheid subordinate. They rank certain people as inferior; they legitimate discriminatory behaviour towards them; and they deprive them of some important powers and rights. The feminists just quoted say pornography has some of these features: pornography ranks women as sex objects, legitimates sexual violence. Feminists think of sexual violence not simply as harm, but as a kind of discrimination. If pornography ranks women as sex objects, and legitimates discriminatory behaviour, it is an illocutionary act of subordination. So the claim that pornography subordinates women makes sense: it is not confused, not "sleight of hand", not "philosophically indefensible". It makes good sense: but is it true? There is disagreement—to put it mildly—about whether the feminist descriptions are correct. Disagreements about illocutions can be hard to resolve. Austin said that disputed speech acts need to have "a construction put upon them by judges" (p. 114), and I discuss elsewhere some different methods for resolving disagreement (Langton, 1993). However, if the argument so far is right, then we know that subordinating speech is a kind of authoritative speech. Whether you can perform authoritative speech acts depends on the authority you have…. So one way to help answer the question: "Does pornography subordinate?" is to ask whether it has authority. If it does, then at least one crucial felicity condition is satisfied: pornographic speech acts may then be authoritative illocutions that rank women as inferior, legitimate violence, and thus subordinate. This question about authority may well be at the heart of the controversy about pornography. Some think pornography is the speech of a powerless minority, vulnerable to moralistic persecution. Then it seems odd to say pornographic speech is authoritative. But some think the voice of pornography is the voice of the ruling power. MacKinnon says, "the power of pornography is more like the power of the state" (1993, p. 39). Then it seems obvious that pornographic speech is authoritative—that the authors of pornographic speech are not mere bystanders to the game, but speakers whose verdict counts. Does pornographic speech have authority? This is not really a question to be settled from the philosopher's armchair. To answer it we need to know about the role pornographers occupy as authoritative speakers about the "facts" of sex. What is important is not whether pornographic speech is generally respected, but whether it is authoritative in the domain of speech about sex. What is important is whether it is authoritative for the hearers that count: people, men, boys, who want (among other things) to discover how to act, want to know which moves in the sexual game are legitimate. What is important is whether it is authoritative for those hearers who somehow learn that violence is sexy and coercion legitimate: those who "think it is okay for a man to rape a woman if he is sexually aroused by her", who say they have raped a woman on a date, who say that they enjoy the conquest part of sex, who rank faces of women displaying pain and fear to be more sexually attractive than faces showing pleasure (Warshaw, 1988, pp. 93, 120; Wolf, 1990, pp. 162–8). In this domain, and for these hearers, perhaps pornography has the authority of a monopoly. If, as a matter of fact, pornography has authority, then the claim that pornography subordinates may be not only intelligible, but true. II. "Pornography Silences"If speech is action, then silence is failure to act. If pornography silences women, it prevents women from doing things with their words. Before thinking about whether pornography silences women, we need to think about how speech acts may be silenced, and whether speech acts can silence. The ability to perform speech acts can be a measure of political power. Those who use the words "Blacks are not permitted to vote" to prohibit are the ones with authority. One mark of powerlessness is an inability to perform speech acts one might otherwise like to perform. We can distinguish three kinds of silence, since (following Austin) there are three kinds of act one may fail to perform. At a first and basic level, members of a powerless group may be silent because they are intimidated. They do not protest, because they think protest is futile. They do not vote, because they fear the guns. In such cases no words are uttered at all. Speakers fail to perform even a locutionary act. Sometimes, however, people speak, and what they say fails to achieve the intended effects: such speakers fail to perform their intended perlocutionary act. Silencing of this second kind (perlocutionary frustration) is a common fact of life: you argue, but persuade no-one; you invite, but no-one comes to the party; you vote, hoping to oust the government, but in vain. There is a third kind of silence: you speak, you utter words, and you fail to perform the illocutionary act that you intend. Things go wrong: your speech misfires. Silencing of this third kind I call illocutionary disablement. Example (1): WarningThis example is from the philosopher Donald Davidson (1984, p. 269).
The actor says words appropriate for warning. He gets the locutionary act exactly right. He intends to warn. But he does not warn. Something about the role he occupies prevents his utterance from counting as a warning. Something, perhaps, about the conventions of theatre constrains the speech acts he can make. The same words said with the same intentions by a member of the audience would count as a warning. The actor, though, has been silenced. The act of warning has been made unspeakable for him…. Example (2): VotingA white in apartheid South Africa makes marks on a piece of paper in a polling booth. A black makes marks that look the same. Their intentions are the same. But the former has done something significant. He has voted. The latter has not. Something about who he is prevents him from satisfying a crucial felicity condition. The law prevents his utterance from counting as a vote. Voting is, for him, an unspeakable act. He lacks an important political power available to other citizens…. If we are interested in the silence of illocutionary disablement, we can ask about its source. When speech misfires because speakers fail to satisfy certain conditions, we can ask how those conditions came to be. MacKinnon says there can be "words that set conditions" (1987, p. 228), and Austin would agree. Felicity conditions can be set by other speech acts. Laws are enacted that specify the felicity conditions for… voting…. Some illocutionary acts fix the range and scope of other illocutionary acts. Some speech acts build and limit a space for other speech acts, making it possible for some people to… vote… —and impossible for other people to… vote…. Speech can thus silence by making speech acts, illocutionary acts, unspeakable. For more informal illocutions (warning, advising, etc.) there are no enactments of legislation to "set conditions". But perhaps here too, conditions can be set by speech: by informal practices of communication that set informal rules about what counts as, for example, a warning. Here too, perhaps, there can be speech that builds and limits the space for potential speech acts, and silences those who do not satisfy the conditions. Let us consider, now, some different examples of silence. Example (3): RefusalThink about the utterance "No." We know how to do things with this word. We use it, typically, to disagree, refuse, prohibit. In sexual contexts a woman sometimes uses it to refuse sex. However, in sexual contexts a woman sometimes tries to use the "No" locution to refuse sex, and it does not work. It does not work for the women who are date raped, or for the girls who are sexually forced (Wolf, 1990, pp. 166–7; Caputi, 1987, p. 119). Saying "No" sometimes doesn't work. But perhaps there are two ways in which it can fail to work. Sometimes the woman's hearer recognizes the action she performs: recognizes that she is refusing. In saying "No", she really does refuse. By saying "No", she intends to stop her hearer from continuing his advances. But the hearer goes ahead, and forces sex on her. She prohibits, but he fails to obey. She fails to achieve the (perlocutionary) goal of her refusal: her refusal is frustrated. ("Perlocutionary frustration" is too academic a label: this is simple rape.) Sometimes, perhaps, there is a different silencing. Sometimes "No", when spoken by a woman, does not count as the act of refusal. The hearer fails to recognize the utterance as a refusal: uptake is not secured. In saying "No" she may well intend to refuse. By saying "No" she intends to prevent sex, but she is far from doing as she intends. Since illocutionary force depends, in part, on uptake being secured, the woman fails to refuse. She is like the actor in Davidson's story, silenced as surely as the actor is silenced. He shouts "Fire!" He says the right words. He means what he says. He intends to warn. But what he says misfires. Something about him, something about the role he occupies, prevents him from warning the audience. She says "No". She says the right words. She means what she says. She intends to refuse. But what she says misfires. Something about her, something about the role she occupies, prevents her from voicing refusal. Refusal—in that context—has become unspeakable for her. Example (4): ProtestThe following appeared in a mail-order catalogue advertising "Adult Reading", flanked by such titles as "426. Forbidden Sexual Fantasies"and"428.Orgy: an Erotic. Experience".
Ordeal is a book that has been cited by feminists who oppose pornography. The author, Linda Marchiano (alias Lovelace), tells the story of the making of the film Deep Throat. Austin remarked (p. 118) that you can perform the illocutionary act of protest a number of different ways: you can shout; you can hurl a tomato. You can also write a book in protest. Ordeal is an act of protest, a denunciation of the industry in which Marchiano says she was forced to perform. One can see why it is cited by anti-pornography feminists. As locutionary act Ordeal depicts the subordination of a woman: it depicts a woman "in scenarios of degradation, injury and torture." But it does not "endorse the degradation"; it does not "celebrate, promote, authorize and legitimate" the sexual violence. It does not appear to have pornography's illocutionary force. Why is Ordeal in a mail-order catalogue, flanked by ordinary pornographic titles? Perhaps because it is pornography after all: here, in this context, for these intended hearers, the uptake secured is that of pornography. Marchiano says words appropriate for an act of protest. She uses the right locutions, words that graphically depict her own past subordination. She intends to protest. But her speech misfires. Something about who she is, or the role she occupies, prevents her from satisfying protest's felicity conditions, at least here. Though the threats and gags are gone, there is silence of another kind. She too is like the actor. Warning was unspeakable for him. Protest is unspeakable for her, in this context. What he tries to say comes out as "merely acted". What she tries to say comes out as pornography. Her protest has been disabled. We can ask about the origins of the illocutionary disablement in examples (3) and (4): the disablement of the rape victim whose attempted refusal is not recognized as a refusal; the disablement of an author whose attempted protest is not recognized as protest. These misfires betray the presence of structural constraints on women's speech. The felicity conditions for refusal, for protest, are, somehow, not met. Something is robbing the speech of its intended force. Intending to refuse, intending to protest, is not enough. Pornography may be responsible for this illocutionary disablement. For if women's speech is disabled, and we ask how the disabling conditions came to be, we can reflect that felicity conditions for illocutions can be set by other speech acts. And when MacKinnon says there can be "words that set conditions", she means that the felicity conditions for women's speech acts are set by the speech acts of pornography. Consider how this might apply to (3). Pornography might legitimate rape, and silence refusal, by doing something other than eroticizing refusal itself. It may simply leave no space for the refusal move in its depictions of sex. In pornography of this kind there would be all kinds of words the women depicted could use to make the consent move. "Yes" is one. "No" is just another. Here the refusal move is not eroticized: it is absent altogether. Consent is the only thing a woman can do with her words, in this game. Someone learning the rules from this kind of pornography might not recognize an attempted refusal. Refusal, here, would be disabled. Refusal would be made unspeakable for a woman. How common is silencing of this kind, and the rape which accompanies it? It is hard to tell, because so few rapes are reported (and these least of all). Studies about sexual violence say that men often "refuse to take no for an answer". Perhaps they recognize the refusal, and persist in spite of it, or because of it (matching the first pattern in example (3)). Or perhaps there is something else: Naomi Wolf says (1990, 167)
If young men can rape without knowing it, then women sometimes fail to secure uptake for their attempted refusals. This is the silence of disablement…. The story about Ordeal shows the same phenomenon. Marchiano tries to protest, but only succeeds in making more pornography. The pornographers know how to do things with her words: stories of "savage violence" and "enslavement in the pornographic underworld" are pornography to readers for whom violence has been legitimated as sex. And there is ironic truth in what the pornographers say: the violence is indeed "unspeakable" for Marchiano. If you are a woman using sexually explicit speech, describing the savage sexual violence you have suffered, and especially if you are a famous pornography star, what you say counts as pornography. Too bad if you want it to count as something else. It is an effective way to silence: not simply by depriving her speech of its intended illocutionary force, but by replacing it with a force that is its antithesis. That story is not an isolated anecdote. If MacKinnon is right, it is comparable to a similar disablement encountered by women who give testimony in court about rape and sexual harassment, and whose testimony, and descriptions of their experience, achieve the uptake appropriate to a description of "normal" sex. If pornography sets up the rules in the language games of sex in a way that disables and silences women, then it belongs in the class of speech acts that removes powers. This, recall, was part of what it meant to be subordinating speech: so we come full circle. If pornography silences, it subordinates. And if pornography silences, it is authoritative speech. So the second feminist claim, like the first, depends on a premise about the authority of pornography—it depends on that premise for its plausibility, but not for its coherence…. The claim is not metaphor; it is not confusion either. Dworkin says (1991, p. 108) it is a "confusion" to suppose that pornography silences women, because it is a confusion to "characterize certain ideas as silencing ideas". But the feminist claim is not that ideas are silencing ideas, but that acts can be silencing acts. That is no confusion. People do all kinds of thing with words: advise, warn, marry—and also silence one another. They silence by preventing other speakers from doing things with words. They can silence simply, by ordering, or threatening; they can silence by frustrating a speaker's perlocutionary acts; they can silence by disabling a speaker's illocutionary acts, and this latter silence has been the special focus of our attention. The claim that pornography silences is not really about ideas at all, but about people and what they do. It is common to cast ideas as the heroes of the free speech story. Free speech is a good thing, because it provides a free-market marketplace for ideas, where the best and truest ideas can win out in the end. To say that some speech silences is to describe a shopping problem: some ideas which could be on the market are not. This too is the tendency of which Austin complained: a focus on content, while ignoring the speech act performed. The claim that pornography silences women is not about ideas, but about people. Free speech is a good thing because it enables people to act, lets people do things with words: argue, protest, question, answer. Speech that silences is bad, not—or not just—because it restricts the ideas available on the shelves, but because it constrains people's actions. Perhaps women do have trouble developing new ideas about themselves, about sexuality, about life, when pornography has market monopoly. The market is missing out on some good ideas. But that is not the point. The point is that a woman's liberty to speak the actions she wants to speak has been thwarted: a woman's liberty to protest against pornography and rape, refuse sex when she wants to, argue about violence in court. The point is that while pornography sets the conditions of women's speech, women cannot do things with words, even when we think we know how. And if speech itself is more than "only words", then free speech is as well. Notes
ReferencesAust in, J. L.: How to Do Things with Words(London: Oxford University Press, 1962). Bahadur, Mahomed Yusoof Khan: Mahomedan Law, vol. III (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co.,1898). Caputi, J.: The Age of Sex Crime (London: The Women's Press, 1987). Davidson, Donald: "Communication and Convention" (1982), in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). Donnerstein, E., D. Linz, and S. Penrod: The Question of Pornography: Research Findings and Policy Implications (New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1987). Dworkin, R.: "Do We Have a Right to Pornography?", Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, I (1981) , 177–212; reprinted in A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 335–72. Dworkin, R.: "Two Concepts of Liberty", in Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration, ed. Edna and Avishai Margalit (London: Hogarth Press, 1991). Habermas, Jüurgen: The Theory of Communicative Action (Beacon Press,1984), vol. I. Hodkinson, K: Muslim Family Law (London: Croom Helm, 1984). Hornsby, Jennifer: "Illocution and Its Significance", Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives, ed. S. L. Tsohatzidis (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). Hornsby, Jennifer: "Speech Acts and Pornography", Women's Philosophy Review, 10 (1993), 38–45; reprinted in The Problem of Pornography, ed. Sue Dwyer (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1995). Jacobson, D.: "Freedom of Speech Acts? A Response to Langton", Philosophy and Public Affairs, 24 (1995), 64–79. Langton, Rae: "Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts", Philosophy and Public Affairs, 22 (1993), 293–330. Langton, Rae. "Whose Right? Ronald Dworkin, Women and Pornographers", Philosophy and Public Affairs, 19 (1990), 311–59. Longino, H. E.: "Pornography, Oppression and Freedom: A Closer Look", in Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, ed. Laura Lederer (New York: William Morrow, 1980). Lovelace, L. with M. McGrady: Ordeal (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1980). MacKinnon, Catharine: Feminism Unmodified (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). MacKinnon, Catharine: Only Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Michelman, F.: "Conceptions of Democracy in American Constitutional Argument: The Case of Pornography Regulation", Tennessee Law Review, 56 (1989). Parent, W. A.: "A Second Look at Pornography and the Subordination of Women", Journal of Philosophy, 87 (1990), 205–11. Tribe, Laurence: American Constitutional Law (2nd edn) (Mineola, NY: Foundation Press, 1988), chapter 12. Vadas, Melinda: "A First Look at the Pornography/Civil Rights Ordinance: Could Pornography be the Subordination of Women?", Journal of Philosophy, 84 (1987), 487–511. Warshaw, R. : I Never Called it Rape (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1988). Wolf , Naomi : The Beauty Myth (New York: Vintage, 1990). From Rae Langton, "Pornography, Speech Acts, and Silence," in Hugh LaFollette, ed., Ethics in Practice: An Anthology (Blackwell, 1997). Revised from "Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts," Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 22 (1993), pp. 305–330. Copyright © 1993 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. POSTSCRIPTDo People Have a Right to Pornography?This is not a dispute between cultural conservatives and cultural liberals. All parties to this dispute are in favor of each individual being allowed the greatest degree of liberty that is compatible with the same amount of liberty being granted to all individuals. In that sense, they can all be considered liberals. Dworkin maintains that people have the right to be morally responsible for themselves. Therefore, they have the right to choose to obtain pornography. Langton emphasizes the view of pornography as an act. She asserts that pornography not only leads to subordination—it is itself an act of subordination. Literature on the subject of pornography is vast. A good place to start might be Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, eds., In Harm's Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (Harvard University Press, 1998). A variety of views can be found in Diana E. H. Russell, ed., Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography (Teachers College Press, 1993); Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (Grove/Atlantic, 1996); Carol Wekesser, ed., Pornography: Opposing Viewpoints (Greenhaven Press, 1997); Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum, eds., Pornography: Private Right or Public Menace? rev. ed. (Prometheus Books, 1998); Gail Dines, Robert Jensen, and Ann Russo, Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality (Routledge, 1998); and Jane Juffer, At Home With Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life (New York University Press, 1998). |
| Previous | Section IV Contents |
|