Are you anti-Porn or Anti-censorship of Porn?

1. Are you anti-Porn or Anti-censorship of Porn? • Let’s start with this question and then try to unpack it? • How can we redefine/flip this binarism?

2. anti-Porn

3. Anti-censorship of Porn

4. Pornography is “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women, whether in pictures or in words” Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, Pornography and Civil Rights, 1988 For Dworkin and MacKinnon sexuality functions within patriarchal cultures as a strategy of control, it is a way of maintaining a system of male privilege and female subordination. Dworkin, Pornography, 1981

5. “Women actively consume mainstream porn – resisting, twisting, and sometimes subverting it. Mass culture does not simply victimise women, and anybody that claims it does belittles the vast majority of women, whose desires, fantasies, and subjectivities are irretrievably bound up in it” Kegan Doyle and Dany Lacombe

6. Pornography is “not one clearly designatable pedagogic object” but a “dynamic construct” that is perpetually redefined in accordance with shifting socio-cultural mores Drucilla Cornell, Feminism and Pornography, 2000

7. “All pornography is made under conditions of inequality based on sex” and these conditions “are what it takes to make women do pornography” even that which shows no overt violence” MacKinnon argues that women cannot autonomously participate in the production or consumption of pornography, and if they claim to, then it is only because they are under the sway of a patriarchal ideology that seeks to indoctrinate and exploit them.

8. “If pornography is part of your sexuality, then you have no right to your sexuality” Mackinnon

9. BLANKET CENSORSHIP OF PORNOGRAPHY is COUNTER Productive • Regulating representations of “women” mightresult in the production of a “representation” • Prohibition eroticises that which it purports to forbid.

10. expansion of the pornographic imaginary rather than its constriction will elicit the displacement of dominant modes of sexual representation, over time Butler suggests this will “open possibilities for identification”. Judith Butler in ‘The Force of Fantasy’ (1990)

11. women are both producers and consumers of sexually explicit materials. The relationship between women and pornography is no longer understood as immobile and invariable, but diverse and dynamic. Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson in Dirty Looks

12. “The penis’ as a ‘symbol of terror’. Dworkin tells us, is ‘even more significant than the gun, the knife, the bomb, the fist, etc.’ Women, she concludes in her lurid book on pornography, ‘will know that they are free when the pornography no longer exists.’ […] Pornography does typically encapsulate all that is most distressing and depressing in the portrayal of women’s bodies in our own culture: women become sexual commodities, usable, disposable, endlessly available for the titillation of men.” (Segal 105-6) Do we need to eradicate all pornography for women to be free?

13. Robin Morgan contends, “porn is the theory, rape is the practice”. Discuss.

14. How can we extend the terms of the pornography debate beyond the perceived anti-porn/anti-censorship debate? Perhaps we might extend the question of what pornography is, to include what pornography does? What is missing from this debate?

15. Is it possible to objectively classify pornographic materials?

16. Is censorship the single valid response to pornography? How might censorship encourage the historical idea of there being only one way to be sexual? Might censorship deny the view that there is more than one way to be sexual? How might pornography dictate sexual self-worth? Does pornography uphold the primary constituents of beauty and sexual desirability?