Catherine MacKinnon has developed city ordinances and laws in the United States and Canada that have allowed women to bring civil suits against producers, distributors, and sellers of pornography. Using a line of reasoning that lacks any notion of agency, and that smolders of heterosexism, MacKinnon holds that the existence of pornography in a locale directly results in the altered perception of women as a class by men as a class. MacKinnon insists that this sexualization of women by pornography infects the everyday lives of women, who are always perceived by all men as first and foremost reified sexual objects, rather than people with goals, aspirations, and subjectivities.

Though her argument at first appears seamless, her chain of assumptions supporting these governmental actions crumbles when examined with scrutiny. When reading MacKinnon’s opinion’s of porn, I often feel a quasi-apocalyptic reinscription of that which she claims to abhor. In this paper, I will address some of the cracks in the equation of porn with sex discrimination. More specifically, I will argue against such a didactic interpretation of all pornography, an interpretation that equates (presumably male) producers, distributors, sellers, and consumers of pornography to an automatic sexualization, subordination, and degradation of all women as a class. By an extension of this, I will problematize her assertion that “men treat women as who they see women as being. Pornography constructs who that is.” (MacKinnon 1987: 171).

MacKinnon and Dworkin claim that every work of porn evokes the most violent, nonconsensual sexual acts portrayed in the most hardcore pornography. MacKinnon says that porn embodies the institutionalization of conventional male and female gender roles, that of dominance and submission (MacKinnon 1989: 197). Each of them has spent pages in a number of articles discussing how all sex acts eventually refer and reflect back onto a woman being fucked, or being seen as capable of being fucked, every time her existence is acknowledged and/or invoked by any man. Yet these depictions assume that male centered heterosexual sex is the epicenter of desires and actions of heterosexual women and men (MacKinnon 1987: 182).

Another radical feminist that has worked closely with MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin claims that porn does not “recognize as part of its standard women’s sexual arousal, a more subjective standard than erection” (Dworkin 1994: 24). And yet there exists a proliferation of sites dedicated to pictures of women in the midst of cumming (www.squirtingpussies.com comes to mind), presumably intended for an audience comprised of heterosexual males. Further, many sites created for heterosexual women feature shots of men servicing women in ways that are usually associated with the primary pleasure of the woman (for instance, cunnilingus, and/or nipple sucking), or with piercings known to enhance female sexual pleasure (for instance, piercing of the clitoral hood and nipples).

More specifically, many sites dedicated to getting heterosexual women off feature men reclining with rigidly erect members, or with water cascading down their sculpted bodies, presumably waiting for the woman to direct the fantasy within the scene. These pictures clearly invite the female gaze. And though the only featured sexual organ is that of a disproportionally large cock, these pictures have obviously been produced for women to fantasize about pleasurable sexual encounters with the goal of getting them off. Even if these story lines do feature elements of conquest and machismo, such pictures allow women to place themselves at the center of the narrative, which simultaneously reaffirms their human-ness and allows them to recognize and assert their desires.

If heterosexual women unknowingly become the hurt, manipulated, fuck doll MacKinnon believes they are trained to become, then why does this genre differ so significantly from that which she claims we are taught to desire? If women really want to become what apparently all men show them in order to teach them how to fuck, they why does a market exist for an alternate, woman centered genre? I have yet to run into porn that has the same scripts as that of hardcore heterosexual male oriented pornography, where violence against a woman’s very personhood constitutes a man’s sexual pleasure. Does porn for straight women, by some collective mind blip, happen to never think to portray women fucking in the missionary position, a position which physically prevents them from adding much physical zest to the experience? Do straight women just make porn for themselves that renders desirable some of the most heinous violations against not only their very sex, but also their very personhood? I, for one, don’t think so.

These authors insist upon a unilateral interpretation of aesthetics even when much sexually explicit material directly reworks, questions, and/or deconstructs the very power relations that they claim underlie every pornographic aesthetic. Nowhere does this become more clear as in pornography created and consumed by various queer audiences employing aesthetics and community norms which do not recognize heteronormative male centered sexuality (a la hardcore porn descirbed by MacKinnon) as the foundation of referentiality. Indeed, in queer pornography, “users must select differences other than biological sex to identify with particular characters” (Frug 1992: 262).

Much lesbian s/m and bdsm porn contains very specific codes and aesthetics that are received by their intended audience in very specific ways (Ross 1997: 270). And though Dwarkin claims that “the violence is supposed to be sex for the woman” in heterosexual porn, this is not so in much lesbian s/m; the violence exists as yet another prop a particular frame as an add on to a mutually enjoyable scene (Dwarkin 1997: 31). These codes include references to respect, sanity, safety and consent (Ross 1997: 270). Ross stresses that “the practice of consent guarantees mutuality, communication, and collaboration” (Ross 1997: 274) within lesbian s/m. Further, in the most popular lesbian porn, both partners get off.

These features just do not have any parallels in the porn MacKinnon trashes, where it is assumed that women want to get fucked, never for the purpose of achieving orgasm (do orgasms ever even enter into the picture?), but in order to derive some sort of pleasure at having done what is supposedly proscribed to them by their social status. Anal play signifies the exploration and discovery of as many avenues of pleasure as possible, rather than signifying an act of degradation. And lots of lesbian sex happens without any props at all, and need not involve any penetration, even in a very hardcore s/m scene. And though phallic objects make frequent appearances, they are in no way the sole focus on sensation. This diffusion of the erection as the giver and receiver of pleasure unto itself challenges the rock hard dick as a sign of male born male masculinity and power within a male centered and heterocentric society so criticized by MacKinnon. However, because MacKinnon does not know how to (or refuses to) read these codes, she falls back upon her barrage of privileging the male penis (or its supposed equivalent in the form of dildos, phallic vibrators, and/or buttplugs) as the receiver of pleasure and administrator of power, even when, to lesbians, such narratives are conspicuously absent.

For homosexual men who are simultaneously exoticized and condemned, it could be quite liberating to posses a portrayal of other men as sexy, wet, and fun, without invoking any sort of comparison to a pussy (i.e., condemning overtones). In (at times) misogynistic gay male subcultures, the bottom is never equated with female. Though daddy-boy scenes and their variations are popular, both roles are plays upon the positions men occupy within larger society and/or within the particular subculture. If these men were born into, and most probably benefit from, their male privilege, then must they look at other men as having that male privilege, even as they, within the bounded context of a scene, play around with roles that may, to MacKinnon, seem to invoke the stereotypical place of women in society? Anal sex between men generally does not invoke what radical feminists might call the subordination of a woman to a man by the penetration of the vagina with a penis. And even if they act out this master narrative in sex, the absence of the sexualization of women in other arenas clearly breaks the chain of MacKinnon’s equation. Indeed, gay men can (quite empowering-ly) perceive women as sexy without looking at them as sexualized.

Further, MacKinnon’s critique of porn operates within an entirely heterocentrist model that assumes everybody thinks exactly the same way she does. If somebody always has to be the girl in sex, then heterosexual sex as described by MacKinnon becomes by default the primary measuring stick of sex by which all other forms of sexual interactions (and depictions of those interactions) are judged. And yet, in the women’s porn as well as the various queer porn examples I have talked about above, these examples just do not work the way MacKinnon wants them to. Is the girly slut bottom really the girl if she is the site of pleasure and runs the fuck, despite the “dominant” position of her stone boi dyke partner? Is a heterosexual woman really the girl if she likes to fantasize about a macho man who rides her into ecstasy? Is a gay man participating in a hardcore s/m scene really the girl if he gets to retain all of his male privilege after the scene is over, and if the codes of the scene partially fall outside Andrea Dworkin’s frame of experience?

One’s interpretation of pornography depends upon a number of factors, including one’s personal experiences, community standards, and upbringing (Feminists for Free Expression web site); MacKinnon cannot know how a “reasonable person” (whatever their gender) with a particular community would react to porn, and how they would internalize that porn, because she cannot be in the heads of all of these people. Though the law paints with a broad brush, it also has to account for very real differences of behaviors of individuals under the law. If different groups prefer such different forms of sexual stimuli, how can MacKinnon distill one line of interpretation of this form of media if she herself does not even participate in these communities or share the predominant narratives of desire circulating within these communities?

MacKinnon also denies us agency to the extent that her culturally specific hierarchy of desire is placed within an ahistoric framework in order to universalize the scope of women’s oppression through pornography. However, this line of reasoning also “divest[s] (porn) of any greater specifiability through class, age, sexuality, race, or culture” (Brown 1995: 204). She chooses to ignore the inseparably intertwined issues of sexual stereotypes experienced by women of a particular racial minority group. Apparently, all sexual experiences fall victim to the paradigm she describes, despite what we may consider our individual desires, experiences, fears, and subjectivities. And MacKinnon, it seems, knows what is good for us better than we know what is best for ourselves.

How can MacKinnon know how the target audience will respond to that pornography, when she herself looks at all porn as boiling down to a paradigm of gender and abuse, with not a wink of agency in sight? Sexual dynamics don’t work the same in every work of porn, just as gender relations don’t work the same way within or even between particular demographic(s).

By numerous citations of the most heinous, hard core pornography, MacKinnon says that “women in pornography are turned on by being put down and feel pain as pleasure” (MacKinnon 1993: 97). And while it may be true that a small number of women are abused in order to take pictures for pornography, many are not. Additionally, the fantasy elements in much hardcore pornography has the potential to serve, for individual women, as a vehicle for sexual agency. Seeing a picture of a woman shamelessly enjoying her sexuality has liberatory potential for a woman who has not had her individual sexual needs, desires, and fantasies condoned or even recognized by society at large, much less by her individual sexual partners. Many women look at kinky porn to better articulate to their partners what they want. Finding published representations of one’s sexual desires can also serve as a means of validating those desires in a puritanical culture that discourages women’s sexual exploration. More simply, many people look at pornography to expand the variety of sensations they are able to derive through masturbation and/or sexual intercourse.

And although MacKinnon attempts to give her argument oomph by talking about women as a class, she may just deny us any agency, be it individual or collective, to rework the categories of sexual perception through our everyday practices. Indeed, MacKinnon seems to believe that every woman’s gender identity is irretrievably wrapped up in the organization of male driven heterosexual desire (Brown 1995: 202).

S/m and bdsm are popular in queer communities for women to work through their sexual issues, and to gain a feeling of control that they did not have at the time of their sexual abuse. Many websites dedicated to s/m contain statements differentiating between s/m and abuse.

Women have been abused sexually before there was any explicit pornography being sold at the corner store, and, unfortunately, it will probably always exist to some degree. But banning explicit porn, especially lesbian porn, will cut off one of the few avenues survivors of sexual abuse have available to them (Cornell 1995: 554). Though participating in s/m and/or bdsm may seem like a reinscription of oppression to MacKinnon, survivors who move in these scenes would not agree with her. Further, the subculturally specific codes embedded in the meaningful images of queer porn represent lesbians, gays, and transgendered persons provide a forum for self representation; and without a profusion of images, “lesbians and gays (and I would like to add transgendered persons) are consigned to speechlessness, invisibility, and internalized homophobia” (Ross 1997: 293).

Fantasy represented in porn, even some fantasy containing undertones of violence and force, can, in some contexts, serve as a tool by which people can assert positive agency in other arenas of their lives. The dominatrix Mistress Patricia Marsh says, “Some people who are into s/m either as dominants or submissives are people who were abused and it is their way of healing. It is their way of owning it again; it is healing for them to get over the powerlessness they had in the abuse situation. It is a way of becoming powerful and saying I want this experience and I am turning it into pleasure” (Bell 1995: 125).

MacKinnon says that the ideas represented in pornography cannot be differentiated from the acts embodying these ideas (MacKinnon 1993: 106). Dworkin claims that men use pornography to define what constitutes a pleasurable sexual act, and, by an extension of this, to teach women how they should desire to get fucked (Dworkin 1987: 42). I want to argue that even some of the most acquiescent viewers of pornography are able to differentiate between reality and fiction. After all, “men can think and have an erection at the same time” (Cornell 1995: 557).

MacKinnon says that showing men porn will lead to the automatic demeaning sexualization of all women, much in the same way that saying “attack” to a dog results in an act of violence (MacKinnon 1987: 179). She states, “when pornography and the law of pornography are invested together, it becomes clear that pornography is women’s status” (MacKinnon 1989: 196). But people are not attack dogs with no consciences, no feelings, and no powers of retrospect. Indeed, sex within the world of porn exists as a blip with no consequences after the scene is over and no emotional spillover, and thus no responsibility outside of that which is designated within the codes of the script embedded in the text.

If every person interpreted hardcore pornography marketed towards straight men, s a mimetic representation of reality as MacKinnon insists, there would not be such a surging market for woman centered porn, or for queer porn, because these genres contradict the prevailing texts and narratives within male centered hardcore porn created for a heterosexual male audience. And queer porn must carry a different meaning to conservative contingents across the country, or they would not make a point of prosecuting queer publishers, distributors, etc of queer pornography more than their heterosexual counterparts. By and large, obscenity laws instituted by the efforts of MacKinnon have led to the seizure of sexually explicit material created for queer audiences, despite the much larger existing market for porn appealing to heterosexual men; this fact unto itself attests to the ability of queer pornography to disrupt heteronormativity as it is experienced by queer people, as well as narratives of desire in MacKinnon’s descriptions that lead to the subjectification of women. (Scales 1994: 325).

If people always believed as true and acted out what they saw, corporations would not spend exorbitant amounts of money trying to persuade consumers to act in a particular way (i.e. buy a product). The genre of pornography is so differentiated and contains so many contradictory messages that anyone who simply attempted to recreate what they saw would be paralyzed, because they would not be able to sort through so many contradictory messages.

In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler argues that gender is a repeated series of actions which, by the very nature of their repetitiveness, exposes the social constructedness of its nature (read: lack of inevitability) (Butler 1992: 17). Similarly, the complex depictions of women in pornography cannot possibly boil down to the position of women in society because of the disjunctures in pornography. Fantasy and reality form critical disjunctures within these dialogues of desire, so that one’s responses to porn more often than not exists in tandem with a myriad of other regulatory mechanisms. Porn, then, is at most a mock-up of just one of the representations of women in society; and this point of view doesn’t even include the ways in which (presumably heterosexual) women value and differentiate themselves from one another outside of male dominated spheres.

Contrary to what MacKinnon would claim, then, viewing and producing pornography is indeed not tantamount to committing the violent acts sometimes portrayed (MacKinnon, 1993: 97). We do, after all, have laws to persecute rapists and other sexual tormentors for a reason. We could, after all, try to enforce those laws, provide more resources for survivors of sexual abuse, and more strongly condem people who perpetuate such dehumanizing acts against other human beings.

Pornography is a complex genre, which contains myriad and often contradictory representations of sexuality and violence. Rather than silencing this form of speech, “the way people talk and act about sex must be changed” (Frug 1992: 260). But we can’t change the power around porn if we don’t talk about it, and accept the fact that different folks prefer different strokes (as it were). And since only a very small portion of the pornography genre is just about women getting abused, disrespected, and fucked, it ultimately makes little sense to render all products within this complex genre illegal.

Since allowing MacKinnon and Dworkin to ban all sexual representations until they can come up with sex in an alternate paradigm seems extreme, if not implausible, it is crucial to allow people to cash in on some of the advances of the women’s movement in order to explore and articulate their sexualities. And it seems that accomplishing this must involve all people, especially women, having access to what turns them on and what (and/or whom) gets them off. Rather than tracing all problems women as a class experience back to pornography, we should realize that “exploring, pursuing, and accepting differences among women and differences among sexual practices is necessary to challenge the oppression of women by sex” (Frug 1992: 262). And ensuring access, especially for women, to a variety of sexual images, metaphors, and representations, be they explicit or not, would certainly facilitate women’s access to healthy, freely chosen sexuality.

MacKinnon, Dworkin, and other radical feminists should try to examine the big sociocultural picture of what causes rape, incest, and the devaluing and exploitation of women, rather than simply embarking on a no compromises battle to purge one of the symptoms. Women were oppressed in Western societies where pornography as MacKinnon describes it did not exist. If the abuse of women as a class is the lynchpin of pornography, then why did rape exist before the advent of Penthouse and Hustler?

I do not mean to imply that MacKinnon’s points are totally invalid. They perhaps serve as useful tools for feminist legal interventions into a misogynistic culture. The heterosexual underpinnings of her argument might highlight the debasement of women that sometimes occurs under pornography to powerful men (e.g. judges) with unattractive gender, sex, and sexuality politics. But theory does not necessarily correlate with practice. The depictions also might cause people who enjoy the fusion of violence and/or debasement with sexually graphic material to examine why these depictions get them off. Ultimately, though, when MacKinnon makes sweeping generalizations, and then silences speech on the premise that her arguments are set in stone, her opinion of pornography catalyzed by legal action silences speech and individual subjectivities to the detriment of those it purports to protect.

Since people are always going to make porn, shouldn’t she make a point of allowing a profusion of voices to enter into this genre by protecting people who choose to be in pornography?

If MacKinnon worked towards ensuring that women have an array of employment options, including work in the sex industry, for all women, then the increased agency enjoyed by women as a class would debunk the absence of person-ness portrayed in hardcore pornography. MacKinnon should crusade for stronger sexual harassment laws so that men who act on their reification of women as less than human will have to suffer the consequences. Cutting off resources by instituting a further legal stigma against women who, for whatever reason, are sex workers, will simply perpetuate the subordination of this group. She could rally support to unionize prostitutes, or attempt to ensure that they receive proper health care, actions which “represent and respect the workers’ own sense of their worth as persons” (Cornell 1995: 552).

Pornography is a complex, multifaceted genre. In recent years, the pornography industry has experienced rapid growth in part because of meticulously differentiated desires which seek to address and satiate the demand for a profusion of sexual fantasies. Indeed, many groups of people are producing counter-narratives, each of which weaken MacKinnon’s argument by highlighting its disjunctures. But MacKinnon is so blinded by her rage that she still insists on swooping down from the clouds to tell us we are being oppressed, even though from her position she can never see the particularities contributing to the construction, depiction, and enaction of our multifarious desires.

Though MacKinnon’s arguments do hold some validity, her line of reasoning condemns her pro-woman interests into a fatally flawed catalyst that silences all speech, by thwarting the exploration of alternatives to the supposed reification of women through hardcore pornography. Despite their best attempts, MacKinnon tragically reinscribes the paradigm of subjection which she so despises.

Copyright Jane Torpedo 2001. If you reproduce, copy, cite, or otherwise do anything with this paper, I will kill you. Direct inquiries, complaints, and confessions of undying love to: thematrixofyourlife@hotmail.com