Pornography

I

Introduction

Pornography, commonly defined as “the explicit description or exhibition of sexual activity in literature, films, photography, and so on, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings”. Current debate about pornography tends to divide along two main axes: the pornography/erotica distinction, and the issue of censorship with its concern for the impact of pornographic images on the perception and treatment of women.

II

Pornography versus Erotica

The attempt to distinguish between pornography and erotica, and between “hard-core” and “soft-core” pornography, is very contentious and often highly subjective. Hard-core porn often includes sadistic violence and may also include bestiality (sexual intercourse between humans and animals). Pornography may take the form of visual images—photographs, videos, film, advertisements, and billboards—or text (stories, articles, published letters). Erotica may take the same forms, but differs from pornography in that it is usually associated with suggestive or symbolic images of desire and sexual arousal and pleasure, rather than with more graphic images. In theory, erotica allows for the possibility of women and men engaging as “equals”, though such a theory is not easily translated into practice in the current social order—charged as it is with unequal access to power based on differences related to gender, race, and class. Unlike erotica, pornography is not associated with an ideal of equality, or mutual pleasure. In fact, many have argued that the function of pornography is to exploit women by representing them merely as sexual bodies, rather than as full, thinking, feeling people. Thus, it is not surprising that pornography has long been at the centre of feminist arguments about the oppression (symbolic and real) of women in society.

III

Forms of Pornography

Pornographic images of women are by far the most common form, though child pornography—that is, pornographic images of, not for children—has an increasingly lucrative market and is often distributed by covert paedophile networks. There is also an expanding market for pornography representing images of men (mostly marketed for gay men, although some is aimed at women) and there is a small but expanding market for feminist erotica (sexual/erotic images marketed for women). Some of this is lesbian erotica and some depicts men, for a market of heterosexual women. Feminist erotica includes films, visual images, or fiction produced by women, for women, whether the subjects depicted in the images are men or women. It has been argued that Harlequin romance novels appeal at a certain level as “mass-market pornography”. This view opens out the pornography debate by moving from discussion of pornographic imagery made by men, to discussion of a novel by a woman that may also be seen to function as a kind of “pornography”.

IV

Pornography and Censorship

At the heart of the pornography debate is the question of censorship, or the imposition of limits on freedom of expression. The notorious novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D. H. Lawrence, was once considered obscene, and Jeanette Winterson's recent novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit might have fallen under this same heading, if the same definitions and restrictions were applied today.

At the heart of the debate about censorship is the question of oppression: does pornography oppress women, or others, more or less than the imposition of limits on the freedom of the press and freedom of speech would do? This is a kind of chicken-and-egg dilemma: the question being whether pornography is, indeed, at the root of women's marginalized position in society—or only one manifestation of it. There is also the highly controversial question of economics in pornography—whether people taking part in pornography actually benefit economically from providing the supply to satisfy the demand.

An organization called Feminists Against Censorship argues that in choosing to censor pornography, feminists may thereby (intentionally or unintentionally) censor women's sexual experience and women's self-expression as well. The radical feminist position of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine Mackinnon views pornography as a form of “hate speech” (in visual and textual media) and an imposition on the rights of women in the public sphere, connected in some instances with real incidents of oppression of, and violence against women—that certain kinds of pornography violate women's civil rights.