Philosophy 1576

Gloria Steinem was a major figure in second-wave feminism and remains something of an icon today. This paper was originally written in 1978 and was presented at an early feminist conference on pornography. The ostensible topic of the paper is how we should distinguish between 'erotica' and 'pornography', but, to see why that matters, it is important to recognize that Steinem is using these terms in what philosophers call a 'thick' sense: They are morally loaded. So, for Steinem, 'erotica' is sexually arousing material that is good (or at least not bad), whereas 'pornography' is by definition objectionable and anti-woman.

As we shall see, different authors use the term 'pornography' in different ways. Some (usually but not always anti-pornography folks) use it in the sort of 'thick' sense that Steinem does. Others use it in a morally neutral sense, as applying to any sexually explicit media that (roughly speaking, and in some sense that it is quite difficult to pin down) is intended to be used as an aid to sexual arousal. I myself will tend to use the term in this morally neutral way. (So there is nothing contradictory, for example, about the term "feminist pornography", as I use that term, whereas there would be, as Steinem uses it. She would instead speak of 'feminist erotica'.)

So, in asking how we should distinguish erotica from pornography, Steinem is insisting that sexually arousing (and even sexually explicit) material is not, just for that reason, objectionable. But, at the same time, Steinem is asking what is objectionable about some sexually explicit material (the material she wants to call 'pornography'). This is obviously a crucial question if one wants to avoid the charge that opposition to pornography is really just opposition to sexually explicit material.

There are many reasons one might object to pornography, some of them founded on religious beliefs or more traditional sexual values. For example, one might think that sex is only permissible between people who are married or that sex ought to be 'private' or that watching pornography is prohibited because it is lustful. These sorts of views are, for the most part, not ones we shall discuss, because they rest upon premises about sex having nothing special to do with pornography. That said, Steinem herself does, in some ways, make substantive assumptions about what sex ought to be like (without arguing for them), and other authors we read will do so, as well.

So how does Steinem propose to distinguish (good) erotica from (bad) pornography? She mentions a number of differentiating factors: Whether there is "mutual pleasure and warmth" or "force, violence, and symbols of unequal power" (p. 219). Steinem, like many early opponents of pornography, is particularly concerned about "sadomasochism" (p. 220), which (she says) presents torture and pain as sexually arousing for, and the appropriate lot of, women.

There's an obvious response to Steinem's remarks about sadomasochism. What is it?

Steinem is, for the most part, focused on heterosexual pornography, since she is particularly concerned about the effects of pornography on women (as are most of the authors we will read). But, as she notes, her analysis of the difference between erotica and pornography would apply more broadly.

Importantly, Steinem's claim is not just that pornography is objectionable because it represents or depicts sexual violence, or situations in which women are sexually subordinate to men. Rather, her claim is that pornography is "propoganda that teaches and legitimizes" attitudes about sexuality that are contrary to women's interests (p. 221, emphasis added).

This is the key idea behind most of the critiques of pornography we shall read: Pornography is not just harmless entertainment but has broader social effects, ones that cause real harm to women, especially, but perhaps also to other marginalized groups. (Some pornography, for example, involves obvious racial stereotypes; pornography featuring transsexual women often uses what many trans women regard as a slur; and so forth.) The crucial questions, which we'll explore at some length, are:

1. Does pornography really harm women?
2. If so, how does pornography work its black magic?
3. What should done about that?

Much mainstream pornography, such as you might find on PornHub or XVideos of You Porn and similar sites,¹ involves quite rough treatment of women—body-punishing intercourse, slapping, spanking, hair pulling, choking, gagging, degarding language, and the like—all of which seems to be presented as 'normative', i.e., as 'just how sex is'. (What's the distinction I'm making here?) How would Steinem's general line of thought apply to this kind of pornography?

Steinem claims that many "crimes [are] committed in the manufacture and sale of pornography" (p. 227), such as rape and assault. She does not give any evidence for this claim (the paper is rather short on references), but there have been some such cases. It is (or should be) obvious that such crimes ought to be prosecuted, but, unless one is convinced that women could not willingly participate in the production of pornography, this worry is not special to pornography: Rape and assault are criminal (and wrong) whatever the context. So we shall largely ignore this kind of concern. We shall see it surface from time to time, however, and it will be important to remember to ignore it (for our purposes) and not let it cloud the issue.

Steinem's claim that "the last screening of a snuff movie showing a real murder was traced to the monthly pornographic film showings of a senior partner in a respected law firm" (p. 230) is false, because there never were any such films. It may be that the film Snuff was shown under such circumstances. Unfortunately, however, Steinem does not give any citation, so it is impossible to know. See the paper by Johnson and Schaefer for more on this.

Steinem does not, however, think that pornography should be censored or banned (unlike, as we shall see, other anti-pornography feminists). So there is no First Amendment, 'free speech' worry about Steinem's view. She is, she insists, simply trying to "protest against pornogrpahy and educate others about it" (p. 229). But Steinem does not make very clear what the goal of this protest and education is supposed to be.

What might Steinem's goals be?

¹ I am generally going to assume that members of the class are familiar with what 'mainstream' heterosexual pornography is generally like. If you are not, then you should visit one of the many 'free' pornography 'tube sites' and have a look at some of the 'most viewed' or 'hottest' clips. It is worth thinking, however, about whether you really want to support these sites, both because much of their content is pirated (so that the performers are not being paid) and for the sorts of reasons we are going to explore in this class.

Longino

Longino explains at the beginning of the paper that, like Steinem and many other authors, she will use the term "pornography" in a 'thick' (that is, morally loaded) sense: Pornography, as she uses the term, is, by definition, "the degrading and demeaning portrayal of the role and status of the human female...as a mere sexual object to be exploited and manipulated sexually" (quoted from the Commission on Obscentity and Pornography). Of course, one can decide to use the term "pornography" however one wishes, but there is always a serious danger of equivocation in such cases: Whether there is any pornography now becomes a substantive question; similarly, whether Playboy or Deep Throat or anything on PornHub is pornography is a substantive, moral question.

Equivocation is the fallacy one commits when one 'trades on ambiguity', i.e., when one uses a term in two different senses but as if it has just one meaning. For example, consider the argument: "Anyone who jumps off a bank will die. John jumped off a bank. Therefore, John died." This equivocates if "bank" is used the first time to mean "building housing a financial institution" and the latter to mean "side of a river". Unfortunately, equivocation is not always so obvious.

That question is important for a number of reasons, but one is worth making especially clear: If there isn't very much pornography, in the sense in which Longino uses that term, then her analysis does not apply very widely, and perhaps does not apply to some sexually explicit media that we think is criticizable (though, in that case, for reasons other than those Longino gives).

Longino is at pains, much as Steinem is, to make clear that she is not objecting to sexually explicit media as such, not even to sexually explicit media that represents "degrading and abusive sexual encounters" (p. 155). Rather, her concern is with "verbal or pictorial material which represents or describes sexual behavior that is degrading or abusive to one or more of the participants in such a way as to endorse the degradation" (p. 155, emphasis original). (Note that this does not limit the analysis to degrading portrayals of women specifically, as Longino's original definition did.)

Longino lists a few forms of degrading and abusive treatment. What does she seem to have in mind here? How common are these in contemporary pornography?

It's an important question how pornography 'endorses' the behaviors it depicts. Longino suggests that it does so by depicting such treatment as a source of pleasure for the abused or degraded party and by not containing any counter-suggestion that such treatment is wrong. That women deserve and even enjoy degrading treatment is, Longino famously says, one of the 'lies' that pornography tells about women.

Longino proceeds to suggest that what she calls the "pornographic view of women" was already widespread in contemporary American culture in 1979 (when this piece was written). The cultural 'acceptance' of pornography, she suggests, amounts to "a cultural endorsement of its message" (p. 157), that is, of the lies it tells about women. This introduces another dimension to the issue: "...the meaning and force of the mass production of pornography" (p. 156)

At one point, Longino suggests that some "album covers and advertisements", and even the fashion magazine Vogue, count as pornography. (Probably she has in mind an infamous advertisement for The Rolling Stones' album Black and Blue and a photograph by Helmut Newton that was published in Vogue.) Is it an advantage or disadvantage if her account of 'pornography' includes such items? In what sense are these pornographic? (Are they "verbal or pictorial explicit representations of sexual behavior" (p. 154), as her definition requires?)

Forget the specific claims Longino makes about what pornography is like and focus instead on whether pornography treats women as sexually subordinate to men. In what sense might that be true? (It is another question whether and how pornography 'endorses' such treatment.)

Longino also mentions research done at the time (more would follow) that found "a correlation between exposure to pornographic materials and the committing of sexually abusive or violent acts against women". We'll discuss this issue further later, but suffice it to say, for now, that this research has always been controversial.

Longino claims, then, that pornography is objectionable for three main reasons: (1) It "is implicated in the committing of crimes of violence against women" (2) it tells lies about women; and (3) "it...supports sexist...attitudes, and thus reinforces the oppression and exploitation of women"; and (p. 158). As we shall see, the second concern is the one that has been most influential.

Longino is careful to say that the studies to which she alludes were only correlational and did not even purport to establish any causal relation, but her later remark that "Pornography...is implicated in the committing of crimes of violence against women" is less careful. How so?

Does Longino give any argument that pornography supports sexist attitudes? If so, what is it? How good is her argument?

Willis

Willis was a cultural critic and journalist, not a philosopher, but this essay well documents a common response to criticisms like Longino's.

Willis is, in many ways, no more fond of the pornography of her day than Longino is. But her reaction is different. Whereas Longino claims that pornography is "implicated in violence against women", Willis claims that pornography (like advertising, and other forms of media) often and even typically reflects common cultural attitudes about women and sex, which are, to put it kindly, not ideal.

Suppose that, as Willis suggests, the criticisms that Longino and others want to make apply much more broadly: To advertising, Hollywood films, video games, and much more. In what ways might that be an advantage of Longino's view? In what ways might it be a disadvantage?

Willis essentially accuses Steinem of elitism, the famous quote being: "What turns me on is erotic; what turns you on is pornographic" (p. 96). But there is a deeper criticism, earlier in the same paragraph: What is it?

Willis—who coined the phrase 'pro-sex feminism', in another essay—also expresses the view that anti-pornography feminists have a somewhat puritancial, conventionally 'feminine' view of sex as "beautiful, romantic, soft, nice, and devoid of messiness, vulgarity, impulses to power, or indeed aggression of any sort" (p. 97). This kind of criticism is developed at greater length in the optional paper by Echols.

As you'll note, this paper is more polemical than analytical. MacKinnon is not a philosopher (by training or profession) but a lawyer and activist. That makes it especially important, with this reading, that you try to read it sympathetically and charitably. It's very easy to be distracted by some of the more extreme rhetorical moves that MacKinnon makes and the political consequences that those claims are supposed to have. Try as best you can to read through them and get to the underlying claims that MacKinnon is making—while, at the same time, recognizing the righteous anger with which she expresses them. (Yes, this is hard.)

The overall perspective that MacKinnon expresses has been very influential and, in some ways, profoundly prescient. (See the New York Times article for more on that.) Our goal at present is more to get some of her ideas on the table than to evaluate the arguments offered for them. We'll spend much of the semester trying to come to terms with MacKinnon's critique of contemporary heterosexuality and the role pornography plays in shaping it.

MacKinnon argues here that gender 'difference' is really gender domination, and that this domination is fundamentally sexual, ultimately expressed and enforced through rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment, and even intercourse itself. As she puts it, towards the beginning of the paper:

The meaning of practices of sexual violence cannot be categorized away as violence, not sex.... The male sexual role...centers on aggressive intrusion on those with less power. Such acts of dominance are experienced as sexually arousing, as sex itself. They therefore are. (p. 316)

That is: Certain forms of (more or less) violent domination are sexualized in our culture and therefore are sex.

MacKinnon goes so far as to suggest that "intrusion"—that is, penetration—is itself understood and experienced by men (in our culture) as a form of domination, since it involves the violation of women's bodily integrity. It is no accident, from this point of view, that we are more inclined to speak of men 'penetrating' women then of women 'enveloping' men. (This conception of heterosexual intercourse is developed in detail in the related reading from Dworkin.)

Part of what makes MacKinnon's perspective important is that she does not take sex, in any sense, as a given, as 'natural'—Steinem seems to think of sexism as distorting what sex naturally is or should be—but demands that we see sex itself as fundamentally shaped by social forces (see esp. pp. 317-20). To take one example: The central place that 'penis-in-vagina' intercourse has in our conception of heterosex is contingent, something that could be otherwise. To be sure, PIV intercourse plays a crucial role in reproduction. But it simply does not follow that PIV intercourse must have any central role in recreational hereosex (which is what most partnered heterosex is). So if we want to know why PIV intercourse is regarded as 'the main event', even when conception is not the goal (and may actively not be wanted), then we must ask how that social norm originated, what (and who) sustains it, to whose benefit it is, and so forth.

There are, no doubt, cultural differences of which MacKinnon does not take account, but my sense is that her critique applies pretty broadly. If it seems to you that there are cultural differences that matter here, please do not hesitate to point them out.

When MacKinnon asks, "What is sex?" then, she means to be asking a question about the social norms that shape our everyday experience of sexuality in all its aspects (and so shape what sex is in our culture). All such norms, as MacKinnon sees it, and shaped and promulgated by those in positions of power, in this case, by men (collectively as well as individually), to their own advantage.

This sort of perspective on sex, an insistence on seeing it as culturally and historically constituted, is strongly identified with the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, in his three volume History of Sexuality. Anyone who has a serious, long-term interest in this material will need to read Foucault at some point. But he is very hard to excerpt, so we will not read Foucault in this course.

Similarly, MacKinnon refuses to take facts about 'desire' as given. To continue the example, it may well be that both heterosexual men and heterosexual women desire intercourse and think of it as pre-eminent in some ways. But then MacKinnon would ask why that is. Our desires, she would insist, are also shaped by social forces. And if, as she suspects, the social norms that govern sexuality in our culture disproportionately benefit men, then getting women to accept and embrace such norms—to claim them as their own, in their effort to be 'feminine'—would be an extremely effective way to sustain them. (This is related to 'false consciousness' and the sort of 'consciousness raising' to which MacKinnon alludes at the beginning of the paper.) So sexual desire, too, is in no sense 'natural', MacKinnon thinks (even if it is rooted in something natural, namely, sexual reproduction).

Later in the paper, MacKinnon writes: "Love of violation, variously termed female masochism [by Freud] and consent, comes to define female sexuality, legitimizing this political system by concealing the force on which it is based" (pp. 329-30). What does she mean? In particular, why might she think that "consent" is just another term for "love of violation" (or sexual submission)?

MacKinnon is calling, then, for a feminist theory of gender and sexuality that puts sexual domination at its core. As she sees it, the sexual domination of men by women is fundamental to sexuality as it exists in our society. (The obvious example is the sexual double standard.) But MacKinnon also holds that sexual domination is fundamental to gender, too: What it is to be a woman, in our society, is (in part) to be sexually subordinate to men, to be "a thing for sexual use" (p. 318). Consider, for example, the standards of appropriate behavior for women: from clothing and dress, to conversational norms, to dating rituals, to (continue the list?). All of these, MacKinnon thinks, express aspects of "what male desire requires for arousal and satisfaction" (pp. 318-9). In particular, women's submissiveness and deference to men is not just an accidental feature of contemporary heterosexuality but an integral part of it: part of what is seen as sexy in women and so part of what establishes how women 'ought' to be.

Gender is not our main topic in this course, but it is important to understand how MacKinnon uses the term "gender" here. She does not have in mind quite the same distinction we would draw with that term today—she is not thinking of 'gender identity'. Rather, MacKinnon means something like "the social meaning of biological sex", the system of norms and expectations through which biological sex comes to have significance in a culture. (Here again, there is no reason that biological sex has to have any significance, socially and culturally speaking, although the different roles that males and females play in reproduction partly explains why it does.) See the optional SEP article on sex and gender, especially §1.2.

On pp. 320-2, MacKinnon discusses 'liberal' attitudes towards sex, roughly: Sex itself is, generally speaking, a good; the political problems surrounding sex are primarily concerned with repression and 'sexual liberation'. Here MacKinnon is echoing a then-common feminist criticism of the so-called 'sexual revolution': that its main effect was to make women's sexuality more readily available for use by men. What the sexual revolution did not do, MacKinnon argues, is do anything to restructure heterosexuality itself, which was then (and arguably is still now) defined in terms of intercourse and male orgasm. (The optional paper by Koedt contains a famous expression of this view.)

Much of this discussion is a manifestation of the so-called 'feminist sex wars'. Many of the authors MacKinnon criticizes were explicitly on the other side of that conflict. We'll read one of them shortly, Gayle Rubin.

It starts to emerge where MacKinnon is going when she discusses the common claim that rape is not a sexual crime but a crime of violence (p. 323). MacKinnon disagrees, insisting (famously) "that violence is sex when it is practiced as sex" (p. 323). She wants to insist that sexual violence (the threat of it, if not the reality of it) is part of women's experience of sex, not something that can be separated from it. That includes not just rape but sexual harassment and everyday objectification and sexualization. All of these things, MacKinnon wants to insist, are part of what sex is in our society, and no feminist theory of sexuality can ignore them.

My own sense is that MacKinnon gets carried away by her own rhetoric here, especially in the full paragraph on p. 325. I'm not sure it is possible to make good sense of these remarks—that's part of why you can skim them—but if there is anyone who wants to make some suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

MacKinnnon writes: "Force is sex, not just sexualized; force is the desire dynamic, not just a response to the desired object when desire's expression is frustrated" (p. 324). What does she mean by that? (Where MacKinnon speaks, in the next sentence, of 'the soft end' and 'the hard end', you might read "carrot" and "stick".)

On p. 326, MacKinnon begins a discussion of pornography as a window into 'what men want' sexually. (Freud famously asked: What does woman want?) It is a serious question whether MacKinnon's description of pornography as it was in 1989 is accurate, let alone whether it reflects the reality of pornography today. Similarly, her claim that "forcible violation of women is the essence of sex" (p. 329) might seem a bit extreme. But there is a relevant aspect of mainstream heterosexual pornography that is still common, namely, the asymmetric roles of men and women: Men are the doers; women are the done-to; men are active subjects, while women are passive objects. Strikingly, this is often true even regarding fellatio, an act where male passivity would make sense. (See esp. the quote from Dworkin in fn. 40.) Moreover, the end (in both the temporal and the teleological sense) of heterosex is male orgasm: Sex is aimed at and culminates in male orgasm.

To what extent does gay male pornography partake of similar tropes, even if gender is not what structures them? To what extent might that underwrite the claim that (much) gay male pornography also contributes to maintaining sexual hierarchy?

We might summarize this by saying that, in (much) hetereosexual pornography, and in American sexual culture more broadly, sex is something that men do to women, and that women do for men. Moreover, the way sex is in pornography and the way sex is in real life are not, MacKinnon is insisting, unrelated. In particular, she is claiming, pornography does not just 'reflect' how sex otherwise is but helps establish and maintain these gendered, and extremely unequal, norms of heterosexuality. (That, more or less, is what MacKinnon means when she says that pornography 'constructs' heterosexuality.) One does not, therefore, have to accept the more extreme claims that MacKinnon makes to wonder whether pornography plays some role in establishing and maintaining socio-sexual norms that disadvantage women.

What might be examples of socio-sexual norms, founded in the asymmetrical sexual roles assigned to men and women, that disadvantage women?

MacKinnon connects all of this to the sexual objectification of women: Women are seen as vehicles for the exercise of men's sexuality; women's sexuality is defined in terms of the use men can make of them. Or, as MacKinnon puts it elsewhere, more memorably: "Man fucks woman; subject verb object" (Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, p. 124).

Note, crucially, that MacKinnon vehemently denies that women's consent to such unequal treatment excuses it. Woman's role is thus not to choose but only to consent (or not) to a choice not her own (pp. 329-30). That would be true even if the terms under which the consent were given were not themselves unequal, though that is, in many ways, what MacKinnon is trying to call attention to: the unequal structural conditions that shape heterosexual interactions.

On p. 334, MacKinnon returns to the issue of rape and its relation to 'sex'. As she sees it, rape is not qualitatively and categorically distinct from 'sex' but only an extreme manifestation of how sex is generally conceived in our culture. MacKinnon argues that this is manifest in the way we actually respond to rape: In the low conviction rate; in the way women who claim to have been raped are treated; in the way the experience of sexual abuse affects women themselves. It is not, note, that MacKinnon thinks there is no difference between rape and consensual sex. It is that she thinks there is more in common between the two than is usually recognized: that there is a continuum between ordinary sex and rape. (We will return to this idea when we read Nicola Gavey.) In particular, she claims, men's power over women is just as present in consensual sexual interactions as it is in non-consensual ones, and it structures women's choices in both cases.

Note that MacKinnon does not think that all heterosexual intercourse is rape (she once sued someone for libel for saying she did), and she does not think that it is all violent and unloving. She does think that the cultural fact of male domination pervades all relations between men and women and that it shapes the way that sex is experienced by all of us (even in non-heterosexual interactions).

The British philosopher John Austin was particularly impressed by the great variety of things we can do with words. For example, consider the sentence "A car is coming". Standing on a corner where a friend is trying to take a picture of a building with a blurry car in front of it, you might say "A car is coming" to inform them of that fact. Seeing someone about to step of the curb, you might utter the same sentence to warn them. A parent whose small child has stepped into the street might utter it to scold them.

Austin was particularly interested in a range of cases in which saying something can literally make something the case (as merely asserting it, for example, cannot). A common example is promising. Uttering the words "I promise to clean the shower" constitutes (under the right circumstances) one's promising to clean the shower: It makes it the case that one has so promised. Other examples are naming a child, appointing someone to a position, and declaring a verdict (as a judge or umpire might do). These examples illustrate the fact that some speech acts have very specific 'felicity conditions'. Not anyone can issue a legally binding verdict.

These sorts of acts are related to a class of sentences known as 'performatives'. These are sentences like "I promise..." or "I find the defendant guilty" that, in some sense, simultaneously describe the act that is being performed and also constitute performing it. It was performatives that were, to a large extent, the focus of Austin's attention.

For our purposes, what we mostly need is a general sense of the distinctions that Austin makes and the terminology he introduced to describe them. The most basic of these is between locutionary content, illocutionary force, and perlocutionary effects. The locutionary content is, roughly, the meaning of the words used (or, more technically, the proposition expressed by those words, in that context). So the locutionary content of "A car is coming" is the same in the three cases mentioned above: that there is a car coming. The illocutionary force corresponds to the kind of speech act performed: informing, warning, or scolding. The perlocutionary effects are what the performance of that speech act causes to happen. E.g., I cause someone to take a picture, to jump back from the curb, or to feel shame. Green gives a number of different examples to show that each of these dimensions can vary independently of the others.

Another important notion here is that of uptake. There is, unfortunately, no agreed use of this term, but the rough idea is that it involves a recognition on the part of the audience of what speech act has been performed. So if I say "Can you chair the meeting?" and you understand me not as making a request but as asking a question, then there has been a failure of uptake. Some authors regard that as amounting to a failure for me to perform the speech act in question: That is, on this view, if you 'misunderstand' me, then I have not in fact made a request at all. (Whether I've asked a question is a different matter.) Other authors hold that I have made a request, but that it simply has not been understood.

Can you think of examples that are 'good' for either of the two views just mentioned? (It's often the case in philosophy that different views are, as it were, motivated by different examples.)

There's also some terminology for different types of speech acts that we'll see various authors use. Two of them will be particularly important, so here they are for future reference (lightly adapted from Green):

• Verdictives, in which a speaker gives a verdict. Examples are acquitting and diagnosing, as well as convicting ("We find the defendant guilty").
• Exercitives, in which speakers exercise powers, rights or influence. Examples are excommunicating, resigning, and appointing ("I hereby appoint you head of the committee").

It's a useful way to check your own understanding of such terminology to come up with your own examples. What are some?

MacKinnon's central goal here is to address the 'free speech' defense of pornography. Now, as I have said before, legal issues are not our concern. But, in some ways, legal issues are not MacKinnon's main concern. What she is trying to do here is to lay the philosophical foundations for the legal regulation of pornography, much as she laid the foundations for sexual harassment law in Sexual Harassment of Working Women: We had first to learn to think of certain behavior differently before sexual harrassment could be addressed. (It's not 'playful sexual banter' or 'compliments' but a form of sex discrimination.) Similarly, MacKinnon wants us to think of pornography not just as a form of speech but also as a form of sex discrimination. Indeed, one might think of MacKinnon's claim as being that pornography creates a 'hostile living environment' for women, much as sexual harrassment in the workplace creates a 'hostile work environment'.

Another way to understand MacKinnon is as arguing that pornography is a form of anti-woman hate speech. But that reading has its limitations, since it seems to require a prior theory of hate speech, when what MacKinnon is doing is, in some ways, articulating just such a theory. For that very reason, though, some philosophers have tried to extract a general theory of hate speech from MacKinnon's ideas. (For some of that work, see the related reading Speech and Harm.

The beginning of the chapter reports what MacKinnon takes to be 'women's reality'. Of course, not all of the things she describes happen to every woman. But the statistics she cites on p. 7, while they have changed somewhat since 1993, have not changed as much as one might have hoped.

As polemical as the beginning of this chapter is, it makes a very specific claim about pornography: that it silences women. It is, MacKinnon is arguing, one element of a larger regime that prevents women's reports of sexual mistreatment from being taken seriously. It is not that women cannot speak at all, but they "cannot use [speech] to say what [they] know" (p. 6), for example, that they were sexually abused or harassed.

MacKinnon makes two kinds of claims which, unfortunately, she tends to run together. This is rhetorically effective but intellectually sloppy.

The first claim is that women are sexually abused in the making of pornography. The second is the one mentioned earlier: that pornography harms women as a group by (among other things) silencing them. You see these two claims made together here, for example:

Protecting pornography means protecting sexual abuse as speech, at the same time that both pornography and its protection have deprived women of speech, especially speech against sexual abuse. (p. 9)

In arguing for the first claim, MacKinnon frequently cites reports of women being forced to appear in pornography (or coerced in some way). But, while of course that is both wrong and criminal, there is no evidence that it is a widespread problem. (Rubin, in one of the optional readings, objects strongly to this claim, noting that women who work in pornography have done so, as well.)

The paragraph on pp. 11-12 is another example of where MacKinnon runs the two claims together. How so? Can you identify other places where she makes the same kind of mistake?

On p. 20, MacKinnon claims that her argument "does not presume that all pornography is made through abuse...". (See also p. 28.) What does she offer instead? Can it play the same role in her argument? Why or why not? Is this other claim any more plausible? (Note that "all" is of course not required. It would obviously be enough if most pornography was "made through abuse".)

One very radical way to defend the claim that pornography involves sexual abuse would be to argue that heterosex itself, as it is routinely practiced, is a form of sexual abuse. Certainly Andrea Dworkin held such a view, and MacKinnon often seems to share it. (See for example her repeated remarks about 'penises ramming into vaginas'.) One of the suggestions I make below could be thought of as in this ballpark (and we'll see ideas in this vicinity when we read Nicola Gavey later in the course).

Note that MacKinnon's second claim—including the claim that pornography 'silences' women—does not depend upon the first claim. If pornography has the kinds of ill effects MacKinnon claims, that is entirely compatible with the women performing in mainstream pornography having consented to whatever is being done, and even genuinely enjoying it. (MacKinnon would raise questions about 'consent' here that are not our focus, though we can of course discuss them.) The question for us, then, is: How does pornography silences women, according to MacKinnon? What's the mechanism?

What MacKinnon is arguing here, first and foremost, is that we should not think of pornography simply as 'expressing ideas' about sex, for example, about what 'good sex' is like or about how women should act or be treated sexually. As MacKinnon notes, there are lots of examples of cases in which words do not 'just' express ideas. Some words do things, and some words discriminate. What MacKinnon wants to argue, then, is that, like a "Whites Only" sign, pornography does something, and what it does is discriminatory.

One of the arguments MacKinnon makes is that pornography causes certain other forms of harm: for example, it causes men to rape and abuse women. This is an empirical claim that we have seen before, and it is dubious. The more important idea is that pornography is a 'performative' form of speech, in Austin's sense. The crucial question, then, is what pornography does and how it does it.

Unfortunately, MacKinnon's presentation of this idea is (once again) mixed up with her claims about how pornography is made. But, every once in a while, one gets a clear statement of what pornography is supposed to do. For example:

As society becomes saturated with pornography, what makes for sexual arousal, and the nature of sex itself..., change. ...As the industry expands, this becomes more and more the generic experience of sex, the woman in pornography becoming more and more the lived archetype for women's sexuality.... In other words, as the human becomes thing and the mutual becomes one-sided and the given becomes stolen and sold, objectification comes to define femininity, and one-sidedness comes to define mutuality, and force comes to define consent.... (pp. 25-6, my emphasis)

What MacKinnon is claiming here is that pornography does the things she lists.

Many liberal 'defenders' of pornography would concede that pornography does these things and insist that they find these effects to be as objectionable as MacKinnon does. (For example, Judge Easterbrook does precisely that in his opinion declaring the Indianapolis law drafted by MacKinnon to be unconstitutional.) How can that be consistent?

Here's an example of the kind of thing MacKinnon might have in mind. There is anecdotal evidence that many women nowadays (including many Brown students) are slapped or choked or gagged during casual sexual encounters, without consenting. There is other evidence that one reason this happens is that some men think these activities are a 'normal' part of heterosex and so that they do not require 'special consent' beyond the initial consent to sex. (Another possibility is that some men, although they do not think this, exploit it as an excuse.) Why would they think that? Because, the suggestion would be, these activities are so common in pornography. Absent consent, however, choking and the like are sexual assault. So, if pornography is responsible for 'normalizing' choking and the like, then it is responsible for 'normalizing' some forms of sexual assault: It makes choking and the like 'just sex', not assault. And it silences women by making it more difficult for them to protest such treatment. (See the recommended readings for some discussion of these issues in the popular press.)

Can you think of other ways in which pornography might shape people's expectations about sex to the detriment of women, or of other groups?

Suppose that pornography were to succeed in altering socio-sexual norms so that consent to intercourse really did include consent to being slapped, choked, etc. Then choking without 'special consent' wouldn't be assault but really would be 'just sex'. Should we say that women have been harmed in this case? How?

Consider MacKinnon's discussion of 'fantasy' and 'simulation' on pp. 26-7. I suggest that this runs together the two kinds of claims I distinguished earlier. How so?

Here's another expression of the idea that pornography does things:

...[A]uthoritatively saying someone is inferior is largely how structures of status and differential treatment are demarcated and actualized. Words and images are how people are placed in hierarchies, how social stratification is made to seem inevitable and right, how feelings of inferiority and superiority are engendered, and how indifference to violence against those on the bottom is rationalized and normalized. (p. 31)

This is the line of thought we'll see Rae Langton try to develop.

It is often claimed that pornography objectifies—that it presents women as if they were merely things—and does so in an objectionable way (if that needs to be added). Saul's focus here is on two related claims: First, that the 'use' of pornography involves treating things (e.g., pieces of paper) as women; and, Second, that such 'personification' might lead to, or even somehow be, objectification. Her counter-claim is that personification presupposes one main kind of objectification.

We have not read anything on objectification ourselves, but Saul provides enough exposition of the idea for present purposes. Anyone who wishes to read more on the topic should start with the SEP article listed as a recommended reading and follow up with the paper by Martha Nussbaum listed as an optional reading. Also listed as optional readings are the two papers, by Rae Langton and Melinda Vadas, that are Saul's main targets here. But the main claim Saul is criticizing, that men 'use pornography as a woman', is already made by MacKinnon.

I do not myself like talk of 'using' pornography, but I'll indulge such language here, since Saul uses it.

Saul begins by discussing the notion of objectification itself, suggesting that it be understood in broadly Kantian terms: To objectify someone is to treat them as an instrument or a tool, as a mere means to one's own ends; to objectify women sexually is to treat women as a mere means to one's own sexual ends without concern for their ends. (A person's 'ends' here includes their goals, intentions, desires, and the like.) This need not, as Saul emphasizes, mean denying that the person in question has their own ends, nor even mean that one always ignores those ends, but only that one is doing so on a particular occasion, or on certain sorts of occasions.

As for personification, Saul takes Langton and Vadas to understand it as: interacting with things in ways that one would normally only interact with people. In particular, the suggestion is, men who use pornography are having sex with pieces of paper or with images on a screen. More precisely, Vadas's idea is that "men have sex with pieces of paper when they use pieces of paper to fulfill the role, function, or capacity of a woman" (pp. 47-8). And more generally, personification involves "using a thing to fulfill the function of a person" (p. 47).

Saul then considers how personification might be related to objectification, considering two possible connections. Ultimately, Saul regards both as problematic, with the crucial lingering question being what exactly is meant by using pornography as a woman.

In order to throw some light on this, Saul considers the history of vibrators,¹ which turn out to have begun life as medical devices designed to treat "hysteria".² Saul argues that women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were using vibrators to fulfill one function of doctors of that time: the inducement of 'hysterical paroxysm', i.e., orgasm. Such women were thus "personifying" vibrators, in the same sense in which Langton and Vadas claim that men personify pieces of paper when they 'use' pornography.

The reason this claim is unproblematic is that doctors, at the time, clearly did have as one of their functions or 'roles' to incude hysterial paroxysm in women with symptoms of 'hysteria'. That is why women's personification of vibrators is not morally objectionable. It is, quite generally, not inappropriate to 'use' people who have certain 'job titles' to fulfill certain of one's needs, so long as one does not, in doing so, ignore the fact that those people have their own "ends" as well.

The claim that 'men use pornography to fulfill the function of women' thus also presupposes something about what "the function of women" is, though it is not entirely clear what. One option, Saul suggests, is that it assumes that "the function of women is to produce sexual satisfaction in men" (p. 54), which she takes to be both false and offensive; hence, the claim that men use pornography as a woman would itself have a false and offensive presupposition.

Although Saul does not pursue this point, this observation suggests that we might try applying her ideas to a different concern about objectification that has sometimes been expressed: that pornography objectifies the women (i.e., models or performers) who are featured in it. The concern here is that these women are used by men for their own sexual satisfaction. How might one adapt Saul's discussion to this context and, perhaps, to sex workers generally?

This already makes it apparent that there is an obvious problem here, namely, that there seems no reason to think that "men use pornography as a women" presupposes that satisfying men sexually is the function of women, rather than a function of women. Saul discusses this point later—though I would have preferred myself that it have been flagged here, at least, since it is such an obvious objection. As she notes (p. 57), however, this weaker presupposition would be no less offensive.

A particularly radical view might hold that this presupposition is not false, even if it is offensive, on the ground that patriarchy has so constructed gender as to make it the case that one, perhaps even the primary, function of women in our society as it is presently constituted is to provide sexual satisfaction to men. It may well be, in fact, that this is MacKinnon's view. Saul does not really address this response, but, at the very least, the argument would then require an additional premise, and a controversial one.

An alternative is to suppose that it is only men who view pornography who need to presuppose that it is the function of women to provide sexual satisfaction to men. But, once again, it seems implausible that men (even ones who view pornography) believe that it is a function of women (one of their purposes) to satisfy men sexually, let alone that this is the function of women.

Whether they do so is an empirical question, as Saul says. But the philosophical issue seems to turn, instead, on whether a man's 'using' pornography for sexual stimulation requires him to presuppose that it is a function of women to satisfy men sexually. Saul clearly thinks it does not. Is she right?

Suppose Vadas is right that heterosexual men 'use pornography as a woman'. What should we say about gay men? or straight or gay women? What about the 'use' of erotica? What about sexual fantasy? Do all these also involve the 'use' of something as a person? Or is there some way for Vadas to distinguish these cases? If not, what is the underlying assumption Vadas is making that leads to this problem?

All that said, however, it might still be true that some men suppose that one function of women is to satisfy men sexually. But now comes the denouement: Perhaps such a man could use pornography "to perform a function that he took to be a function of women" (p. 58). But such a man would be one who "holds an instrumentalizing view of women's sexuality" (p. 58), that is, who already regards women as, in that respect, mere means to his own sexual satisfaction; that is, such a man already objectifies women sexually. Thus, we reach Saul's intended conclusion: Personification presupposes objectification.

In footnote 6, Saul writes: "It seems to me more likely that the function of pornography is to produce sexual arousal rather than sexual satisfaction." What distinction is she making here? Does it seem like an important one? How would making it affect the discussion in the paper?

¹For more information on the history of vibrators, see the web page of the Antique Vibrator Museum at Good Vibrations (a famous women-owned sex shop in San Francisco, though there is now also a branch in Cambrdige). There's a nice timeline, with links to some of the old ads, at Mother Jones.

²This claim is widely but not universally accepted, but it's probably enough for Saul's purposes that it could be true.

NOTE: Remember that you do not have to post anything on Canvas for this meeting. But if there are specific questions you'd like answered, or topics you'd like to suggest for discussion, you should feel free to post them. For more general discussion of the films for this session, please use the course forum.

In the mid-1980s, feminist film theorist Linda Williams (then at UC-Irvine) was working on what was to be a book about "the pleasure of looking at human bodies in movement". She decided that she would include a chapter on pornography. Much to her surprise, when she started actually to look at pornography, she found it much more complex than she expected, and the chapter became a book, Hard Core, now widely regarded as a groundbreaking study of cinematic pornography.

In the first chapter, Williams motivates her project and places it with respect to the then-raging debates over pornography, which we have just been reading.

As Williams sees it, cinematic pornography at that time was primarily concerned with the nature of women's sexuality, though it both raises and answers the relevant questions from an exclusively male point of view (see esp. pp. 48-57). This replicates what Williams regards as a fundamental problem with how sexality is constructed in comtemporary society: "...[F]or women, one constant of the history of sexuality has been a failure to imagine their pleasures outside a dominant male economy" (p. 4). But that, Williams suggests, makes critical engagement with pornography all the more essential.

To move towards such engagement, Williams says, we must simultaneously recognize, first, that pornography's "visceral appeal to the body" is not unique to it but shared, for example, with horror. And second, we must insist upon stepping back from those responses and interrogating them.

One film that Williams will analyze closely later (and which I will ask you to watch) is Deep Throat, which was a target of much outrage among anti-pornography feminists. As Williams notes, the obejction is not that the film is violent or involves the portayal of rape.¹ Rather, the objection was to the centrality of fellatio and, ironically, on the female protagonist's enthusiasm for the practice, which some feminists regarded (and still regard) as intrinsically objectifying.

Summarizing the discussion, Williams writes:

Before we can adequately read the significance for women—let alone men—of the representation of nonnormative sexual acts in pornography, we will need to think more about how such acts are represented, for whom they are represented, and how they function in narrative context. Deep Throat, for example, was one of the first hard-core features to be seen by large numbers of women in theaters. It was also one of the first pornographic films to concentrate on the problem of a woman's pleasure and to suggest that some sexual acts were less than earthshaking. While none of this makes Deep Throat a progressive or feminist work, it does suggest...the complexity involved in reading sexual acts in hard-core films. (p. 25)

The point is not that such analysis should ignore the role that power plays in human relationships, both sexual and otherwise, but rather that a more subtle analysis is needed of that role.

The broader question at issue there, and the one that animates the entire book, is how sexual pleasure is represented in cinematic pornography. Pleasure is something we feel. How do you get it on film? (Of course, that kind of question is not unique to pornography, but it has a special relevance here.) In most pornography, Williams suggests:

...the confession of pleasure is organized according to male norms that fail to recognize—or perhaps to imagine—difference. The more the male investigator probes the mysteries of female sexuality to capture the single moment revealing the secret of her mechanism..., the more he succeeds only in reproducing the woman's pleasure based on the model, and measured against the standard, of his own. (p. 53)

In some ways, I think Williams means to undermine pornography's own pretensions by emphasizing its inability to do what it wants to do: represent the truth of women's pleasure. But one might wonder whether it can even do so for men's pleasure. Certainly there is an obvious visual language, but how does it work? Note, too, that the obvious visual language only works for orgasmic sexual pleasure, not for the non-orgasmic pleasure that we experience most of time during sex. In what ways do the films we've been watching (and will later watch) try to capture that? If we could figure out how to capture and represent non-orgasmic pleasure, could that be extended to women's orgasmic pleasure?

One of the important things that Chapter 2 does is force us to start thinking about the 'pleasures' of 'moving image photography' generally, and what it means to be able to see human bodies as we do. It's obvious that pornography does have, in the words of Ellen Willis, a "utilitarian function". But is that all there is to pornography? Or is there something else about seeing human bodies as pornography presents them that attracts us to it?

Williams also introduces here what she calls the 'principle of maximum visibility'. What is this principle? To what extent does it seem manifest in 'mainstream' pornography? Is it violated in some of the films we have watched? If so, to what effect?

In the third chapter, Williams is much concerned with the contrast between early stag films of the early 20th century and the 'full-length features' that emerged around 1970 (such as Deep Throat or the two films assigned for this session). Does this distinction still seem signficant today? Have we, in some sense, seen a return of stag film-like pornography? Does the way most poeple watch porn today seem more like the 'viewing booths' she mentions?

¹Linda Marchiano (Lovelace) would later claim that she had been forced to take part in the movie by her abusive husband, Chuck Traynor. While I know of no reason to doubt Marchiano's claims, and such abuse is obviously to be condemned, it is important to note that Traynor had nothing to do with the production of the film. The producer and director have denied any knowledge that Marchiano was being coerced, and I know of no reason to doubt their claims, either.

Rae Langton's focus in this paper is, obviously, on pornography, and there are many objections one might make to her argument that are specific to the case of pornography (and that we will explore). Her underlying idea, though, which is borrowed from MacKinnon, is that pornography is a kind of anti-woman hate speech, and both she and other authors have, more recently, developed more general accounts of hate speech based upon the ideas in this paper. (See the collection Speech and Harm listed as an optional reading for Only Words.) So, even if Langton were wrong about pornography, we'd want to pay close attention to the structure of her argument, and not just because that's what philosophers do.

In the United States, pornography is protected by the right to free speech. In this paper, Langton proposes to take the idea that pornography is speech seriously and to think about what kind of speech pornography is. (In effect, she's trying to turn the free speech argument on its head.) Her claim is that pornography is speech that subordinates and silences women. This claim has often been thought to be incoherent. It's the coherence of the claim that Langton most immediately wants to defend, not its truth, although she does argue for its truth as well.

Discussion of this issue is necessarily intertwined with certain claims about pornography itself, and it's a shortcoming of Langton's treatment that she does not make clear to what exactly it is supposed to apply. Langton remarks in a later paper that her "discussion has an implicit restriction to the kind of pornography for which a case might be made that it subordinates and silences women" ("Pornography's Authority? Response to Leslie Green", p. 92, fn. 7). But this is not very helpful, since it seems to mean that the discussion applies to what it most plausibly applies to. Moreover, different people will have different views about whether "a case might [plausibly] be made that" any pornography "subordinates and silences women". In order to focus on the structure of Langton's argument, though, let's set this issue aside for the moment; so we'll grant Langton (for the sake of argument) her claims about the nature of pornography itself. Our focus for now is on how Langton thinks pornography "works" to alter socio-sexual norms.

To understand Langton's view, it's essential to distinguish it from two other views that are in the same vicinity. One would object to pornography on the ground that it portrays women as subordinate. So that would be an aspect of the 'locutionary content' expressed by making a 'pornographic utterance'. Another would object to pornography on the ground that it causes women to be subordinated. That would be a 'perlocutionary effect'. Neither of these is Langton's view.

Little quiz to check your own understanding: Why does Langton say that persuading is perlocutionary not illocutionary? (Note: You don't have to submit an answer!)

Langton's view, instead, is that pornography subordinates as an illocutionary matter: It is alleged to rank women as inferior, to endorse the degradation of women, and to legitimize discrimination against women. She gives a number of examples to illustrate what she has in mind. But a contemporary analogy can be found in US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, declaring laws prohibiting same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional. His complaint was very much that such laws rank gay people as inferior, endorse their degradation, and legitimize discrimination against them. Note that there is something factive about the notions in play here.¹ It is not just that the law says that gay people are inferior. Kennedy's claim was that such laws make gay people inferior by denying them certain legal rights available to straight people.

As we discussed before, MacKinnon proposes to regard pornography as a form of sex discrimination, much like sexual harassment. How might one use that analogy to explain what kind of claim Langton is making here?

What, then, does Langton mean when she says that pornographers subordinate women in the illocutionary sense? Not just that it causes women to be subordinated. Rather, pornographers are supposed to make it the case that women are subordinated, in much the same way that an umpire can make it the case that a particular pitch was a strike: simply by saying that it is. So the illocutionary act is, in a sense, defined in terms of its effect, but the effect is not merely a causal consequence of the performance of the act (that is its perlocutionary effect) but is somehow built into the act itself (it is 'constitutive').

Ordinarily, we would want to distinguish between the question whether some law or act makes people believe something and whether it makes that belief true. (See pp. 303-4.) E.g., opponents of mandatory childhood vaccinations may have made many people believe that vaccines are ineffective or dangerous, but that doesn't make vaccines ineffective or dangerous. But in this case, one might think, it is less clear. Is there a difference between making lots of people believe that women are inferior and actually making women inferior? Is there a difference between making lots of people believe that choking is a 'normal' part of sex and its being a 'normal' part of sex? Why might one think there isn't? Or, at least, that there is less of a gap here? (Are there similar examples that would be better?)

Another important point, which first appears on p. 305, concerns the role of authority. An umpire's ability to call a pitch a strike rests upon a certain sort of authority that the umpire has; similarly for legislators, judges, and the like. So there is a question about whether pornography has (or pornographers have) the necessary sort of authority (as regards questions about gender and sexuality) to make women subordinate. We'll return to this below.

It's a good strategy at this sort of point to check your understanding by formulating your own examples. (Get into the habit of doing this, and it will make you a better reader.) What other cases of 'authoritative' speech acts can you think of? What kind of authority is at issue in them? Are there important differences along that dimension?

Langton says there are three ways one might try to make the argument that pornography subordinates women in the illocutionary sense (by, e.g., legitimating sexual violence or ranking women as inferior).

There's something I have always found strange about these arguments. They seem almost to commit the fallacy of affirming the consequent. (This is when you argue: If this first thing is the case, then that other thing is the case. But that other thing is the case. So this first thing is the case.) More precisely, they all seem to be aimed at the question whether certain necessary conditions for pornography to be subordinating speech are met. But even if they are, it will not follow that pornography is subordinating speech. Thoughts?

First, one might try to explain the perlocutionary effects of pornography (e.g., why it allegedly makes people more likely to endorse rape myths) in terms of its illocutionary content. It is obvious, though, that this argument has all the problems that the 'causal objection' to pornography has: There is no consensus that pornography actually has such harmful effects; studies disagree. (Even Edward Donnerstein, whose work Langton cites in this connection, has objected to what he regards as misappropriation of his work. See the optional readings for more details.) Moreover, as Langton notes, this is an argument by inference to the best explanation, and it is far from clear there are not better explanations. Indeed, so far as I can see, Langton says nothing in favor of the claim that an explanation in terms of illocution is better than any other.

Second, one could try to focus on the question what message viewers actually get from pornography. But, as Langton notes, different people seem to get different messages. For some, pornography is "escapist storytelling". Others "take pornography to be something that ranks them, judges them, denigrates them, and legitimates ways of behaving that hurt women" (p. 311). It would seem, then, as if the people who 'read' pornography as subordination are, basically, MacKinnon, Langton, and other opponents of pornography. But then it's difficult to see how men who regard pornography as "entertainment" are supposed to 'get the message' that women are inferior, etc. (If anyone has ideas about how to read this argument so that it's more plausible, please do say so.)

In any event, the third strategy is the one Langton finds most promising. This is to investigate whether the sorts of conditions that would need to be in place if pornography were to have the sort of illocutionary content Langton says it does actually are in place. The most important of these, as mentioned above, is that pornography has to have a certain sort of authority. Pornography, on her view, does not simply say that women are or ought to be subordinate. It is not supposed to be like a political commentator who says that Muslims ought not to be allowed to enter the United States. It is supposed, rather, to be like a President who signs an executive order saying that Muslims are not allowed to enter the United States, and who thereby makes it the case that Muslims are not allowed to do so. Note, again, then, that the issue is not just whether pornography "has a message", nor even whether that message is (sometimes) misogynistic. The issue, at present, is whether pornography has the authority necessary, as it were, to enforce that message: to make it the case that women are subordinate.

And so, Langton says:

What is important here is not whether the speech of pornographers is universally held in high esteem: it is not.... What is important is whether it is authoritative in the domain that counts—the domain of speech about sex—and whether it is authoritative for the hearers that count: people, men, boys, who in addition to wanting "entertainment", want to discover the right way to do things, want to know which moves in the sexual game are legitimate.... (p. 312)

As Langton notes, this is an empirical question, and it is far from clear how to answer it. But some studies have found that teenagers do often think that pornography portrays sex in a realistic way. Whether that amounts to its having "authority" in the required sense, however, is a different question, one we'll discuss further when we read Naomi Wieland and Louise Antony in a couple weeks.

As noted earlier, Langton does not say much about what kind of pornography she has in mind. That does make it difficult to evaluate her arguments, in a way, because much of what she says might not seem to apply to pornography in general. But might we help her out here by focusing on some pornography that seems especially objectionable? Could it be argued that that pornography subordinates women? Note that the tricky issue here will still be whether such pornography has the right kind of authority to do so. How might that issue be affected by how much and what kind of pornography is in question?

As I've mentioned previously, many people have expressed concern about the increase in cases of choking, slapping, name-calling and the like that occur, even during casual sex, without any 'special' consent. What would an explanation of that pheonomenon based upon Langton's ideas be like? How plausible is that explanation?

Here are two more kinds of pornography you might consider. First, incest or 'fauxcest' porn, in which the performers are not actually related but pretend to be (ususally step-) relatives. Second, pornography in which young-looking but of-age women pretend to be young teens. Do the sorts of arguments Langton gives help us to understand what, if anything, is objectionable about such porn?

¹Factivity is a property of certain verbs, such as "know" and "regret": If X knows that p, then p must be true; if X regrets doing p, then X must have done p; etc.

In section I of this paper, Langton argued that pornography might subordinate women. In this section, she argues that pornography might also silence women in two ways: First, it can make it impossible for "No!" to be heard as a refusal; Second, it can make it impossible for women's protests about their mistreatment to be heard as such.

As with the first section, it is important to separate the claims that Langton makes about pornography from the general structure of her account of silencing. Later authors have attempted to develop this account to explain other ways in which marginalized groups can be silenced. (See the optional paper by West for one example.) Langton's overall account of silencing could be valuable and important even if she were wrong that pornography silences women in the specific ways she suggests.

The kind of silencing in which Langton is most interested is what she calls "illocutionary disablement": A case in which one is prevented, in some way, from performing a certain illocutionary act, even though one can utter the right words. (So illocution is again central.) Langton gives a number of useful examples of this phenomenon, so there should be no question that this sort of thing can happen. Langton also gives a general argument that speech acts made by one person can lead to illocutionary disablement of another person.

Do any of Langton's examples seem not to make the point she wants them to make? Can you think of other examples of the same phenomenon?

We will later see a dispute about whether failure to secure uptake implies failure to perform the illocutionary act one intends. In the first example, Langton makes a form of the claim that it does. This will be worth remembering.

Langton wants to argue that pornography silences women through illocutionary disablement. In principle, however, one could argue that it silences women in one of the other two ways she distinguishes. How might such an argument go? What are the pros or cons of these alternatives?

The kinds of question I've just asked are the kinds of question you should learn to ask yourself as you are reading. Whenever a philosopher chooses one of a number of possible routes, you want to ask: Why that one? What would the alternatives look like? What are their pros and cons? Of course, you can't pursue every such possibility in depth. You have to use your judgement about which are worth pursuing. But it's worth at least thinking briefly about the alternatives, if only to make sure you understand how they are different from the one chosen.

Let's take the case of refusal first. Langton distinguishes two kinds of cases in which a woman might unsuccessfully try to refuse a sexual advance. In the first, the woman's refusal is recognized as such but ignored. Langton suggests that pornography could encourage this sort of behavior "by sexualizing the use of force in response to refusal that is recognized as refusal" (p. 323). But one might well wonder whether there is much pornography that fits this description (and whether pornography that appears on the surface to fit this description really does).

In the second sort of case, the woman's refusal is not even recognized as such: Her "No" is treated as insincere. This would be a case of "illocutionary disablement": The very possibility of refusal has been eliminated. Here, Langton suggests that (some) pornography "may simply leave no space for the refusal move in its depictions of sex" (p. 324). The idea, I take it, is that some pornography portrays women as saying "No" but not thereby refusing; sex follows, and the woman is portrayed as enjoying it every bit as much as if she'd enthusiastically said "Yes!" In some way, then, such pornography is supposed to enact (establish, promulgate) a norm that a woman's saying "No", in a sexual context, does not constitute refusal.

Here again, one might wonder how much, if any, pornography fits the description just given. That is an empirical question, of course, about which Langton does not have much to say. We'll read some studies later that address this issue and look at an infamous pictorial that is claimed to be of this kind. For now, we'll just bracket the question.

Langton herself asks the question, "How common is silencing of this kind and the rape that accompanies it?" She suggests that it may be quite common, and it was the "common wisdom" at the time Langton was writing that much date rape is due to men's failure to recognize women's attempted refusals as such. (This is largely what gave rise to the focus on consent in programs designed to prevent sexual violence.) This sort of view, which is known as the Miscommunication Hypothesis, still seems to be fairly widespread. What it is important to note here is that Langton's account depends upon it. If the Miscommunication Hypothesis is false, then date rape does not (often) occur because men do not recognize women's attempts at refusal; it then follows that pornography does not silence women in the way Langton argues it does, because women simply are not silenced in that way. We'll read some empirical literature that bears upon this question soon. For now, it's just worth noting that Langton's view has this empirical presupposition.

As said above, even if there is not illocutionary disablement in this particular case, the structure of Langton's account has been very influential. Indeed, much of the philosophical discussion of the notion of 'silencing' traces to this paper. To what extent does 'silencing', as that notion occurs in contemporary discussions of racism, etc, seem to be captured by Langton's notion of illocutionary disablement? To what extent does it seem to involve some other phenomenon? (Langton herself mentions other forms of silencing.)

Langton also suggests that there might be a second way in which pornography silences women: It might make it difficult for women to protest their mistreatment.

Langton introduces this second kind of silencing on pp. 321-2, with reference to Linda Marchiano's book Ordeal. How plausible do you think her claim is that Marchiano was silenced? By what was she silenced?

What Langton says about Linda Marchiano (Lovelace) and her experience making Deep Throat is at best misleading. There is no reason to doubt that Marchiano was, as she claims, physically abused during the making of the film and coereced into partcipating. But the person who was abusing and coercing her was not anyone involved with the making of the film but her husband, Chuck Traynor. There is no evidence that the producers of the film knew that Marchiano was being abused or coerced.

Perhaps the most important version of the second form of silencing is the one Langton mentions on p. 326: the "disablement encountered by women who give testimony in court about rape and about sexual harassment, and whose testimony, and descriptions of their experience, achieve the uptake appropriate to a description of normal sex". In these cases, that is, women's attempt to describe their having been violated fail, because what they describe is understood as 'just sex'. So, the thought is, pornography could silence women by making people believe that 'consent is complicated', thereby making it difficult for women who are date-raped to convince other people that they were raped (be those people friends or jurors).

What kind of illocutionary act does pornography have to perform in order for it to be responsible for this kind of silencing? What would the pornography itself need to be like in order to perform that illocutionary act?

Langton says near the beginning of the paper that her main goal is just to show that MacKinnon's claims that pornography subordinates and silences women are coherent. Has she accomplished that goal? Even if so, it's another question whether those claims are true. What are the most important questions that we would need to answer to decide whether the claims are true? (I.e., what are the most important premises that still need defending?)

Langton argues that pornography silences women: more specifically, that it leads to certain sorts of illocutionary disablement. It is for this reason, recall, that she can claim that the debate over pornography concerns the liberties both of women and of those who produce and consume pornography: It is a conflict between liberty and liberty, not just between liberty and equality.

Jacobson counters this argument in two ways. The first focuses specifically on Langton's attempt to answer the 'free speech' argument on its own terms. The second is probably more important for our purposes, but I'll talk about the first, as well.

Jacobson's First Objection

The first few pages of Jacobson's article give some background about the debate over freedom of speech. It leads up to Jacobson's first objection to Langton: that the sort of speech that "arch-defenders of free speech have been trying to defend" does not include any right to perform illocutionary acts; rather, "Free speech...is roughly the freedom of locutionary acts..." (p. 71).

As Jacobson recognizes, there is something peculiar about speaking of "the freedom of locutionary acts". We do better to speak of locutionary content (which is, recall, roughly just the meaning of the words that are used). But the larger point is that one can't just express contents. One always does so in the course of performing some illocutionary act: asserting, warning, whatever. So you can't just protect the freedom to express any content one wishes.

I take this to be one of the central points that Hornsby and Langton make in section III, and they are certainly right about that much. But they do not, it seems to me, really address the underlying worry. They concede—this is one of Jacobson's main points—that there is no general right to "freedom of illocution", emphasizing that Langton's own view is that pornographers should not have the freedom to perform illocutionary acts of subordination. Jacobson gives some examples later that make the same point: The same illocutionary disablement from which blacks suffered in apartheid South Africa afflicts minors in the United States, as well as non-citizen residents. But the issue is not whether Langton says that there is a general right to 'illocutionary freedom' but whether she can consistently deny that there is.

Langton does not and cannot just deny that pornographers have a right to produce and distribute their films and to perform whatever speech acts they thereby perform. That would be to deny that they have any right at all to speak as they do, and then there would be no conflict between the rights of pornographers and the rights of women (because pornographers would have no conflicting right). So that cannot be the argument that Langton is making. (Perhaps Longino makes an argument more along those lines.)

To sum up, here's the problem H&L seem to have. They want to insist that "Caring about free speech is a matter of caring about people's powers of doing things with words, including illocutionary, communicative things" (p. 87), i.e., about people's ability to perform illocutionary acts. But they deny that there is any general right to perform any illocutionary act one likes, so it looks as if there needs to be some account of which illocutionary acts we have a right to perform and which we do not. But H&L say nothing about this matter. That, I take it, is why Jacobson thinks they are committed to the claim that there is a general right to "freedom of illocution", though one that can be restricted in certain circumstances. But H&L do nothing to defend that view, either, and it does not reek of plausibility.

Here's a special question for those of you with some prior experience with moral philosophy. I have a dim sense that H&L's use of the term "right" equivocates between some notion of prima facie rights and some notion of all things considered right and that that's what leads to all the confusion. The way to find out if that's a correct diagnosis would be to try to disentangle the two uses and see where that leaves us. (This could possibly be done in 3-5 pages so could make a good paper topic if you're feeling adventurous.)

What H&L do correctly argue, as said above, is that we can't just protect locutionary freedom: the freedom to express contents. As they rightly emphasize, if the value of free speech rests upon the importance of 'free exchange of ideas', then what needs protecting must be something like expressing opinions, which is an illocutionary act. But surely that does not support a general right to illocutionary freedom: It supports the right to express opinions and nothing more.¹ And we can now understand, I think, what Jacobson really means when he says that freedom of speech is locutionary freedom: There should be no restrictions on which opinions are expressed; i.e., one cannot prohibit speech based solely upon its locutionary content. It should not be surprising that we end up here. This is a common understanding of one of the things the First Amendment requires: that restrictions on speech not be based upon the content of that speech.

Jacobson's Second Objection

Jacobson's second worry concerns how Langton wants us to think about "illocutionary disablement".

First, Jacobson argues that we should not require actual uptake for an illocutionary act to have been performed. He gives examples involving warning and inviting to make his case (pp. 72-3). Langton and Hornsby respond (pp. 80ff) that his examples are ineffective and that, indeed, we should think of the "full success" of an illocutionary act as requiring uptake, i.e., recognition of what act is being performed. So far as I can see, however, this amounts to little more than a terminological dispute. How we choose to use the term of art "performed the illocutionary act of Phi-ing" cannot be critical. (Nor can the question how Austin is properly interpreted.) The facts are agreed: Sometimes people intend to perform a certain illocutionary act and do everything that would normally be required, but they are, for one reason or another, not recognized as doing so; illocutionary disablement, as Langton describes it in the case of refusal, lies in the fact that the intention to refuse is not recognized. The rest looks like a verbal issue.

One might worry that Langton really does need there to be a failure to perform an illocutionary act. Otherwise, women have not been 'silenced' in the sense in which she claims they are—prevented from performing certain illocutionary acts—and one would not get the speech vs speech (liberty vs liberty) conflict that is supposed to rescue MacKinnon from free speech concerns. If so, however, then Langton owes us some account of why the requirement of uptake should be accepted. Mere insistence that someone won't entirely have succeeded in what they are trying to do can't suffice: that will apply also to perlocutionary effects, e.g., persuading.

In the original version of H&L's reply (see the top of p. 26), they do give an argument that uptake should be required for the performance of an illocutionary act. But that discussion was dropped from the reprint, so I assume Langton must have decided it was inadequate. The key idea there is that we have to require uptake if we're to "preserv[e] the idea of illocution as communication", but I have no idea what that means, frankly. If anyone does, please say so.

Jacobson also argues (pp. 74-6) that what is problematic about the way in which pornography (allegedly) prevents women from refusing sex is not that they are prevented from performing a certain illocutionary act. Illocutionary disablement, he claims, is not, in itself, a bad thing (and he gives a handful of examples where it clearly is not). Rather, what makes illocutionary disablement a bad thing in this case, he claims, is the perlocutionary frustration to which it leads:

What is so terrible about a woman's being unable to refuse sex is the disablement of her autonomy, the resulting violation of her body, and assault on her well-being. (p. 76)

H&L's response to this objection, I think, is that illocutionary disablement is, in itself, a harm: Being deprived of the ability to do something other people can do is a 'deprivation'. But Jacobson's examples—children's inability to vote, my inability to call balls and strikes, the inability to incite riots, etc—cast serious doubt upon that claim if it is intended quite generally. Jacobson's strongest point here is really a dialectical one: We cannot rely upon our revulsion at the consequences of illocutionary disablement to argue that illocutionary disablement is, in itself, a harm.

This leads us, then, to Jacobson's most striking objection (pp. 76-9): that, if Langton is right, and pornography leads to a situation in which women are sometimes unable to refuse sex, then, in those situations, no rape has occurred, because the woman did not actually refuse. Jacobson's own view, by contrast, is that the woman just has not been recognized as refusing; since 'a reasonable person' would recognize her as doing so, she has 'performed the illocutionary act of refusing' and therefore has been raped.

Here again, I don't think how we use the technical language of speech act theory can be critical. H&L seem to want it to be, but the real issue can at least be phrased without deciding that question: whether there is a general right to have one's intended illocutionary acts recognized for what they are intended to be.

¹Indeed, it's notable that the First Amedment separately secures the right to a certain illocutionary act: "petition[ing] the government for a redress of grievances".

The central question Wieland tries to address in this paper is how pornography could have the sort of authority it needs to have if it is to be able to 'silence' women in the way Langton and Hornsby argue it does. As we have seen, pornography's authority is usually conceived as similar to that of a judge or an umpire: Pornography performs a verdictive or exercitive speech act of quite staggering scope and influence. As we have also seen, however, it is very difficult to argue that pornography does have such authority. Wieland suggests, though, that there is a different kind of authority that pornography might have, one that it is very easy for it to have. Making use of this kind of authority, pornography could still silence women.

What's most interesting in this paper, to me, though, is Wieland's attempt to resuscitate an objection that Jacobson makes: that, if Langton is right, and pornography makes it impossible for (some) women to 'perform the illocutionary act of refusal', then no rape has occurred in such cases, because the woman has not refused. Maitra and McGowan devote the final section of their paper to this topic, too. I'll discuss all that toward the end of these notes. First, I'll talk about how Wieland suggests Langton and Hornsby could resolve the authority problem.

Now, let me register right away that there is something that is potentially very confusing about this paper. The account of pornography's authority that Wieland gives is intended to fill a lacuna in the Langton-Hornsby account. But it is not, in the end, something Wieland thinks will work: She argues, at the end of the paper, that it has unacceptable consequences. I'm not sure, though, that she ever says explicitly where the argument she develops, on behalf of Langton and Hornsby, goes wrong. So we'll have to figure that out for ourselves.

Section II outlines the Langton-Hornsby view, emphasizing the difficulties it has with claims about authority. Section III attempts to characterize the sub-class of pornography to which the analysis is meant to apply.

There are certainly questions to be asked here. It just isn't as clear as Wieland seems to think what (or how much) pornography satisfies the definition she gives. As I have mentioned before, much of what has been thought to satisfy it is actually BDSM pornography. We'll look at some empirical work on this issue later.

The arguments of the paper really begin in Section IV. Wieland first lays out some ideas from David Lewis and Stephen Schiffer about how the linguistic meanings of expressions are fixed by conventions governing their use. Do not worry too much about the details in §IV.A, which are at best controversial. The important point is just that linguistic conventions are fairly easy to establish. Wieland establishes one herself when she stipulates what "pornography_sub" will mean in her paper. Another way that such conventions get established is through repetition: If people use a word enough times as if it has a certain meaning, it will eventually come to have that meaning. (This is very often how words change their meanings over time.)

See Lewis's paper "Languages and Language", which is listed as a related reading, if you want to know more about lingusitic conventions and how they (allegedly) fix meaning. (I'm not myself a fan of Lewis's account, as it happens.)

Wieland's idea, which she develops in §IV.B, is that pornography can easily set or alter the linguistic conventions that are in force in pornography itself, so that "no" literally means yes in pornography. It can simply present "no" as not really meaning no, at least within a sexual context, and do so often enough as to make it a convention, within pornography, that a woman's saying "no" does not constitute her refusing sex.

For those familiar with Lewis, note that Wieland's emphasis on different 'grammars' is somewhat confused. But one can replace it by the claim that not all members of the community speak the same language. In effect, the idea is that women in pornography do not speak English but a closely related langauge in which "No" means yes (and so does "Yes").

The problem is then to explain how this transfers to real-life situations. Wieland's claim is that real-life sexual interactions are enough like pornographic ones that the same conventions will carry over. Thus:

It is...plausible that there is mutual knowledge in the unwanted sexual encounter; what both speakers know is that there is mutual knowledge that "no" means yes in most contexts relevantly similar to the unwanted sexual encounter—namely those in pornographic representations. (p. 444)

To put it less formally, the claim is that real-life sexual situations are similar enough to porno-sex situations that the conventions that govern the latter will also govern the former.

There are all kinds of questions one might have about this. But we need to remember what Wieland is trying to do: She's trying to offer Langton and Hornsby an account of how pornography could have the authority it needs to have to silence women. She doesn't think this account works, in the end, but she's trying to offer a 'friendly amendment'. But it's hardly 'friendly' to offer your opponent an account that is hopeless, and one might worry that this one is.

Here are some of the questions that seem naturally to arise at this point. Are the "contexts relevantly similar to the unwanted sexual encounter" really those represented in the 'bad' pornography with which Wieland is concerned? Why aren't non-sexual contexts relevantly similar? Why aren't wanted sexual contexts relevantly similar? Why isn't pornography that isn't pornography_sub relevantly similar? How widespread would pornography_sub have to be to generate mutual knowledge, including on the part of the woman involved, that "no" means yes in the context of the sexual interaction in which she is involved? (If there is no mutual knowledge, then there is no convention.) There are relevant remarks in section V.A, but is there a principle at work there, beyond the empirical speculation?

Another question, which is similar to one raised by Maitra and McGowan, concerns what happens even in the pornographic context (as Wieland imagines it). Wieland speaks as if the word "no" has come to have a different conventional meaning. (And that is what Lewis's view is about.) I.e., the meaning of the word has actually changed. But is that the right way to describe what is happening in the kind of situation Wieland has in mind? That the word "no" does not mean no? Is that the way 'token resistance' is supposed to work? (Wieland may actually give a version of this objection herself.)

Let me say a quick word about how Maitra and McGowan formulate this point:

According to Langton and Hornsby, pornography causes its viewers to believe that women say 'No' even when they want sex, perhaps in order to play along with a sexual script that requires them to pretend to refuse. When confronted with an actual 'No', such a viewer assumes that the woman is just playing her role in that script, rather than really intending to refuse. He therefore fails to recognize her intention to refuse.... (p. 168, my boldface)

Use of the term "cause" suggests that this might be no more than a perlocutionary effect—but that need not undermine the argument that pornography silences (only the sort of argument Langton is giving). The more important point, it seems to me, is that there may well be such a sexual script: There may well be social penalties for women who too-quickly consent to sex, which in turn may lead men to expect women to "play hard to get" (and might even lead women themselves to feel some pressure to do so). So that part of Maitra and McGowan's argument may have some plausibility.

But is it really plausible that pornography is, to any significant extent, responsible for the mentioned social penalties? If not, might one reply that pornography helps to reinforce that script? One would still want to know how much pornography there really is that does so. The usual complaint about how women are presented in pornography is precisely the opposite: as ever-horny, insatiable nymphomaniacs who are always ready for sex with any available man, and so forth.

I'll leave it to you to think about other objections to Wieland's account of how pornography could have the authority to silence.

Maitra and McGowan themselves offer one in §3. It concerns how pornography's proprietary conventions are supposed to spread to real-life sexual encounters. (This is where the dialectical oddity of Wieland's paper is most pressing: Maitra and McGowan are attacking a view that Wieland does not actually hold, though it is one she means to be offering to Langton and Hornsby.) One might wonder, however, whether Maitra and McGowan can consistently push this kind of point: Their view, after all, is "that by depicting women as not really intending to refuse, pornography causes consumers to believe that [real] women who say 'No' do not intend to refuse" (p. 169). Why should that assumption spread from porn to real-life any more easily than the change of meaning?

Wieland herself discusses three objections to Langton and Hornsby's view (as she has reconstructed it). The first is that some people may be "immune" to the alleged effects of pornography. The second is that Langton and Hornsby's view might lead not to the conclusion that pornography should be censored, but rather to the conclusion that there should be more pornography, representing more of a range of sexual viewpoints. I'll not discuss these two objections here, but you should of course feel free to do so in your comments.

The third objection is a version of Jacobson's worry that Langton and Hornsby's view threatens to diminish the responsibility of the rapist: After all, if "no" really does mean yes, then the woman has in fact consented, or at least it would be reasonable for someone to think she had. In response, Maitra and McGowan point out that the mere fact that "no" means yes, even if it were one, could not by itself make it reasonable for someone to suppose someone consented, say, in the face of body language strongly suggesting otherwise.

That seems right as far as it goes, but the worry was that there might be some reduction of responsibility. What if the woman does only say "No"? What of cases in which consent is given initially but the woman then tries to withdraw it by saying "Stop"? Remember that Langton and Hornsby's view is not that the woman does refuse but is not recognized as doing so. It is that pornography prevents the woman from 'performing the illocutionary act of refusal' (or of withdrawing her consent) at all.

A related but slightly different thought is that the Langton-Hornsby view has "the unintended consequence of treating rapists and their victims as equally subjugated by the conventional power of pornographers_sub..." (p. 452). Or again: "Either pornographers_sub have the authority to change the meanings or illocutionary force of expressions or they don't; if they do, then these change for all interlocutors, including rapists" (p. 454). This kind of worry does not seem to depend upon the details of Wieland's proposal. How serious a problem is this?

As said earlier, Wieland herself doesn't think that her defense of Langton and Hornsby works: It leads to absurd conclusions. But why doesn't it work? Where does it go wrong? Does Wieland think that "No" doesn't really mean yes in pornography? Or that it does but doesn't mean yes in 'unwanted sexual contexts'? Or what? (Possibly there is an answer on pp. 454-5.) Whatever Wieland thinks, where do you think the argument goes wrong?

One of heterosexual pornography's most familiar tropes is the "money shot" or "cum shot", in which a penis is shown ejaculating. Typically, this is done in such a way that the ejaculate ends up on a woman's body. Many anti-pornography feminists have focused on this aspect of pornography, arguing that it is degrading and humiliating, especially the so-called 'facial', when semen is directed onto a woman's face. For example, Andrea Dworkin writes:

It is a convention of pornography that the sperm is on her, not in her. It marks the spot, what he owns and how he owns it. The ejaculation on her is a way of saying (through showing) that she is contaminated with his dirt; that she is dirty. ("Pornography Happens to Women", pp. 182-3)

Williams's goal in Chapter 4 is "to understand both the form and content of the most prevalent device of the new hard-core film's attempt to capture an involuntary confession of pleasure" (p. 95).

Williams's discussion is important, first, just for asking this kind of question: What is the meaning of 'cum shots'? Why are they so common in pornography? Dworkin offers one answer, but many people have objected to her implication that semen is a 'contaminent', that it is 'dirt'. Williams aims to look more closely at the role that 'cum shots' play in pornography, but it is, it seems to me, a shortcoming of Williams's discussion that she does not have much to say about men's own feelings about semen. Surely that must be part of the answer to why cum shots are so common in heterosexual pornography. The optional readings discuss this issue.

Williams suggests that we might regard the money shot as a 'fetish' or 'perversion', a substitute for the 'normal' experience of 'tactile sexual contact'. Anti-pornography feminists often make similar points, emphasizing that the 'disengagement' typical of money shots is 'abnormal'. Is any of that true? (Set aside the question what role pornography might have played in 'normalizing' external ejaculation.)

Williams describes fellatio as "the most photogenic of all sexual practices" (p. 111). Why?

Williams thinks of pornography as being in some sense 'about' the nature of sex and sexual pleasure—especially, as experienced by women (the 'other' of much pornography). Now, visible ejaculation is the obvious way to visually represent male sexual pleasure. But that only raises the question how female sexual pleasure might be represented in film. How does Williams think Deep Throat tries to solve this problem? What other techniques might be available for representing female sexual pleasure in film? How, indeed, is it represented in other films?

Williams somewhat downplays the significance of sound in the representation of sexual pleasure. Is she right to do so? (Some of what she says seems out of date, as regards contemporary pornography.) You might think here of the clips from Beautiful Agony or, perhaps better, the sorts of audio clips collected on Dipsea or the subreddit Gone Wild Audio.

One of the most interesting aspects of Williams's discussion is the comparison she draws between pornography and musicals: Both feature 'numbers' placed within a narrative that gives them context. Of course, this is only true of some pornography, and probably of less today than in 1989. Nonetheless, even short films such as My Roomie's Toy have narrative elements. What is the role or place of these? Are they just an excuse for sex scenes? What does it mean for narrative to inform number and number to inform narrative (see p. 130)?

Many people who write about pornography simply assume that male viewers identify with the men and female viewers identify with the (subordinated) women. Williams suggests, however, that things may not be so simple. Why? Can you add to her argument? Can you give examples?

At several points, Williams mentions ways in which pornography can be 'reflexive', calling attention to and commenting upon the very experience of watching pornography. What are her best examples of this pheneomenon? Can you think of others? (We shall shortly see a film that is, in a way, all about reflexivity: Candida Royalle's Eyes of Desire.)

Williams argues that, in filmed pornography "sex as a spontaneous event enacted for its own sake stands in perpetual opposition to sex as an elaborately engineered and choreographed show enacted by...performers for a camera". Or again: "...the problem of 'phoniness'—of insincere sexual performance—is absolutely central to what the feature-length hard-core genre is all about" (p. 147). How does this opposition affect the experience of watching pornography? In what sense is it an aspect of everyday sexual experience? (We'll read some papers about authenticity later.)

The central question of Chapter 6 is whether hardcore's focus on female sexual pleasure is objectionably objectifying. Williams emphasizes that pornography treats heterosex as a problem or paradox to be resolved, with sexual difference as the root of the problem. Here again, the analogy with musicals is a central theme.

Williams distinguishes three broad ways in which pornography tries to solve this problem.

• The (frequently misogynistic) escapism of 'separated utopianism', illustrated by Beyond the Green Door. In these films, the sex is relatively separate from the narrative and offers an escape from the problems of ordinary life (as in Busby Berkeley musicals like Gold Diggers of 1933).
• Films that 'integrate' the sexual numbers into the narrative and, at the same time, offer 'better sex' as the solution to the problems with real-world sexuality. The main example here is The Resurrection of Eve. Williams regards these films as more sophisticated than the separated ones, able to address the real-world problems in a more realistic (if still "patently facile") way.
• Films that 'dissolve' the boundary between sexual fantasy and the real world, presenting 'pornotopia' as if it were reality. Williams offers Insatiable as an example of this form. What distinguishes it from films like Green Door is that the female lead is presented as a subject who desires not just an object of desire. These films never really confront the real-world problems of sexuality, but they do at least recognize women's sexuality.

As we have already seen, it is a common complaint among anti-pornography feminists that pornography promulgates rape myths. Williams suggests that Green Door, at least, is one example of a film that does. Does it? (The related reading by Kerr addresses this issue and suggests a more 'progressive' reading of Green Door. It could make for a good final project to try to mediate this dispute.)

In section 4.2, after a careful exposition of the motivations for Langton's account, and a discussion of its (in)significance for the legal issues, Antony argues that Langton's insistence that pornography is speech (rather than conduct) creates a tension in her account.

Not that it is terribly important, but MacKinnon was not, as Antony says, "one of the earliest feminist critics of pornography". To the best of my knowledge, MacKinnon enters the fray, in any serious way, only around 1983 or so, but by then the so-called sex wars were well under way. Gloria Steinem's piece "Erotica vs Pornography", for example, was first published in Ms magazine in 1977 and 1978. (See Gayle Rubin's "Blood Under the Bridge" (here) for some of the history. Much more can be found in Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter's book Sex Wars.) What is true is that the Dworkin-MacKinnon line, after it appeared, became something like the accepted view among anti-pornography feminists, all but replacing earlier views that had focused on the harms that pornography allegedly causes.

Antony emphasizes that Austin sharply distinguished between a performative's bringing about a certain state of affairs and a report that that state of affairs obtains. In particular, performatives do not simultaneously describe the states of affairs they bring about. Antony gives a striking example: "I find the defendant guilty" has both performative and 'constative' (descriptive) uses, and it should be uttered performatively (by a judge, say) only when it could truly be uttered descriptively. But there is an ambiguity here that Antony notes later. The term 'guilty' has to mean 'legally guilty', not guilty as a matter of fact, if the performative is to make it so that the defendant is guilty. Hence, the description can only describe what the performative brings about if it is not "the expression of a constative judgment that the defendant is, as a matter of fact, the perpetrator of the crime", but rather as a judgment about what legal status they should have. With that alteration, though, the example seems compelling.

But we can usefully think of the description the other way. In that case, it records what we might think of as the 'appropriate factual basis' for the issuance of the verdict. (Compare "The ball is out", as descriptive and as verdictive.) It is important to recognize that the success of the performative does not depend upon the obtaining of the underlying facts. More importantly: "No single speech act can verdictively determine the condition that the correlative expositive claims to describe" (p. 71). I.e., the jury's determination does not make it the case that the defendant did commit the crime; the umpire's decision does not determine where the ball landed. (As Antony puts it in her earlier paper, which is listed as a related reading, these are not socially constructed facts, so they are beyond the scope of verdictives.)

There's a second example that Antony uses that is even more powerful: the posting of a job advertisement that excludes black people as candidates. Such a posting is conduct that is not protected by the First Amendment, not an expression of a racist opinion, which is protected, even though it is probably a racist opinion that motivates the conduct. Antony's point is that subordination—what MacKinnon and Langton think that pornography does—seems to be more like the discriminatory job posting than it is like a racist essay.

Suppose that Fred posts a job advertisement saying: "Mechanic wanted. Black people are not qualified for this job." Is that speech or conduct? What makes it one or the other? Could this example help Langton? Why or why not?

But then, ironically, what is problematic about pornography cannot be that it 'tells lies about women' (e.g., that women exist for the pleasure of men). If pornography 'tells lies', then it is descriptive, not performative. But, Antony argues, it is much more plausible that pornography has (false) descriptive content than that it has any verdictive content. Nor does it seem terribly difficult to understand how, by expressing certain misogynistic attitudes, pornography could lead men to have "a host of false beliefs and absurd expectations about women" (p. 74), which in turn would lead them to mistreat women or to condone such mistreatment. Antony returns to this idea at the end of the paper.

Antony writes: "It is very important to both [Langton and MacKinnon] to say that pornography tells lies about women" (p. 73). Is that right? If so, why is it so important?

This brings to the forefront the importance of the question how pornography is supposed to bring about its effects. For Langton, as we know, it is supposed to be merely through saying that women are inferior that pornography makes women so. And for that, familiarly, pornography needs to have a certain authority. So Antony turns to the question of authority in section 4.3.

After reviewing what Austin has to say about the role of authority, Antony draws an important distinction between authority and power (p. 79). Authority, as Antony understands it, is always socially conferred, whereas power is a matter of 'brute facts' about one's ability "to make things be the way you want". The two are related but different, as Antony explains with some examples. Authority can lead to power, and cannot be enforced without it, but power can exist absent any relevant authority.

Antony writes: "This is the message of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States: it is the power of armed police officers, rather than their authority, that structures the lives of young black men—​and that should not be so" (p. 79). What does she mean by that? Is she right?

Antony mentions another case that is closer to our concerns: the norm that women's bodies should be 'smooth and hairless'. How does the distinction between authority and power apply in this case? What does Antony mean when she says that "Social norms of this sort are embedded in structures of social power, whether or not the authority of those in power is accepted" (p. 79)? Who is 'in power' in this case?

Antony's charge is that Langton conflates power with authority. Antony first points out that there simply do not seem to be the kinds of conventions that would need to be in place for pornography to be performative. But, even if there are, the question arises, yet again, how pornographers have the authority to issue their pronouncements on the status of women.

In some places, Langton claims that pornography shapes men's beliefs about women. (The evidence for this, as concerns acceptance of rape myths, is at best equivocal, but Antony sets that aside.) But that suggests that such men regard "pornographers as epistemic authorities[,] ...as a reliable source of information about women, about their characteristics, and about their value" (p. 82). But that is an entirely different notion of authority, as Antony again explains through example.

How is epistemic authority different from the kind of authority relevant to performative speech acts? What is it to have epistemic authority, and how does someone come to have it? Is it plausible that pornography has epistemic authority in this sense?

The danger, Antony says, is when epistemic authority meets power. Men have power, so what they believe about women matters. But then "the problem lies in...men's believing what pornography is saying..." (p. 83), i.e., their accepting as true the descriptive content of pornography. There is no need to suppose that pornography performs a verdictive speech act.

Antony concludes, in section 4.4, by sketching a model of how pornography might shape social facts. Antony here returns to an example she had mentioned earlier: the norm that women's bodies should be 'smooth and hairless'. It is worth thinking through this example. How would things have to be if this norm were promulgated through verdictive speech acts? Who might have the appropriate authority (in the relevant sense)? How would it be established? By contrast, what does a 'looping' account of the prevalence of this norm look like?

To be sure, it is not unreasonable to think that media have an important role to play in shaping such norms as the one just mentioned. How might that work in this case?

Antony's suggestion is that pornography might work in a similar way. One way to develop that point, it seems to me, would be to consider a less dramatic case than the ones Antony mentions: It is sometimes claimed that pornography has extended the ideal (for women) of the smooth, hairless body to more private body parts. What would an illocutionary account of that effect be like? What would a 'looping' account of it be like?

Langton, you will recall, argues that pornography silences women by making it impossible (in certain circumstances) for their refusals to be heard as such, and that this silencing is a grave harm, since it leads to rape (typically, date rape). This claim has an empirical presupposition: that some significant proportion of rapes really are due to women's refusals not being recognized as such. This is known in the empirical literature as the "Miscommunication Hypothesis" or the "Miscommunication Theory", and Langton needs it to be true. If it is false, then she is trying to explain a phenomenon that does not actually occur.

Some early studies, such as the one by Muehlenhard and Hollabaugh (in the related readings), seemed to support the Miscommunication Hypothesis. But Muehlenhard herself changed her mind (see the paper by her and Rodgers). Much work since has cast doubt upon the Miscommunication Hypothesis, and all the papers we are reading for this session do so. So far as I'm aware, there has been little new work that supports the Miscommunication Hypothesis, and our authors plead for it to be put to rest, since its continued prevalence does very real harm. What harm is the subject of the paper by O'Byrne, Rapley, and Hansen.

What harm do our authors suggest is done by the cultural prevalence of the Miscommunication Hypothesis? Can you think of other such harms?

In what follows I'll mostly just point out important aspects of the studies and ask some questions.

For lots of background on the emergence of the Miscommunication Hypothesis and the studies that (seemed to) support it, see the related paper by Frith and Kitzinger.

Kitzinger and Frith

K&F note that both their own research and that of others suggests that women find it difficult to decline sexual invitations, especially by saying an outright "No". The question is what explains this fact. K&F offer a novel explanation: "...[Y]oung women find it difficult to say 'no' to sex at least partly because saying immediate clear and direct 'no's (to anything) is not a normal conversational activity" (p. 310).

If not, then, of course, there must be other 'normal' ways of saying "No", and K&F next discuss the subtle and complex ways in which we all do so. They note four specific aspects: delays, prefaces, palliatives, and accounts (p. 301). They then argue that the way women talk about refusals supports the results from conversation analysis. More importantly, their point is that women's felt need to explain why they might not want to have sex is due, in part, to the fact that this is a normal part of refusing any kind of invitation, for everyone.

Are sexual invitations so different from ordinary invitations that it's a mistake even to compare them?

K&F's next point is subtle. Ostensibly, it is that women should not need to say "No", since other ways of refusing sex are readily available. But the deeper point is that everyone understands how refusals are usually done, so there is no reason (yet, at least) to suspect that men are unable to recognize women's indirect refusals as such. Their oft-quoted conclusion is:

If there is an organized and normative way of doing indirect refusal, which provides for culturally understood ways in which (for example) 'maybe later' means 'no', then men who claim not to have understood an indirect refusal (as in, 'she didn't actually say no') are claiming to be cultural dopes, and playing rather disingenuously on how refusals are usually done and understood to be done. .. For men to claim that they do not 'understand' such refusals to be refusals...is to lay claim to an astounding and implausible ignorance of normative conversational patterns. ...[T]he root of the problem is not that men do not understand sexual refusals, but that they do not like them. (p. 310)

Now, to be sure, it's at least possible that in sexual contexts, in particular, men's ordinary ability to recognize refusals fails—which is more or less what Langton suggests. The study by O'Byrne, Rapley, and Hansen listed as an optional reading addresses this question; the results of that study are discussed, briefly, in the paper by O'Byrne, Hansen, and Rapley that is required reading.

Throughout the paper, K&F criticize rape prevention programs that counsel women to say "No!" clearly and directly. What exactly is their objection? What's the alternative?

Beres, Senn, and McCaw

The most important aspect of this paper, for our purposes, is how it deploys the distinction between consenting to sex and wanting sex. BS&M suggest that what might look like 'token resistance' is often in fact an expression of ambivalence and is understood as such (a point first made by Muehlenhard and Rodgers, in one of the related readings). The initial refusal is not 'token resistance' but is meant. It's just that sometimes women change their minds.

It's important to recognize that the women in the stories are ambivalent about wanting sex; it is not unclear to anyone in these stories whether the woman has consented. More importantly still, the male characters in the 'ambivalence' stories understand that their partners have not (yet) consented to sex and also that they might be ambivalent about wanting it. There is no miscommunication here.

In many of these stories, the male characters responded by, e.g., trying to address the female character's reasons for concern (not by dropping the subject). Is that acceptable? Always? Sometimes? How can you tell? And where is the limit? (See p. 772 for some discussion of 'male persistence'.)

Having read this paper, you would now be a poor subject for the study. But it's a useful exercise to imagine what story you would have written, had you been a subject. In which of the categories that BS&M distinguish on pp. 770ff would your story have fallen? (It could be more than one.) Do some of these seem more plausible to you than others?

There were some stories in which coercion was involved. But these do not involve miscommunication, either: The refusal is recognized as such but ignored. Even when the woman did want to have sex when she initially said "No", in most cases "...the refusal is directed toward the specific timing of the behavior refused... and reflects that the woman is changing things to fit her idea of how she would like the evening and the sex to progress" (p. 772). Only a very small number of cases involved a 'token' "No" and so any kind of miscommunication. BS&M "conclude that it is long past time to declare that the miscommunication hypothesis has failed to be proven, despite a plethora of attempts..." (p. 774).

O'Byrne, Hansen, and Rapley

Even if the Miscommunication Hypothesis is false, it nonetheless is widely believed. In this paepr, OH&R describe one effect of that fact: Some men use the possibility of miscommunication as an excuse for sexually assaulting women: "...[T]hrough the predominant employment of the miscommunication model, young men work to attribute responsibility for rape to women, while simultaneously reducing the accountability attributable to men" (p. 174).

OH&R suggest that the Miscommunication Hypothesis is "one of the very rape myths that may serve, in practice, to promote, condone and exculpate coercive sexual behaviour" (p. 189). True or false? Or do we need to know more before we can say? (And what more would we need to know?)

As we have seen, many authors have tended to make unsupported assumptions about how consent is communicated. The readings for this session are of two types: A general overview of scholarly work on consent and examinations of how consent is, in practice, communicated.

Beres

Beres's paper is a helpful overview of some of the literature on consent. What is consent exactly? Why should it be thought of any legal or moral significance whether someone has 'consented' to sex? Our main goal with it will be to understand some of the basic distinctions that get drawn in this area.

Sometimes, it seems as if the term "consent" is used in a 'programmatic' way, as meaning: whatever there needs to be for sexual relations to be morally permissible. That usage is a testament to the ubiquity of 'consent-talk', but it has the potential to be extremely misleading. The word "consent" means something already, and to repurpose it in that way is just asking for confusion. The related papers by West and Wertheimer discuss what 'consent' means legally.

Beres notes first that the notion of consent is rarely defined; rather, it is just assumed that everyone understands it. In fact, however, different authors seem to have quite different notions in mind. For example, some authors use a broadly behavioral definition (X acted as if they wanted to have sex), whereas for others consent involves verbal agreement. Sometimes, authors speak of someone as 'consenting' even when they were coerced, whereas others regard someone as consenting only if they do so freely. And in some cases, the term 'consent' is used in different senses within a single paper. So there is a good deal of confusion to be sorted out here.

Beres also notes that many authors regard consent as, in heterosexual contexts, significantly gendered (in practice): It is women who 'consent' or not to men's sexual requests. Beres suggests that this asymmetry does need to be incorporated into any adequate account of consent, since gendered power asymmetries can't but affect consent. But focusing only on women's consent "assumes that men's consent is never contested and ever-present" (p. 97). Moreover, many authors fail even to consider consent in non-heterosexual contexts and seem to assume that consent is always asymmetrical: one person asks and another consents, or doesn't.

In what ways might the invisibility of men's consent distort our understanding of men's sexuality? Beres mentions one: that it implicitly assume a "'male sexual drive' discourse in which men are viewed as always desiring sex, and always in pursuit of sex" (p. 97). Are there others?

Beres then turns to one common thread in discussions of consent: that it "represents some form of agreement to engage in sexual activity" (p. 97). But there are different ways of understanding what such "agreement" involves. Does saying "yes" always amount to consenting? Or is there no consent at all if the "yes" is coerced? Beres suggests that definitions of consent that require it to be 'freely given' are more helpful, since they highlight the distinction that really needs making here: A coereced "yes" does not have the same moral or legal significance as an uncoerced "yes". Understanding consent as necessarily 'free' is also less likely to be confusing, since "consent to unwanted sex" can mean very different things if consent can be coerced.

To some extent, it is of course a verbal question whether we say that someone has 'consented' when they have been coerced. Is it merely a verbal question, though? Or is there something significant at issue?

Beres notes that some authors, such as MacKinnon and Gavey, speak of forms of 'coercion' that are not interpersonal but socio-political. This problematizes the notion of consent, even if we do decide to say that social coercion does not invalidate consent in the same way that interpersonal coercion does.

Beres then turns to questions about the 'nature' of consent: Is consent something mental or is it an outward act? Many authors consider consent to be a kind of behavior: some form of verbal or non-verbal communcation; roughly, a speech act (though words may not be involved). If so, then what a proper account of consent requires is a way of distinguishing the behaviors that count as 'consenting' from the ones that do not. Beres raises two difficulties for this approach. The first is that there do not seem to be any behaviors that always signal consent. Rather, whether a given behavior signals consent will depend upon the situation in which that behavior occurs. Moreover, consent can sometimes be signaled in very unconventional ways, such as in BDSM.

Such problems lead other authors to think of consent as a kind of mental state or act: a willingness or intention to engage in sexual activity. One problem with such accounts is that it seems to make consent difficult to determine. Indeed, someone might act as if they are consenting but not actually consent: What should we say about the legal and moral status of sex in such a case? Some authors therefore think of consent as a kind of hybrid: an act that communicates or indicates willingness.

Beres cites Larry Alexander, the author of one of the related papers, as defending a view of the latter sort. On his account, certain behaviors can indicate consent but do not constitute consent. Can you explain this distinction in your own words? How does it help to solve the problems just mentioned?

Beres then turns to a very important aspect of consent: that it is supposed to be 'morally transformative'; whether a particular behavior is morally acceptable is often thought to depend upon consent. If so, then the crucial question may be not "What is consent?" but rather: What kinds of things have this transformative moral power? Beres, however, suggests that thinking of consent this way is 'pessimistic': The default is that sex is bad or impermissible, and it takes something special to make it good or permissible. Beres also notes that, according to many people, consent by itself does not make sex acceptable: Perhaps marriage or love is required as well.

What should we make of these worries? Does thinking that consent is 'morally transformative' require thinking that sexual relations are, by default, wrong? Or is there some other way of thinking about what 'morally transformative' means?

In the section titled "Communicative Sexuality", Beres discusses what is nowadays known as affirmative consent, regarded either as a legal standard or an institutional one (e.g., as a university policy). The Antioch College version of this policy required consent to be obtained for each 'stage' of sexual activity. This policy was widely regarded as unrealistic. (It was also unclear what makes for a different 'stage' of sexual activity.) Beres suggests, however, that the important aspect of this approach is that it shifts the burden of proof: Women no longer have to show their non-consent; rather, men have to make sure they have consent.

Theoretically, Beres suggests that what would be most helpful is for researchers to study the ways in which people already communicate consent. She notes that some such work had already been done (when she was writing, in 2007).

Jozkowski and Peterson

J&P discuss what sorts of behaviors heterosexual college students use to communicate consent.

The data J&P used simply did not include enough students who identified as homosexual. But the related paper by Beres, Harold, and Maitland does discuss consent in same-sex relationships.

J&P draw four main conclusions:

1. Many college students "endorse the traditional sexual script" which has men attempting to initiate sex and women consenting to it (or not). That is, both men and women described their own consent behavior in ways that conform to that script.
2. Oral sex is asymmetrical: When asked questions about consent to oral sex, people tended to assume the question concerned fellatio, not cunnilingus.
3. A significant percentage of men indicated that they are aggressive in their attempts to secure consent (or, at least, to initiate sex).
4. A small but significant percentage of men indicated that they use deception to obtain consent or that they purposely initiate sex without obtaining consent.

J&P suggest that the 'traditional heterosexual script', which positions men as initiators and women as gatekeepers, has dangerous social effects. What are these? How serious are these problems?

To what extent do these conclusions seem supported by your own experience and that of your friends? (The subjects for this study came from Indiana University in 2010, so things may have changed in the interim—indeed, hopefully, some things have changed, especially around (4)—and Brown students might be different from Indiana students.)

Gavey is interested in the ways in which consensual sex can nonetheless be harmful. She is particularly interested here in the reasons for which women consent to sex that they do not actually want to have within heterosexual relationships. Gavey's discussion is emprically based: Her data comes from interviews with six women. (This is a small group and so the experience of these women might not be representative. But anecdotal evidence, as in some of the blog posts listed as related readings, suggests that it is at least somewhat widespread.) Gavey's larger goal, though, is to begin to interrogate how 'dominant discourses on sexuality' prescribe relatively passive positions for heterosexual women and encourage compliance with their partners' sexual requests. (See the related paper by Impett and Peplau for more on this issue.)

Although Gavey's focus here is on heterosex, at least some of the dynamics she discusses can and will appear in other contexts. As the related paper by Struckman-Johnson, et al., demonstrates, heterosexual women do also coerce their male partners into sex sometimes. Gender norms figure in such coercion (see below), but gender inequality might affect one of these more than the other. How so? Moreover, some of the phenomena Gavey discusses seem almost inherent in long-term relationships and so will probably appear in homosexual contexts, as well. Are these more or less worrying if they are almost inevitable? How, again, do broader social inequalities affect one's answer?

Gavey begins by outlining some of the background against which she operates. One key term to understand here is "discourse". In this sense, 'discourse' is something like a set of public, and broadly shared, assumptions, norms, and stereotypes about some topic that serve to structure our thinking about it. Discourse is said to define possible 'subject positions', which I take to mean: It identifies different categories of people (man and woman, for example) and their proper relations to each other, and it articulates expectations, rights, responsibilities, etc, that people in those categories have. The crucial observation is that we think of ourselves in these same terms and that we understand ourselves and our own actions in terms of the conceptual resources that the 'discourse' makes available: That is the sense in which the discourse 'constitutes us as subjects'. (I take talk of 'language' here really to be talk about the concepts we use to understand and explain the actions and events that occur in the topic area.)

Another important idea, which Gavey borrows from Michel Foucault, is that of 'discplinary power'. The basic idea here is that, because we understand ourselves in the terms the 'discourse' makes available, we regulate our own behavior so that, by and large, it conforms to the norms the discourse prescribes. (Even when we challenge those norms, we feel their influence.) This leads to a diagnosis of women's "complicity...in [their] own subjugation" (p. 327), which in earlier work had been described in terms of 'false consciousness' (a concept that originates with Marx).

It's important to recognize that Gavey does not use the term "complicity" with any moral connotation. In fact, she remarks on p. 330 that "To forget th[e] material condition of women’s lives is, perhaps, to move onto the slippery slope of victim-blaming". What does she mean by that?

As Gavey notes, Sandra Lee Bartky had already (in one of the related papers) given an account of how women are thus led to feel a pressure from within to conform to the norms of femininity.

Gavey quotes Bartky as having said that "a panoptical male connoisseur resides within the consciousness of most women". She puts this herself as: "...[W]hile women may not engage in conscious and deliberate submission, disciplinary power nevertheless produces what can be seen as a form of obedience" (pp. 328-9). Can you explain in your own words (and without any jargon) what Bartky and Gavey mean? (It's enough to study the rest of p. 328, including the long quotation.)

Recent work on masculinity suggests that something similar might be true for men. (See e.g. this article and the recommended TED talk.) How so? What might men's 'self-surveillance' involve?

Gavey's goal is to extend Bartky's analysis to the norms of heterosexuality: "Women involved in heterosexual encounters are...engaged in self-surveilance, and are encouraged to become self-policing subjects who comply with normative heterosexual narrative scripts which demand our consent and participation irrespective of our sexual desire" (p. 328). This includes both the decision whether to have sex on some given occasion and what kind of sex one has. As Gavey notes, the sources of such norms are various and sometimes conflicting, but also pervasive.

Explain, without jargon, what the sentence just quoted from Gavey means. How does this idea help to explain both how socio-sexual norms operate and how they are perpetuated?

Gavey thus wants to understand how ordinary women understand their own experiences of heterosexual coercion and how the terms in which they do so affect their ability to see it for what it is. (So Gavey is interested in what Miranda Fricker calls "hermeneutical injustice": not even having the conceptual tools to talk about and understand one's oppression.) She characterizes a number of themes that emerged from her interviews:

What is 'normal'

There are strong expectations about what 'normal' heterosex will look like, and the pressure to be or appear 'normal' acts to channel women's sexual behavior into those forms. In many cases, this simply involves expectations that there will be sex in certain cases, and the expectation that sex means intercourse.

A felt inability to say 'no'

This discussion involves a number of subtle fears about the consequences of saying "no" to sex. The most striking is that some women sometimes feel as if, if they say "No", then they will be raped. So they don't say "No", and they aren't raped. But they end up having sex they do not want to be having. (Recall the piece by Reina Gattuso we read earlier in the semester; see also many of the blog posts listed as related readings.)

Problems with the notion of 'consent'

The notion of consent itself is operative only in contexts where something is being done to someone. Framing women's sexual choices in these terms thus tends to leave out the very idea of women's sexual desire. (This is the lesson of the recommended paper by Corinna. See also the related papers by Fine and by Fine and McClelland.)

The consequences of 'abnormality'

Though related to the first point, the focus here is on the penalties to be paid for not being 'normal', such as shaming. (As Struckman-Johnson et al. show in one of the related readings, shaming men is a popular strategy among women for coercing their male partners into sex. See also the TED talk by Tony Porter.) Much of this relates to women's sense that they owe sex to men, especially when in relationships with them.

A desire to 'take care' of men's sexual 'needs'

Although there can be and are cases in which people can agree to have sex as an act of generosity when they don't really want to do so, many of Gavey's subjects report also having done so out of a sense of duty, a responsiblity to care for men's sexual needs.

I'll leave it to you to comment on these different phenomena. They strike me very differently. Some of them, for example, seem more gendered than others. Some of them almost seem inherent in the structure of long-term, monogamous relationships. Note also that, in some cases (such as those of Rosemary and Lee), it seems clear that someone is to blame. But in many of these cases, there isn't anyone who is coercing the women, and yet their choices still seem constrained in the same sort of way that coercion might constrain them. What is the significance of that difference?

On p. 348, Gavey discusses ways in which the absence of women's desire from traditional discourses around sexuality problematizes consent and restricts women's sexual choices to "limit[ing] and control[ling] male sexual access". What does she have in mind here? Of what significance is it that, as she notes on pp. 348-9, her analysis does not rely upon any centralized soure of control but, rather, emphasizes ways in which women conform their own behavior to social expectations?

Lewis's paper is background for the next one we will read, by Langton and West. There are two main concepts to understand: presupposition and accommodation. We'll spend some time in class making sure we've all understood these notions and then spend the rest of the time discussing the pieces by Gattuso and Brodsky. The point of those pieces is to expand our conception of sexual harm beyond the narrow focus on sexual assault that is common in most discussions of pornography. Roughly speaking: The mere fact (assuming it is one) that pornography does not cause men to rape women or what have you does not, by itself, mean that pornography does not shape socio-sexual norms in ways that lead to very real harms.

What follows is an explanation of presupposition and accommodation.

The notion of presupposition originates in the work of Gottlob Frege, but it was really Sir Peter Strawson who first developed it (in one of the related readings). Strawson himself was interested in so-called 'definite descriptions' (expressions like 'the tallest person in the class'), but that case is extremely controversial, and there are better examples. One of the most common is a sentence like "John has stopped smoking". In order for that to be true, John has to not smoke now but also to have smoked in the (recent?) past. But the sentence does not assert that John used to smoke; rather, this is 'presupposed'. We have evidence for this in the fact that "John has not stopped smoking" also seems to 'presuppose' that John smoked in the past (and still does). If John has never smoked, then he has not stopped smoking, but he has not not stopped smoking, either. Moreover, the question "Has John stopped smoking?" seems to make the same presupposition.

Many verbs exhibit this kind of behavior. Thus, "Does Jean regret voting for Smith?" presupposes that Jean voted for Smith; "Does Sadio remember going to the party?" pressupposes that Sadio went to the party; etc. Can you think of other examples? (Remember: Thinking up your own examples is an excellent way to check your comprehension.)

There are complications here. If Maria says, "John has stopped smoking", then Tien might say, "John has not stopped smoking. He never smoked." The usual claim is that this is 'meta-linguistic negation' and means something like: You shouldn't say "John has stopped smoking". Good examples of that phenomenon are things like: "Naomi isn't knocked up; she's pregnant". The first clause can't just mean "Naomi isn't pregnant". There are typical stress patterns that usually accompany meta-linguistic negation and other linguistic diagnostics. (Much of the most important work on this issue was done by Laurence Horn.)

Strawson thinks of presupposition as a 'logical' relation between a sentence and some 'proposition' that it presupposes. For example, the sentence "John has stopped smoking" is supposed to presuppose the proposition that John has smoked in the past. Nowadays, though, the dominant conception of presupposition is 'pragmatic'. On this account, which is largely due to Robert Stalnaker, it is people who make presuppositions in the course of saying things. Thus, Stalnaker would have us say that Maria presupposes that John has smoked in the past when she asks "Has John stopped smoking?"

There are a couple points about 'pragmatic presupposition' that are very important. First, in the most common case, presuppositions are things we believe. But they need not be. Things that are explicitly supposed are also presupposed. For example, I might say, "Suppose that John is at home". Then you could say, "Then Mary must be at home, too". The word "too" is a so-called presupposition trigger: It's (proper) use requires that some other contextually relevant person is at home. (Imagine you ask me, "Where is John?" and I say "John is home, too".) That you can now use "too" in this way shows that it really is now presupposed that John is at home. Presuppositions are thus said to be 'accepted' (or not), where acceptance here is a technical notion that can include beliefs but can also include other things, like suppositions.

Second, presuppositions normally are, and need to be, shared among the participants in a given conversation. If one person is presupposing that John is at home, but another person is not, then one of them will regard "Mary is at home, too" as 'felicitous' (though perhaps false) whereas the other person will not. In other cases (which I won't try to describe), it will be hard even to make sense of what someone says if you do not share their presuppositions. These shared presuppositions are what people now call the 'common ground' of the conversation. (See the related paper by Stalnaker for some detail on this notion.) Note again that these shared presuppositions need not be believed.

The requirement that presuppositions be shared is something of an idealization. In practice, each party to a conversation will have their own expectations about what the 'common ground' is, and they will normally expect others to have the same expectations. But divergences will not always matter (maybe whether John is home just isn't relevant).

Now, in most cases, saying something that has a presupposition will be 'infelicitous' if one's audience is not already making that presupposition: Again, "Mary is home, too" is just 'off' unless it's already being presupposed that some other person is home. But not all cases are like that. If Jinho asks, "Does Jean regret voting for Smith?" then it will be clear enough what he is presupposing: that Jean voted for Smith. And we are perfectly capable of adding this presupposition 'on the fly', as it were, so that the remark is now felicitous. As Lewis puts it: "Say something that requires a missing presupposition, and straightway that presupposition springs into existence, making what you said acceptable after all" (p. 339).

This process is what Lewis is concerned to describe in "Scorekeeping"; it is what he dubs "accommodation". So, in this case, we would say that the presupposition that Jean voted for Smith has been 'accommodated'. (Note, yet again, that one need not believe that Jean voted for Smith. It's possible just to 'play along'.) One does not have to accommodate: One can instead 'challenge' the presupposition, for example, by saying, "Are you sure Jean voted for Smith?" or "I'm pretty sure Jean voted for Martinez". In doing so, one is suggesting (to borrow language from Strawson) that the question whether Jean regrets voting for Smith 'just doesn't arise': Neither 'yes' nor 'no' would be an appropriate answer. But if you don't challenge, then the presupposition gets accommodated by default.

Lewis uses an analogy with baseball to explain this idea: As in baseball there is always a 'score' (involving not just runs scored but what inning it is and what the 'count' is), so in a conversation there is a 'score' involving, among other things, what is being presupposed. The details of Lewis's account will not be particularly important to us.

The central aim of this paper is to explain and defend an answer to the question: "How does pornography change people who watch it?"

1. Liberals: Pornography (more or less rationally) persuades its consumers to accept the truth of the view that women are inferior by expressing that view. (Protected speech)
2. MacKinnon: Pornography causes its consumers to have "misogynistic beliefs and violent desires" via non-rational stimulus-response conditioning. (Not protected speech?)
3. MacKinnon, Langton and West: Pornography subordinates women and legitimizes sexual violence in virtue of its illocutionary force. (Answers the free speech argument, at least in part)

L&W position their illocutionary view (answer 3) as a moderate middle ground between answers 1 and 2. The liberal view (answer 1) they dismiss as implausible, since "pornography is designed to generate, not conclusions, but orgasms" (p. 305). They also find the reductive view (answer 2) unappealing because it doesn't appeal to any features of pornography that are distinctive of speech. This doesn't strike me as very strong reason for setting the view aside, but we'll consider a view of this kind later.

Is the reason L&W give to reject Dworkin's view a good one? Might L&W's work in this paper actually help us to understand how Dworkin's view might be true? Most of what L&W have to say in this paper, after all, concerns the locutionary content of pornography (e.g., 'women are inferior') rather than whatever illocutionary force it might have. What more does Dworkin need?

In order for pornography to have the illocutionary force that their view ascribes to it, L&W claim, it must (a) have a certain sort of locutionary content and (b) have a certain kind of authority, in order to perform the illocutionary acts Langton thinks it performs. In particular, they suggest that pornography must have as its locutionary content propositions like 'Women are inferior' or 'Sexual violence is legitimate'. They set aside the task of defending (b) for another day (and we have already spent plenty of time on that issue). Here, they take up the task of defending (a) in the face of two kinds of doubts.

The first ground for doubting that pornography could have the kind of content L&W think it does is that no such content is typically explicit in pornography. L&W's answer is that pornography implicitly expresses the relevant content via presupposition. They explicate the notion of presupposition in terms of Lewis's account of conversation as a rule-bound game.

How is the application of Lewis's account to pornography supposed to work? L&W suggest that pornography may be understood as a kind of one-sided conversation, complete with a conversational score and certain rules of accommodation. In particular, there is a rule of accommodation according to which, if some of pornography's explicit content does not make sense absent certain background assumptions, then the presuppositions required for the most "natural or obvious" interpretation of that explicit content are added to the 'common ground'.

The notion that pornography, or any kind of media, can express things without explicitly depicting them is pretty intuitive. This raises the question whether there might be some other way that L&W could have supported this idea, one that wouldn't require bringing in all of Lewis's theoretical machinery. Explaining the messages implicit in pornography in terms of Lewis's account raises questions in ways that other accounts might not. For example, does it really make sense to think of media like porn as a kind of conversation? Does it make sense to think of such media as part of some rule-bound game?

Does L&W's account of the 'footwear' experiment (on pp. 310-1) seem plausible? Are there other ways of interpreting that experiment that are better?

The other example L&W discuss, a pictorial titled "Dirty Pool", is the one that matters more to them. The pictorial itself is available on Canvas. Are the claim that L&W make about "Dirty Pool" correct? Does it presuppose "that the female waitress says 'no' when she really means 'yes'; that, despite her protestations to the contrary, she wanted to be raped and dominated all along; that she was there as an object for the men's sexual gratification; that raping a woman is sexy and erotic for man and woman alike" (p. 311)? Or is there some other way of reading the pictorial?

Although L&W say that they are only trying to explain how pornography has the content it does, rather than how it has the authority it does, they also suggest that their account might help us understand how pornography can "say and do" the things it says and does. In particular, they seem to suggest that the way in which accommodation works helps us to understand the 'doing'. See pp. 309-10, the top of p. 311, and the middle of p. 313. What exactly are L&W suggesting here?

Does the appeal to Lewis add anything to the account of silencing Langton already gave in "Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts"? (See pp. 313-4.) Is the inability to 'alter the score of the language game' a matter of illocutionary disablement or of perlocutionary frustration? Or does it depend upon the specific case?

The second ground for doubt concerns not whether pornography could in some sense express the relevant locutionary content, but whether that content could be something that pornography really means. This doubt arises from the fact that "[p]ornography usually purports to be fantasy, or fiction" (p. 314).

L&W seem here to be suggesting that there is no relevant difference between fantasy and fiction. Is there one?

L&W respond by pointing out that, in general, fictional narrative expresses a good deal of ostensibly factual content along with its ostensibly fictional content. (See §2 of the SEP article listed as an optional reading, and the paper by Lewis listed as a related reading, for more on this.) In particular, they note that fiction typically operates against a class of (purportedly) factual "background propositions". If one regards some background presupposition with which one was not previously familiar as factual, then one can 'learn facts from fiction'. (A common example is that one can learn something about the geography of London from the Sherlock Holmes stories.) Exactly how this happens is controversial, of course, but, however it happens, there can be no doubt that it does happen.

Can you think of examples, from your own reading, in which facts are conveyed by fiction? Are there such examples that might be usefully compared to the way L&W think pornography works?

In the case of pornography, L&W's idea is that when pornography expresses propositions like 'women are inferior' and 'sexual violence is legitimate' via presupposition, it fails to employ the "authorial moves" necessary to mark them as part of the fictional content. These propositions may be actively presented as part of the factual background, in which case pornographers would be what L&W call "background liars". Alternatively, however, the boundary between pornography's fictional content and factual background may simply be inadequately flagged, in which case the authors will be "background blurrers".

It's often remarked that many people look to pornography to learn about sex. How is that possible if pornography is fictional? Or is it only non-fictional pornography from which one can learn about sex?

If the problem really is that what's fictional (or fantastical) has just been inadequately flagged, then it's somewhat unclear whether pornography itself really does 'mean', e.g., that women are inferior. Granted, as a result of such unclarity, a relevantly ignorant pornography consumer may mistake implicit content like 'women are inferior' and 'sexual violence is legitimate' as factual and thereby come to believe such things. But who, then, would be to blame in that case? The question matters, if for no other reason, because it bears upon what we ought to do if pornography does indeed spread misinformation in the way that L&W are suggesting that it does.

A more serious issue is that it's not clear that the effect on the consumer's beliefs is what L&W ought to be emphasizing here. The "change" that L&W's view was meant to explain was not a matter of individual's beliefs, as Dworkin's view proposed, but rather concerned the legitimacy of sexual violence and the subordinate status of women. Perhaps the idea here is that changes in individuals' beliefs in some sense explain changes in the legitimacy of sexual violence and the status of women. But that does not look like an illocutionary effect but a perlocutionary one, unless there is some other story to be told. What should L&W say about this?

The essay by Royalle gives some background about her history, how she started making 'feminist' pornography, and what she is trying to accomplish with her films, some of which we'll watch for this session. What follow are some remarks about Williams.

Chapter 7 is about BDSM pornography and proceeds, in large part, through a comparison with horror films. Generally speaking, Williams's goal is to complicate how such pornography (and horror) is 'read'. But it's a shortcoming of the chapter that Williams does not seem to have a sophisticated understanding of the practice of BDSM itself and takes more seriously than most now would psychoanalytic accounts of its significance. It's something of a challenge, then, to read through and past those parts of the discussion to the important points Williams does make.

Note that, when Williams speaks here of 'bisexuality', she usually does not mean that term in the sense of sexual orientation. She means it in a broadly psychoanalytic sense, as referring to something more like a fusion or overlap of masculine and feminine gender roles.

One important idea here is that viewers' identifications with characters in pornography might not be fixed by gender, as anti-pornography feminists often assume: Women do not have to identify with the women in the film but can also identify with the man; and similarly for male viewers. There is, in fact, no reason for such a restriction. It's well known, for example, that many lesbians enjoy gay male pornography and projectively 'identify' with one or another of the positions within it. Along these same lines, Williams argues that 'masochism' is not as 'purely passive' as is usually assumed. Rather, consensual masochism (submission) is itself an active choice, a route to pleasure rather than a denial of it.

Chapter 8 is about the then-new phenomenon of pornography created by women and also for women. Note that 'porn for women' can mean quite a few different things. Most weakly, it can mean pornography that is at least aware of women as among its audience. More strongly, it can mean pornography that aims to address women specifically, by including sexual acts, fantasies, and so forth that are expected, at least, to appeal to women.

The former, which is the 'less revolutionary' of the changes that Williams discusses, is characteristic of so-called 'couples porn', which very often is just mainstream porn stripped of the elements most likely to turn the average woman off (e.g., facials, anal sex). Williams argues that, for that reason, such films still retain the facile assumption that 'better sex' is something within the reach of the individual, something that does not require social change; the social circumstances that structure heterosex are beyond the reach of such films.

Genuine 'feminist' pornography, by contrast, "attempt[s] to visualize women's desire in a genre that has consistently continued to see sex...from the viewpoint of the phallus" (p. 247). That is, such pornography attempts to re-think women's desire in its own terms. Importantly, Royalle was, from the beginning, aware that there is no single thing that is 'women's sexuality' but a variety of viewpoints and experiences, which she attempts to capture in her Star Directors Series.

Williams is especially interested the "cultivation and exploration of specifically female [heterosexual] desire" in Royalle's films, particularly Christine's Secret and Three Daughters, both of which will be made available for optional viewing. But the films that are required for this week all attempt to "develop the one thing that cinematic hard core [has] had great difficulty representing with any conviction: woman's desire" (p. 257).

Williams's discussion, with reference to the work of the feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, of the 'intersubjective' nature of women's desire—and, I think, ideally, of everyone's—would really be the topic of a different course. But it is bound up with our topic, since Williams is arguing, in effect, that women's desire is essentially relational (and, again, men's ought also to be). I'll leave it to you to think about how that is represented in some of the films we'll be discussing.

McGowan here develops a view that, like Langton and West's account, draws upon Lewis's ideas about accommodation.

McGowan reports MacKinnon as arguing that pornography might violate women's right to equality under the Fourteenth Amendment. Now, I'm not a lawyer, but even I know that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equality before the law. It does not guarantee equality in any broader sense. If it did, we would not need Title IX and the rest of the Civil Rights Act.

There is also a bad mistake in McGowan's exposition of Austin. There is no such thing as "locutionary force". But this does not seem to matter for what follows.

In §IV, McGowan distinguishes five 'challenges' for Langton's criticism of pornography.

Locutionary Content

Although Langton (and West) have given a reasonable account of how pornography might express such facts as that women enjoy being assaulted, Austinian exercitives express the very rule they thereby enact. It's far from obvious, however, that pornography expresses such claims as that 'women are inferior to men'.

Speaker Intention

Normally, one can perform an exercitive speech act only if one intends to do so. But it is far from obvious that pornographers intend to subordinate women.

Hearer Recognition

Although McGowan does not put it this way, the thought here is that uptake is a necessary condition for the 'fully successful' performance of a speech act. If so, then pornographer's attempt to perform an illocutionary act of subordination could be 'fully successful' only if their audience recognized them as performing that very act. (Note that this is a very different form of the uptake worry.) But it is far from clear that viewers of pornography do recognize the performance of such an act.

Authority

This is of course the authority problem. McGowan stresses that, not only is it unclear that pornographers have any special authority over socio-sexual norms, but that it is not even clear what it would be for them to have such authority. As we shall see, avoiding this problem is probably the main benefit she thinks her analysis has.

Pornography as Unconscious Conditioning

Exercitive speech acts work at the conscious level, whereas MacKinnon's idea is that pornography works below the conscious level, and that that is part of why it is so effective.

Note that McGowan does think that these objections pose serious problems for Langton's analysis and that, collectively, they undermine her case. McGowan's claim is going to be that these problems arise because Langton regards pornography as performing "Austinian" exercitives. So she proposes instead to base the analysis on a different kind of speech act: what she calls a 'conversational' exercitive.

McGowan's presentation offers us an opportunity to review these objections. Which is the most serious? Are there important objections she does not include in her list? If so, does her account help answer those objections? Or do they remain problems for her?

In §V.2, McGowan introduces her notion of a 'conversational exercitive'. Her claim will be that "any conversational contribution invoking a rule of accommodation changes the bounds of conversational permissibility and is therefore an exercitive speech act" (p. 169). The basic idea is that, since what conversational moves are permissible depends upon what is presupposed, then, if what is presupposed changes, what is permissible also changes. So any conversational move that changes what is presupposed changes what is permissible and so acts like an exercitive: It makes it possible to perform certain speech acts and impossible to perform others.

McGowan gives an example to illustrate this last point at the top of p. 174. What speech act is it that is 'unspeakable'? In what sense is that so? Does it help Langton if some speech acts are 'unspeakable' in that sense? (Hint: Ironically, Maitra and McGowan make a point in this vicinity.)

Here's a simple example to illustrate what McGowan has in mind. The word "too" is a presupposition trigger: You can only say "too" when there's some other similar fact already being presupposed. So it's 'off' (or, as it's said, 'infelicitous') to ask "Did John vote for Smith too?" just 'out of the blue', when it's not being presupposed that some other person voted for Smith. But if I say, "I wonder if Jean regrets voting for Smith", you can now say, "I don't know. But that makes me wonder whether John voted for Smith, too." So my utterance, by entering the presupposition that Jean voted for Smith into the 'common ground', licenses your utterance; that's the sense in which it 'changes permissibility facts', i.e., changes what's conversationally permissible and what's not.

In §V.3, McGowan considers a number of objections and offers some clarification.

One important objection is that it may well be that all speech is exercitive in the way she describes. Why would that be a problem? Her response is that "we can be discriminating about exercitives by being discriminating about the permissibility facts enacted" (p. 176). What does she mean by that?

The last objection McGowan considers is directed at her claim that, in making an utterance that introduces a new presupposition, we perform an exercitive speech act (as well as, say, an assertive one). Certainly, one's utterance has the effect that certain permissibility facts have changed, but is it right to say that one has acted so as to change those facts? What is McGowan's response to this objection? How good is it? Suppose McGowan can't answer this objection. How serious a problem is that?

In §VI, McGowan discusses how her analysis meets the 'challenges' for Langton's analysis.

Locutionary Content

When one performs a conversational exercitive, one does not ordinarily express the content of the permissibility fact thereby enacted.

Speaker Intention

One need not have the intention to perform a conversational exercitive to do so. (This is what leads to the last objection McGowan considered. Can one perform an action without intending to perform that action?)

Hearer Recognition

There is no particular need for hearers consciously to recognize the fact that the bounds of conversational permissibility have changed. (Note, however, that we certainly do recognize such changes, since we adjust our speech to them. But we needn't be consciously aware of how the boundaries have shifted, or why.)

Authority

No special authority is required to change the conversational 'score' in the way we do with conversational exercitives.

Pornography as Unconscious Conditioning

Conversational exercitives do function in a way that is 'automatic'. They do not depend for their effectiveness on any kind of conscious recognition.

In §VI, McGowan suggests that "pornography functions like a conversational exercitive" (p. 181).

McGowan mentions two ways in which pornography might change permissibility facts in order to silence women. The first involves refusal; the second, rape. (There is also a third, but this seems to be a 'permissibility fact' only in a very loose sense.) What role does the notion of a conversational exercitive play in her brief account of these cases?

McGowan is no doubt correct that any conversational contribution that changes the 'common ground' also effects changes in what is permissible. What kinds of permissibility facts do conversational exercitives change? If pornography "functions like a conversational exercitive", then what kinds of permissibility facts would we expect it to change? (This question is particularly important for McGowan's answer to the authority problem.)

In §VII, McGowan considers three further objections. The most interesting of these is the last, which is that the kinds of permissibility facts typically affected by conversational exercitives are often quite easy to 'reverse' or change. (Indeed, what conversational moves are permissible is constantly changing.) McGowan offers two responses. First, some aspects of the conversational score are less easy to change than others. Second, the very fact that conversational exercitives work at a less than fully conscious level might make their effects hard to notice in the first place. How good are those responses?

Finlayson's main goal in this paper is to rehabilitate the form of the 'silencing argument' originally offered by MacKinnon.

After summarizing Langton's version of the silencing argument in Section I, Finlayson discusses the usual objections to it in Section II.

It gets old constantly to have to issue this kind of correction, but it's really quite astonishing that Finlayson seems not to think any actual evidence is needed for the claim that "much pornography propagates a 'rape myth': the idea that all women, at all times, whether they admit it or not, 'really' want sex, and that their refusals of sex are not sincere or authentic; women say 'no' but mean 'yes'" (p. 777).

The first kind of objection Finlayson discusses comes in several forms. Setting aside the more legalistic objection due to Dworkin, there are two. The first denies that women are silenced through any illocutionary act that pornography performs; rather, the silencing is a perlocutionary effect. The second is that the silencing itself is not a matter of illocutionary disablement but of perlocutionary frustration.

Most of Finlayson's discussion of these objections is bound up with questions about 'negative' vs 'positive' liberty, which she claims "proponents of the two sub-strategies...often run together" with it (p. 779). That seems somewhat odd, since none of the proponents of these objections that we have read have used that (common) terminology or, so far as I am aware, appealed to that distinction. Unfortunately, Finlayson does not give any citations for this claim, so it is impossible to know what she has in mind here. (Let that be a lesson to you.)

Nonetheless, it is worth considering the example Finlayson borrows from Caroline West (in the related paper), concerning various ways in which 'the government' might interfere with the effects of speech. Which of these examples seems most like silencing as Langton understands it? What if the government instead of 'flicking a switch', launches an information campaign to try to stop people from believing you? (What if 'you' are a Holocaust denier?) What if a private individual does so instead?

Finlayson's other complaint comes in the form of two questions: "What difference does it make whether we say that women are silenced, or are 'caused to be silent'? Does it really matter whether women are 'illocutionarily disabled' or 'perlocutionarily frustrated'?" (p. 779) What matters depends upon one's purpose. Since the topic here is objections to Langton, then, the question ought really to be: Do these things matter to Langton? Do they?

Granted, if these things matter to Langton, and if Finlayson thinks they do not matter, then that might be a reason to be skeptical of Langton's reconstruction. But I find it hard to be sure when Finlayson is speaking in defense of Langton and when she is speaking for herself.

The second sort of objection Finlayson considers is that women are not illocutionarily disabled in the way Langton claims they are. Rather, date rape is a matter of perlocutionary frustration.

Finlayson regards Langton's claim that women are silenced in this way as no more than "a model or device, employed to make a point..." (p. 780), although she concedes that Langton sometimes gives the opposite impression. Is that right? Or does Langton really mean what Jacobson, for example, thinks she is saying?

Nonetheless, Finlayson is surely right that Langton's general point does not depend upon her being right about this particular case. Her thought is that pornography helps to establish and maintain a "system of unequal power...in which women's agency and worth is denied in such a way that their protest or refusal...is effectively defused or nullified in ways that are not always easy to detect..." (pp. 781-2).

In the remarks just quoted, Finlayson suggests that women's refusals are "effectively defused or nullified". How is that different from Langton's claim that women are prevented from performing the illocutionary act of refusing sex? Does Jacobson understand the claim in a different way? Or is Finlayson misinterpreting him?

In Section III, Finlayson tries to articulate what has gone wrong in the debate over the silencing argument. Her first claim is that the question whether pornography silences women through illocution or perlocution is less important than Langton supposes.

Why is it important to Langton that pornography perform an illocutionary act of subordination?

Is it right to speak of illocutionary acts as causing illocutionary effects? Is the difference between illocutionary and perlocutionary effects just a matter of there being "fewer intervening contingencies" in the former case? When an umpire says, "Out!" what are the 'intervening contingencies' between her performing that speech act and the ball's counting as out? How would pornography need to function if it were to work like that?

The question, though, is what we should make of MacKinnon's claim that (say, the act of publishing) pornography is subordination. What is distinctive about that claim if we no longer insist upon regarding it as a claim about what illocutionary act is thereby performed? Finlayson suggests that the claim concerns "the intimacy, immediacy, and systematicity of the relationship...between pornography...and violence and discrimination against women..." (p. 784). Pornography is meant to be comparable to a "Whites Only" sign.

Langton, you may recall, mentions exactly that example. Why doesn't Langton just insist that the analogy is a good one? Why does she think any more needs to be said? Does any more need to be said? Why or why not?

Is posting a "Whites Only" sign itself an act of discrimination? What if the sign is in a civil rights museum? What do we have to assume about the sign, then, to make its posting discriminatory? Does this analogy, by itself, then, help us to understand in what sense the publication of pornography is discriminatory?

In this paper, Heck is especially focused on the role that accommodation plays in the sort of 'pragmatic' story that both L&W and McGowan want to tell. The rough idea, recall, is that pornography pressuposes certain 'facts', such as that women enjoy being assaulted, and viewers are then forced to 'accommodate' these facts if they are to make sense of the stories pornography tells. As Heck puts it: "Pornography thus expresses its misogynistic attitudes implicitly, through presupposition, and conveys them indirectly, through accommodation" (p. 831). It's this last bit on which Heck is focused in this paper.

In §3, Heck discusses a common worry about L&W's position: that accommodation happens, so to speak, instantaneously, and that once some presupposition has been accommodated, it does not need to be accommodated again. The obvious thing for L&W to say, though—and what they more or less do say—is that pornography instills misogynistic beliefs in viewers who do not already have them and reinforces (or perhaps legitimates) those same beliefs in those who already do.

But does pornography ever introduce the kinds of presuppositions L&W think it makes? If such ideas were already widespread in our culture, there would be no need. One might worry that L&W will not then be able to say that pornography makes women socio-sexually inferior: They already were, quite independently of pornography. But, Heck suggests, L&W can readily allow that other things too 'make' women socio-sexually inferior, so L&W need not think that pornography is solely responsible for women's status.

The more serious question, which Heck raises and discusses in §4, is why the presuppositions that pornography introduces into "pornographic conversations" should persist beyond those conversations. If people adopted the relevant presuppositions while viewing porn and then simply discarded them, then they would have no effect on their real-world sexual relations. And, in fact, there is nothing in the nature of presupposition that suggests that that is not how things are: As Heck notes in §4.1, presuppositions are, in general, 'local' to particular conversations; they are "are what one is prepared to take for granted for the purposes of the conversation in which one is engaged at that time" (p. 842).

The contrary impression rests, Heck suggests, on the tendency to think of presuppositions as beliefs. But, while presuppositions certainly can be beliefs, they often aren't: One can very well 'accept' a presupposition without believing it (and even while disbelieving it), and we do so all the time. So L&W need to say something about why pornography's presuppositions persist. The mere fact that those presuppositions are accommodated does not imply that they will persist nor even make it likely that they will.

Heck suggests that Green Door (on one reading) might pull us "into a world in which sexual violence is legitimate" (pp. 842-3), but that we need not carry that presupposition with us when we leave the world of the film. Can you think of other fictional texts that do something similar? One example that occurs to me is Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange.

As Heck notes in fn. 21 on p. 843, issues in this vicinity have been much discussed in aesthetics. There might be a good paper topic in this vicinity, then, too, for someone who is interested in aesthetics and who is willing to do a bit of extra reading. (Probalby two or three papers would be enough.)

In §4.2, Heck discusses McGowan's version of the 'pragmatic story'. What is Heck's best objection to McGowan? How might she reply to it?

In §4.3, Heck considers L&W's observation that it is harder to challenge presuppositions than to challenge claims that are asserted outright. The thought here is that, if it really is harder to challenge factual presuppositions, then maybe that makes it more likely that people will adopt them as beliefs. Heck argues, however, that L&W misunderstand the sense in which presuppositions are 'harder to challenge'. First, Heck claims, L&W are just mistaken that 'tacit' presuppositions are usually 'widely known', let alone that they have to be. Second, Heck argues, while it is true that presuppositions are more difficult to challenge, that is simply because doing so involves "redirecting the conversation"; that has no bearing upon whether one must accept the presuppositions in any sense other than the technical one. And even that fact is irrelevant where 'one-sided' conversations are concerned.

In §5, Heck turns to the authority question: L&W say explicitly that an assumption about authority is needed for their account to work; Heck suggests that this 'authority premise' might be what explains why viewers do not just 'accept' pornography's presuppositions but come to believe them. But, Heck argues, largely following Antony, L&W conflate legislative authority with epistemic authority. Unlike Antony, however, Heck goes on to suggest that the claim that pornography has some epistemic authority, at least for some viewers, is not implausible and might well be true, and that it might do some explanatory work.

The members of the Marylebone Cricket Club are sometimes known as the 'Lords of Cricket': This is the body that determines what the rules of cricket are (at least at the international level), so they are legislative authorities about the laws of cricket.

Heck considers a number of examples, some of them due to Langton herself, to illustrate the difference between legislative and epistemic authority. Which of these seems to make Heck's point best? Are there other examples that might be better? Is there still room for Langton to re-interpret these examples?

In §6;, Heck sketches an account of how pornography might, if viewers are inclined to trust its portrayals of what sex is 'really like', reshape socio-sexual attitudes about anal sex in ways that disadvantage women. What is this account? How plausible is it? What does Heck suggest might be done to counteract such harm?

What Hardy means by "iconoclasm" is the "current of hostility to pornography and unease with eroticism as a whole among 'rank and file' feminists and their male sympathizers" (p. 78), people who are not necessarily invested in the academic dispute over pornography. Indeed, what interests Hardy here is the appeal that anti-pornography arguments have had among (some groups of) 'ordinary' women. What is it that explains the widespread concern about pornography?

Hardy himself had previously studied, in his book The Reader, The Author, His Woman and Her Lover, how pornographic sexual representations are received and interpreted by men. His main conclusion, as he reports it here, was that "...typical mass-market pornographic texts usually present a particular, though hegemonic, type of heterosexual eroticism which is strongly predicated on the symbolic power of men over women" (p. 79). Hardy suggests that what we really have here, and what feminist 'iconoclasts' are responding to, is a "general problem of heterosexual eroticism", that is, a problematization of "the symbolic meanings by which the sexual is represented and experienced" in our culture (p. 79). To put it more simply, according to Hardy, there are really important questions to be raised how heterosexual eroticism is understood and represented culturally: questions about what is sexy, and about the proper roles of men and women in heterosexual practice.

Part of what is important in Hardy's approach, then, is just his taking seriously the question how mainstream pornography is understood and interpreted by its viewers, especially by men. Perhaps that is not as obvious as it seems. MacKinnon, for example, often seems to project her own reaction to pornography onto male viewers, assuming that if it makes her feel degraded, then it must be the degradation of women that male viewers find arousing.

First issue: How and why did the problematization of heterosexual eroticism come about? Hardy suggests that it has its roots, historically, in the presumed relationship between (i) whether one takes an "active" or "passive" role in sex itself and (ii) one's social status. (Much of this discussion, as Hardy notes, is borrowed from Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality.) It was, in particular, seen as appropriate to men to take an "active" role and for women to take a "passive" one, and correspondingly inappropriate for men to take on a 'passive' role. Men thus become the (active) subjects of the erotic, and women its (passive) objects. And all of that is symbolic of, historically founded upon, and quite generally continuous with men's power over women in non-sexual parts of life.

At the bottom of p. 80, Hardy suggests (if I'm reading him rightly) that the feminist criticism of pornography is a result of a tension between the changes in the relative social positions of men and women that were the result of second-wave feminism and a corresponding lack of such change in the sexual sphere. Can you elaborate this idea?

This dichotomy takes on a new form in the Victorian era, and especially with the work of Sigmund Freud, as heterosexual pleasure is naturalized and normalized along with "its constituent erotic dualisms" (p. 83). (We still see this today in, among many other places, evolutionary 'explanations' of men's desire for sex and women's desire for love, or of men's 'natural' promiscuity and women's 'natural' monogamy.) Thus, feminism is led to "question[] the way in which the constituent dualisms of hetero-eroticism are posited as natural" (p. 83).

The response, particularly evident in queer theory, has been to call for a wider variety of erotic expression (for example, featuring women's own erotic perspective). But Hardy thinks that this response is dangerous unless accompanied by a proper appreciation of the issues that led to the problematization of heterosexual eroticism in the first place.

One illustration of this is how psychoanalytic analyses, represented here by Lynne Segal (see the related readings), construe the "erotic meanings and pleasures concerning relations of domination and submission...as expressive of essentially psychic forces rather than social circumstances" (p. 85). Hardy wants us to allow for both of these aspects: Adult sexuality may have its origins in our earliest experience, and what we find erotic may be bound up with 'psychic forces', but our own individual sexuality is shaped also by social forces. In particular, the 'sexual scripts' that define our conception of what heterosex is typically like are not independent of the broader form that gender relations take in society.

The criticism of Segal here is a bit unfair: There is much emphasis on social forces in "Sweet Sorrows". I also think that there are more expressions of dis-satisfaction with "the available stock of erotic discourses and representations" (p. 86) in folks like Segal and Judith Butler than Hardy seems to allow. But he is nonetheless right that neither of them offers us much by way of articulate criticism of mainstream erotic media (including but not just pornography).

This leads to questions about the 'social uses' of eroticism. What most fundamentally poses the problem of heterosexual eroticism, Hardy argues, is "the principle of sexual equality" and the way it implies that intimate relationships, previously regarded as 'naturally' asymmetric, must also become a site of contention: The old assumptions about heterosexual eroticism are inconsistent with sexual equality. The problem becomes all the more pressing as intimate relationships themselves become more important to people's sense of self.

Another complicating factor is the way in which sexuality has come to be seen as a "natural" force. The most obvious instance of this might be the way in which social conservatives often appeal to the 'nature' of men and women in trying to secure certain normative claims about gender and sexuality. But Hardy suggests that it is more difficult to escape this perspective that we might like to suppose: "...[W]e define the erotic according to our lives but experience it as defining us according to our nature" (p. 88).

Can you unpack the sentence just quoted? What contrast does Hardy have in mind here?

As a result, it can be difficult to reconcile one's own erotic life with one's attitudes concerning sexual equality. And so, Hardy suggests: "Perhaps ultimately, any radical recasting of heterosexual relations and corresponding gender identities must necessarily enlist the naturalizing power of the sexual, which resides in erotic meaning as well as in the embodiedness of sexuality" (p. 89). That is to say: Hardy is in effect arguing not just that pornography (and other forms of sexual representation) might play a role in reshaping gender relations but that they must, precisely because sexuality is such a key component of gender. (In a slogan: Women won't be equal to men in the boardroom until they are equal to men in the bedroom.)

The iconoclasts' criticism of heterosexual eroticism thus founders at this point, since it has nothing with which to replace the now dominant form of heterosexual eroticism. What is required, if a new form is to be found, is to undermine the dominance of the male perspective on sexuality, to make it possible for women to "become the subjects of erotic meaning and definition as readily as men" (p. 90). This is precisely the flourishing of forms of erotic representation for which Segal, Butler, and others have called.

If Hardy is right, then the first and most fundamental task is to figure out what "sexual equality" might actually look like in the heterosexual realm. What might it look like? What might pornography that promoted such an ideal look like? Do any of the films we have watched seem to you to illustrate 'sexual equality', or at least to be on the right track?

I think that what Hardy is trying to say in the paragraph beginning "My own research" is that "the absence of a female subject within the erotic" leaves men feeling responsible for all expression of heterosexual desire, and therefore vulnerable to judgement, rejection, and ridicule in a way that women are not (or, at least, that men do not think women are). It is this sense of "isolation, frustration and anger"—of being sexually alone, so to speak, as desiring but not desired—that gives rise to the aggressive impulse that finds expression in pornography. (Interestingly enough, at the crucial point, Hardy starts to speculate about psychological rather than social forces.) I'm not sure whether that is the right interpretation of what Hardy is trying to say, but a somewhat similar idea is found in Scott MacDonald's "Confessions of a Feminist Porn Watcher", which is listed as a related reading (see esp. pp. 14-5).

Hardy speaks often of men's 'dominance' in typical heterosex. What forms does this dominance take? It seems to me that this is not as obvious as it is usually taken to be (and I am not asking because there is some answer I am secretly withholding and expecting you to find). This is often put in terms of the active-passive contrast. But women are (typically) 'active' and men are 'passive' when women are giving men blowjobs, and yet that's part of 'normative heterosex' in a way that men going down on women isn't. So it's not obvious that active-passive, in that sense, really gets at the character of the asymmetry.

I think there must be something to the idea that what one might call the "asymmetry of desire", as men experience it, plays a role here. To be sure, this asymmetry is not a natural fact (if it even is a fact) but a consequence of social forces that penalize women for expressing (let alone acting upon) sexual desire in the ways in which men are free to do. To be sure, these are social forces from which men, as a group, benefit in other ways. But Hardy's worry is that many men experience the asymmetry of desire not merely as a (possibly natural) sociological fact but as being, at least potentially, normatively loaded: as indicting them for being 'obsessed with sex' even as it leaves them responsible both for the occurrence of sex and for its course. (Men are expected to be the ones to initiate sex, with all the emotional risks that entails.) Thus, men's desire itself becomes a source of shame, quite independently of any frustration they may experience in satisfying that desire. Insofar as women are seen as the source of this judgement (Freudians might point to the mother, but we need not), that fact can be expected to reinforce the power dynamic that is at the heart of hegemonic heterosexual eroticism.

We are all familiar, I expect, with discourses that call upon men to be able to fuck for as long as it takes for women to be able to orgasm. In what ways might this expectation illustrate Hardy's point? In what ways might it disadvantage men sexually? (Of course, it also disadvantages women, since there is a corresponding expectation that women should be able to orgasm through intercourse alone, which most women cannot.)

Hardy ultimately comes around, then, to a view close to that of the anti-censorship feminists: We must begin with the eroticism we have and insist that a greater variety of voices be heard. But he ends with some cautionary notes, which I'll leave it to you to comment upon.

Maybe one of the key points here is that Hardy's approach, although it pays a good deal of attention to the social meaning of certain kinds of pornography, inverts the order of explanation that is central to anti-pornography feminism. What Hardy purports to explain, in the first instance, is why men find certain sorts of pornography appealing, which depends upon its reflecting pre-existing social arrangements. Of course, that does not preclude pornography from also reinforcing those same arrangements.

The readings for this session all discuss the importance (or otherwise) of 'authenticity' in feminist pornography. The paper by Crutcher reports the results of a study she did on what factors influence women's response to pornography, in particular. Ashley and Madison are directors and performers who discuss the place of authenticity in their own films.

Crutcher's methodology involved asking participants to watch two clips: one 'mainstream gonzo' and one from the feminist pornographer Tristan Taormino. Crutcher's interest was in what factors affected the response women, in particular, had to these clips, although the groups did include two men. What she found was that the women were particularly interested in whether the performers (especially the women) were experiencing genuine sexual pleasure.

This is bound up, of course, with the question how women's pleasure is represented in an cinematic pornography: through sound, largely, though also through facial expressions, bodily contortions, and the like. So the question of 'authenticity' becomes, to a significant extent, the question whether these elements are 'real' or 'faked', natural or performed.

Crutcher mentions two types of knowledge on which her subjects drew to make their assessments of authenticity: what kinds of physical stimulation tend to be pleasurable for women, and "the normative timeline of arousal", that is, how quickly women become aroused to different degrees. In the mainstream clip, women seemed to be aroused by activities that would not typically be experienced that way and to become aroused much faster than most women would.

Taormino's film Chemistry 3 has a documentary style: It was made by inviting a group of porn stars to stay at a villa together for a weekend with cameras present. So the scenes in the film purport to be 'authentic'. One can easily see, then, why 'authenticity' might matter a lot in that case. By contrast, films like The Submission of Emma Marx and Eyes of Desire are not documentary, in this sense. To what extent does 'authenticity' still matter in such films? Why?

Many of the comments Crutcher describes focus on evidence that pleasure is inauthentic. How are authenticity and inauthenticity related? Is it important to have evidence of authenticity or is it enough if there is not evidence of inauthenticity? Why? How might this bear upon the question whether authenticity matters in films like Eyes of Desire or Emma Marx?

Although Crutcher explicitly disavows any interest in the 'effects' of pornography, we need not. What harm sort of harm might inauthentic portrayals of women's sexual pleasure do? (Young briefly addressees this question.)

Young, like many feminist pornographers, regards 'authenticity' as a crucial element of feminist pornography. Ashley disagrees, suggesting that there is an element of performativity in all sex. Moreover, she suggests that the presence of the camera can't but affect what happens and insisting that the act of filming sex introduces a perspective, a point of view, on what happens. Perhaps most importantly, however, Ashley emphasizes the fictional and fantastical nature of pornography, remarking that "The exaggerated, fantastical and performative does not define human sexuality, but it can be an important tool in exploring it" (p. 189).

What does Young mean when she says, "Essentially, I am a documentarian" (p. 187)? To what extent does this conflict with Ashley's remark: "A porn actor should not have to have an authentic orgasm, they work to convince the viewer that their character in that scenario does" (p. 188)? Is the disagreement between Young and Ashley ultimately a reflection of the kinds of films that each makes?

Ashley compares porno-sex to a car chase in an action film. What is the point of this comparison? What does she mean when she says: "The issue is not the authenticity of the performance itself, but the (lack of) context" (p. 189)?

Eaton

Eaton aims in this paper to formulate a criticism of pornography that avoids the problems that other forms of 'anti-pornography feminism' have encountered. It's important to note that Eaton's criticism is, broadly speaking, moral and is not intended to justify any form of legal restriction. It is, rather, an attempt to articulate how certain forms of pornography might be 'harmful'. Eaton also means to restrict her analysis to 'inegalitarian' pornography, though she does not say very much about what that is supposed to be. We'll get a bit more on that in another paper of hers that we'll later.

Section I outlines an account of how inegalitarian pornography harms women: what Eaton calls the 'harm hypothesis'. This argument is focused on the way that pornography affects its consumers and so is, in that respect, different from Langton's argument.

Eaton's argument has two crucial ingredients:

1. The eroticization of certain aspects of gender inequality—of ambition and dominance in men, vulnerabilty and submission in women—is a signficant factor in the perpetuation of women's oppression. (This is roughly (i)-(vi) in the outline and is familiar from MacKinnon.)
2. Pornography contributes to the eroticization of those aspects of gender inequality and, therefore, "causes women harm in the sense that it impairs or thwarts their capacity to pursue their interests" (p. 681). (This is (vii).)

What is really distinctive of Eaton's position, though, is her conception of how pornography eroticizes men's dominance and women's submission:

Antiporn feminists hold that pornography perverts the emotional life of its audience by soliciting very strong positive feelings for situations characterized by gender inequality and in so doing plays a role in sustaining and reproducing a system of pervasive injustice. (p. 680, my emphasis)

The idea (which Eaton develops elsewhere) is that pornography most directly affects how we feel about certain things, as opposed to what we believe. This is a general point, she thinks, about artistic and other sorts of media representations: "[U]nderstanding and appreciating representations...requires an imaginative engagement that can have lasting effects on one’s character" (p. 680), both for good and for ill.

One thing that is particularly notable about this argument, as opposed to some of the others we have encountered, is that it does purport to tell a story about why sexually explicit media should be a particularly effective vehicle for perpetuating sexism. Pornography, Eaton wants to argue, is particularly well-placed to affect what people find erotic.

Think back to Langton: What account might she offer of why pornography is particularly well-placed to affect socio-sexual norms through illocution? Does the kind of account Eaton is sketching have anything to say about socio-sexual norms? Or is her account limited to explaining how pornographys affects what people find sexy?

There is a need for some caution here. Sometimes, Eaton talks of the eroticization of aspects (or what we might call 'features') of gender inequality: for example, 'innocence', or a kind of childishness, in women; maturity and self-confidence in men. Other times, though, she talks about the eroticization of gender inequality itself. Those are, at least in principle, different. Probably Eaton intends the latter just to be shorthand for the former. (It isn't sexism itself that people find hot, but certain manifestations of it.) But one might well wonder whether eroticizing features or aspects of gender inequality is really enough to 'support' or 'sustain' gender inequality itself.

Such questions presumably intersect, as well, with ones about what sorts of gender norms pornography actually eroticizes. Eaton writes that pornography "depict[s] women deriving sexual pleasure from a range of inegalitarian relations and situations, from being the passive objects of conquest to scenarios of humiliation, degradation, and sexual abuse" (p. 680). There are questions to be raised here both about the extent to which that is a correct description of the bulk of mainstream pornography and whether, even if that is true, it can have the kinds of effects Eaton needs it to have.

To put it differently: What kinds of "situations characterized by gender inequality" might pornography eroticize? What kinds of effects could that plausibly have? It looks as if close analysis of some actual pornography could help here. (We'll read a discussion of 'extreme' pornography quite soon.)

One important claim that Eaton makes here, following Helen Longino, is that pornograhy does not just depict but endorses the subordination or degradation of women. She claims that this has three components: (i) presenting such acts as pleasurable for all parties, including the women involved; (ii) presenting such treatment as unobjectionable; and (iii) eroticizing the degradation of women.

In sum, pornography endorses by representing women enjoying, benefiting from, and deserving acts that are objectifying, degrading, or even physically injurious and rendering these things libidinally appealing on a visceral level. (p. 682)

Eaton herself regards the 'eroticization' part as the crucial one. (See fn. 23.) How is that supposed to work? Certainly it is true that pornography "kindle[s] carnal appetites", and inegalitarian pornography (by definition) includes scenarios that are objectifying of or degrading to women. But are those two things enough for it to follow that pornography eroticizes the objectifying and degrading acts? There are lot of things that appear in pornography that it doesn't seem to eroticize, say, white sheets. What stronger connection is needed? How is it made?

Section II (which you can skim) disentangles some of the different claims people have made about how pornography causes harm. For our purposes, what's most important here is Eaton's distinction between what she calls 'singular' and 'diffuse' causes and effects. The singular case is where one bit of pornography has some definite effect on some specific person (e.g., it causes them to go out and rape someone). The diffuse case is where there is a cumulative effect of lots of pornography either on a single person or on society more generally. Eaton does not rule out cases of singular causation, but her interest is more in the diffuse case.

Section III discusses different notions of 'cause' that might be appropriate to the claim that pornography 'causes' women harm. Eaton argues that the appropriate notion is probabilistic. Roughly: We say that A 'probabilistically causes' B just in case the occurrence of A raises the probability that B will occur and is (in some sense it is harder to pin down) responsible for that increased probability. Thus, for example: Even though not everyone who smokes will get lung cancer, we nonetheless think that smoking causes lung cancer; Eaton suggests that what this means is that smoking increases the risk of lung cancer (i.e., is responsible for that increased risk). Indeed, Eaton's idea is that we should think of pornography in broadly epidemiological terms. Pornography, on this account, is a kind of contributing risk factor for various sorts of harm to women.

Section IV (which you do not have to read) discusses two central issues: What more than just a statistical correlation is needed to support the sort of causal claim that anti-pornography feminists make and how we might amass evidence for such a claim. Eaton's overall point is that the clinical and experimental data connecting pornography and sexual assault is extremely problematic and that there isn't at present good evidence for any such connection, though there could be.

Early in the paper, Eaton makes it clear that pornography could lead to all kinds of harms (broadly based in gender inequality), not just sexual violence. But as the paper proceeds, she focuses more and more on sexual violence. Indeed, the discussion in section IV is almost entirely focused on what evidence there might be that pornography increases the prevalence of rape (even though she herself complains about this fact). As we have seen, however, the sexual subordination of women has many aspects besides sexual assault, and pornography might be more deeply implicated in those. What would an 'epidemological' account of some of those effects be like?

Hopkins

Hopkins focuses on Eaton's suggestion that we should take an 'epidemiological' approach to pornography. He makes several points about it.

Hopkins's first point is that Eaton's proposal differs more from extant proposals than she seems to suppose. In particular, nothing in it seems to depend upon our regarding pornography as speech (as liberals tend to assume). Nor, for that matter, does it treat it as a kind of action (as MacKinnon sometimes does, and Langton definitely does). Hopkins suggests that Eaton's view treats it more like a "substance", as "something that is consumed and absorbed, something that enters the brain and has physical effects on the brain..." (p. 2). (He seems to have in mind an analogy to drugs or alcohol.) His idea is that, if we do think of it that way, then we might want to think of pornography more as an issue of public health. He notes, moreover, that this focuses attention on the effects of pornography rather than on the attitudes of its producers, or even on the attitudes of its consumers.

Second, Hopkins suggests that "the public health view is a plausible and likely beneficial perspective to take on pornography..." (p. 3). The vexed question whether it is a form of expression seems irrelevant to the question of its harms, and we need not commit ourselves to outlandish claims about the effects of "limited exposure to mainstream pornography" (p. 3). Moreover, Hopkins suggests that the sorts of 'feedback loops' that are familiar with addiction might apply here as well.

Third, Hopkins addresses the "worry that using a public health perspective turns issues such as freedom of speech over to biotechnocrats" (p. 4). His main point is that simply examining pornography through the lens of public health does not imply anything specific about policy, even if it can be shown that pornography is harmful. If it is harmful, however, then we ought to do something about that harm, and then there are many different approaches that could be taken here.

What should a 'liberal' concerned about government intrusion on freedom of expression say about the epidemiological proposal? Are such liberals doomed to "ignore the possibility that pornography could lead to harm" (p. 4)?

Maddison's paper is particularly concerned to investigate the influence of so-called 'gonzo' pornography and some of what it has inspired. The term 'gonzo porn' is borrowed from 'gonzo journalism', which Wikipedia describes as "a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story using a first-person narrative". Gonzo porn is similar: It has a very documentary and even amateur style, often eschewing narrative entirely. The camera often takes the point of view of one of the participants and is, in a way, a participant itself. The sex tends to be very rough and even 'extreme'. As John Stagliano, often credited as the creator of gonzo, once put it, gonzo treats sex as an extreme sport (or, perhaps better, an endurance sport).

Maddison first point is that 'sex-positive' feminists have failed to articulate a positive criticism of mainstream pornography, even though they often will remark that, of course, they do not mean to be defending all pornography as it actually is. That failure is understandable, Maddison suggests:

In the heated, polarized context of the porn wars th[eir] position necessitated strategic omissions and denials. The strategic need to argue for cultural outlets through which women, and especially lesbians, could explore sexual representation, meant that it became difficult to mount a sustained critical analysis of the overwhelmingly sexist nature of the porn industry. (p. 42)

Nonetheless, however, Maddison thinks this silence is problematic, especially in the face of such 'extreme' content as that produced by Extreme Associates and similar studios.

Second, Maddison suggests that, even if it is true that rape portrayals have become less common in pornography, that may not be worthy of celebration if it is due only to market forces (as women have become participating consumers) rather than to political transformation. That is to say: What's changed may not be men's attitudes about rape portrayals but simply the marketability of such pornography when women are consumers.

The remainder of Maddison's paper is devoted to an analysis of one particular film from Extreme Associates, Forced Entry. It is, in a way, unfortunate that Maddison chooses here to concentrate upon this film. It is a particularly extreme example that, as Maddison remarks, mixes gonzo pornography with the sort of plot that might figure in a slasher film. (N.B: I have not seen this film, so I have no independent knowledge about it.) In a way, that serves Maddison's purpose: Surely feminists should be critical of this particular film (whether or not they think it should be censored). On the other hand, however, many of the remarks Maddison makes about Forced Entry seem to me to apply just as well to much mainstream pornography—e.g., to much of what is most readily available on the internet—and especially to much gonzo porn. By taking such an extreme example as Forced Entry, then, Maddison may make it harder to see how broadly his points apply.

For more details on the legal case, see the Wikipedia article on it. Zacari and Romano eventually pleaded guilty to obscenity charges—largely because they could not afford the legal bills—and each served a year in prison.

Maddison makes two main criticisms of Forced Entry. (We'll have to take his description of it on faith). The first is that the way the sexual scenes are presented seems to "implicat[e] the spectator in the acts being committed" (p. 48) and that the framing material is too minimal "to dislodge the identification with the violence and sexual sadism..." (p. 49).

Although we cannot (and probably do not want to) watch Forced Entry ourselves to verify these claims, it is, again, worth thinking about how they might apply to other pornography. In what way might this 'implicating the spectator' be used to explain what Longino might mean when she describes pornography as 'endorsing' violence against women? Or should we think of the fact that we are addressed as partcipants as having some other function?

I am not myself a fan of slasher films, but perhaps some of you are. Is the 'identification with the slasher' of which Maddison speaks here common in that genre? Are there other ways in which treating Forced Entry as a pornographic form of slasher film might help us understand it better? What difference exactly does the sexual aspect of the film make? As is often noted, the victims in horror films are very often women or teenage girls.

This point, obviously, is very specific to this particular film, and one might wonder whether it would apply to all attempts to represent these sorts of scenes: Were there more irony, humor, and self-consciousness, would that make a difference? I know of two websites that might be worth considering in this connection, Pro Villain and Tough Love X. (The former is discussed in the article by Chauntelle Tibbals.) I've not done any research on these sites myself. But there might be a final project here for someone interested in these issues.

The other criticism is more general and concerns how sex itself is presented in this film, and this point does generalize to much gonzo pornography. The sex itself does not at all progress in the way the standard heterosexual script would lead one to expect. Rather:

...[T]he organization of genital acts offered by Forced Entry is emblematic of a contemporary style of hardcore, characterized by repetitive cycles of penetration, from mouth to vagina to anus to mouth, vagina and back again, the visual and affective pleasures of which lie in the performative supremacy of a large penetrating penis, and the denigration of women, whose bodies become mere collections of gaping orifices.

What is particularly striking about these "mechanized cycles of penetration" is that they seem to have little to do with anyone's pleasure, even that of the men. As Maddison notes, that threatens to make Williams's suggestion that pornography seeks visual evidence of women's pleasure out of date.

Toward the end of the paper, Maddison writes: "Williams’s critical engagement with hardcore is limited by her faith in the idea of women as porn consumers" (p. 50). That summarizes a larger argument. What is it? What does he mean when he asks whether women are "buying porn, or buying into porn" (p. 51)?

What does Maddison mean when he speaks of "the increasing tendency of hardcore to constitute women as 'raw material' for demonstrations of phallic endurance..." (p. 52)? It may well seem obvious that this is problematic. But why?

Eaton argues in her earlier paper "A Sensible Anti-porn Feminism" that pornography harms women by eroticizing dominance in men and submission in women, thereby helping to perpetuate gender inequality. This paper sketches an account of how pornography does that, namely, by (mis)shaping 'erotic taste'. Eaton also argues that, in principle, 'better' pornography could therefore help to re-shape 'erotic taste' in ways that are more egalitarian.

It's worth distinguishing right away the general shape of this argument from any particular application that Eaton might make. The central ideas are:

1. There are widespread cultural norms of 'sexiness' and 'attractiveness'.
2. These norms have significant influence upon people's lives (especially women's lives).
3. These norms are shaped by pornography and other media.

The particular norms on which Eaton focuses are dominance in men and submissiveness in women, going so far as to say: ...[S]ome form of dominance is what makes men attractive, while some form of submissiveness makes women attractive" (p. 243). That is a very strong claim, but the general shape of Eaton's account does not depend upon it.

In section 12.2, Eaton offers her account of 'erotic taste'. She uses the term 'taste' in the sense in which we might talk about someone's taste in music: What kinds of music they tend to like or dislike. More precisely, she means a "standing disposition for evaluative sentiments regarding some" kind of thing (p. 244). A sentiment is something like an emotion or feeling; to say that sentiments are 'evaluative' is to say that they involve feelings of attraction or repulsion (which may be weaker or stronger). This is a broadly aesthetic notion that has wide application and which is much discussed in aesthetics and in moral psychology.

Eaton stresses that taste matters much more than has typically been assumed: It motivates us to act in various ways and, therefore, or so she argues, has social consequences. Her interest here, though, is mostly in what she calls our collective taste: "the erotic aesthetic that dominates mainstream popular culture" (p. 245) and which, therefore, will be culturally variable, including across sub-cultures. One key thought is that the terms 'masculinity' and 'femininity' are essentially just names for those collections of features of men and women respectively that are regarded, culturally speaking, as sexy or attractive. I.e., femininity just is what is sexy in women (whatever that is); masculinity just is what is sexy in men (whatever that is).

On pp. 247-8, Eaton lists a number of more specific ways in which the 'collective' taste for dominance in men and submissiveness in women manifests itself. Which of these examples seem most compelling? What would you add or subtract?

Eaton's goal here is to argue that pornography shapes our erotic tastes in ways that reinforce the eroticization of dominance, etc. Which of the things listed on pp. 247-8 is it plausible that pornography influences? Are there important things Eaton has left out?

Section 12.3 discusses how pornography (and other forms of media) affect erotic taste. Eaton outlines a broadly Aristotelian account of 'habituation' that she had previously articulated in her paper "Taste in Bodies and Fat Oppression" (which is listed as a related paper). This involves a kind of training that, Eaton claims, is more plausible than the Pavlovian model. Typically, it involves imaginative engagement with media representations of some kind: We are, so to speak, encouraged to feel certain things in watching a film or reading a book; repeated exposures of this kind can change how we actually respond to similar events in real life. As evidence, Eaton cites advertising: "This is something that advertisers have long known: sufficiently vivid and compelling representations can actually change what people want and find attractive..." (p. 251).

Forget about pornography for a bit and just think about the ways in which fiction can affect one's moral attitudes. Reading a book like The Bluest Eye or To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, might make someone more sympathetic to the experience of Black Americans. Does the sort of story Eaton wants to tell seem plausible as an account of how that happens? Does she need to tell such a story? Or could we just rest upon an analogy between how porn affects us and how fiction quite generally does?

It's important to Eaton that her account credits viewers of pornography with some intelligence and critical capacity. But she does not develop that idea. What does she have in mind? To what extent can one avoid the negative influences of pornography by deploying one's critical capacities? How does the analogy with advertising affect this point?

Eaton's idea, then, is that pornography functions like advertising for men's domination of women: "Mainstream heterosexual pornography's representational content strongly tends toward sexually explicit scenes in which women take a subordinate role to men" (p. 251). More specifically:

Mainstream heterosexual pornography has the following features: (1) it eroticizes women performing and enjoying passivity, (2) it eroticizes women forgoing their own pleasure in order to service men, and (3) it does these things in ways that enhance women's subordinate position to men who are active and in control and whose pleasure determines the course of events. (p. 252)

Claims (1) and (2) concern what mainstream pornography eroticizes. Can you give more concrete sorts of examples? How true, in general, are these claims? What does claim (3) mean? Can you give examples there?

It's important to keep in mind that, when Eaton says that gender inequality is presented as sexy and hot, what she means is not that pornography speaks in such explicitly political terms but rather that it eroticizes things that are, as a matter of fact, unequal. Similarly, it's not as if pornography says: Hey, look, that woman is forgoing her own pleasure for the sake of this guy's, and isn't that hot? Rather, the situation is presented as hot and, within it, she is forgoing her own pleasure; her pleasure doesn't seem to figure as essential; so we're being trained to find situations hot in which women's pleasure is treated as optional. (This is what philosophers would call a de re--de dicto ambiguity.)

The last section suggests that, if it's true that 'bad' pornography can misshape erotic taste, then it stands to reason that 'good' pornography could help reshape erotic taste. The pressing question, then, is what 'good' (or at least 'better') pornography would have to be like. Eaton insists that it needs to be pornographic and that its central feature is that it works to dismantle gender roles.

Eaton makes some more concrete suggestions on pp. 253-4. To what extent do these seem along the right lines?

This paper is somewhat similar to Crutcher's, which we read for last time. It is particularly concerned with the role feminist pornography could play in helping women to develop their own 'sexual subjectivity'. I'd ask you to think about how your own viewing habits do or don't alight with the 'viewing practices' that Liberman discusses, and the extent to which the films we are watching for this time can or can't play the kind of role she discusses.

Liao and Protasi are concerned to understand the 'fictional' character of pornography. By this they do not mean what you might think: Rather, they just mean that pornography is a form of representation that prompts imagination (p. 100), which is something even documentaries can do. To that extent, they agree with Eaton that 'imaginative engagement' is an important component of viewing pornography. But they disagree that 'inegalitarian' pornography must affect its viewers' attitudes for the worse.

The key distinction in the paper is between 'response realistic' fiction and other fiction. In 'response realistic' fiction, viewers are supposed "to import their actual attitudes towards sex into imaginative engagement...and then...to export their imaginative attitudes back out to reality" (p. 101). In that kind of fiction, then, there can be the kind of 'training' that Eaton describes. But with response unrealistic fiction, these same rules do not apply.

L&P highlight the role that imagination plays in roleplaying and in masturbation and suggest that it plays a similar role in watching pornography. Is that right? What kinds of imaginings are involved in the experience?

L&P note that Eaton's argument depends upon her assuming that pornography is response realistic: that the emotional responses we have to the fictional representation are meant to correspond to the responses we would have to similar real-world scenarios.

To make this argument, they first clarify two key concepts. First, there is the idea of a work's being responsible for certain sorts of attitudinal changes in its audience. This is not the same as merely causing those changes, since a viewer might badly misunderstand the work. Second, there is the notion of genre, which they take to be important because what genre a work is part of "influences the normative conditions of our imaginative engagements with" it (p. 108), i.e., it affects how we respond to it, or should respond to it. Importantly for L&P's purposes, generic conventions affect the relation between our responses to the fiction and our responses to corresponding real-world scenarios.

Putting all that together, we get one of L&P's key conclusions: Genre affects what attitudinal changes a work is responsible for.

How about it, then? Is there argument for that conclusion a good one? Which premise of the argument should someone who wants to reject this conclusion attack?

L&P argue that satire is typically not response realistic. Nor, they suggest, is BDSM pornography. That is: The sexual arousal one experiences in viewing (say) a person being subjected to some form of 'torture' in a BDSM scene is not supposed to lead one to respond to similar real-world torture of political prisoners in the same way. Therefore, while it is possible that BDSM pornography could cause someone to have inappropriate attitudes about women, it would not be responsible for those attitudes.

One might agree with L&P that BDSM pornography is not response realistic but disagree with them about why. They write: "...[P]lausibly in BDSM fictional worlds women universally find pain to be sexually pleasurable" (p. 110). Is that right? Or does more need to be said here?

L&P suggest that, by contrast, most mainstream pornography is response realistic. They give as an example the occurrence of 'facials' in pornography, which might cause viewers to think, e.g., that women derive sexual pleasure from having semen deposited on their faces. (Or, better, remembering Eaton: It might cause viewers to find facials sexually arousing.) Since mainstream pornography is response realistic, it would be responsible for that change: The response to facials in porn gets 'exported' so that viewers also find facials hot in real life.

L&P are assuming that 'facials' are one form of 'inegalitarian sexual relation'. We'll read a bit more about that topic later this week—not everyone agrees that facials are (or have to be) demeaning—but of course the example could be changed. Still, that does raise the question what other examples might be better. Which are?

L&P's argument depends crucially upon the assumption that mainstream pornography is 'response realistic'. Is it? Or is pornography as a genre response unrealistic? How can we tell?

As L&P note, it is really a mistake to talk of works (or genres) as a whole as being response realistic or not. Rather, works are response realistic in some respects and not in others. Their example is science fiction, which can be response realistic morally speaking but response unrealistic physically speaking. Does that distinction matter in the case of pornography? Is it response realistic in some ways but not in others? Are there specific respects in which Eaton (say) needs pornography to be response realistic? I.e., could she concede that pornography isn’t entirely response realistic but insist that it is in certain respects relevant to her argument?

Rebecca Whisnant teaches philosophy at the University of Dayton and is a prominent 'anti-pornography feminist'. In this paper, she answers a question she frequently encounters at her lectures: But what about feminist porn? To her credit, she does not just dismiss this question but undertakes a 'case study' using some of the films of Tristan Taormino, who, at the time, was one of the most prominent, and awarded, feminist pornographers. Whisnant argues that Taormino's films differ less from 'mainstream' pornography than she supposes.

The choice to focus on Taormino certainly is understandable. But is it true that "her body of work exemplifies themes and commitments that are largely consistent among those who produce, perform in, and/or support feminist pornography" (pp. 1-2)? How many of Whisnant's criticisms would also apply to, say, Candida Royalle's work? Or to that of Jackie St James? Or to that of Shine Louise Houston? This is an important question to keep in mind: Someone might want to defend feminist pornography generally but still have reservations about Taormino's films, or about certain aspects of them.

As Whisnant notes, Taormino's own understanding of feminist pornography tends to focus on the ethics of production, which emphasizes the agency of the people who perform in her films. This leads to a focus on 'authenticity'—which is, as we have seen, fairly common among feminist pornographers. Whisnant argues that the facts about how pornography is produced and marketed make authenticity more difficult to achieve than Taormino supposes.

Most of Whisnant's discussion, though, is focused on the sexual content of Taormino's films, arguing that "When it comes to content, the similarities between her films and the rest of mainstream pornography are readily apparent..." (p. 5, my emphasis). There are several specific kinds of content to which Whisnant objects.

Dominance and Submission

Whisnant notes Taormino's insistence "that it is fine to portray dominance, submission, pain, and hierarchy as sexually exciting, so long as women are shown consenting to them and even enjoying them" (p. 5). She disagrees, asking: "...[I]f celebratory eroticized depictions of female pain, abject submission, and even violence against women need not disqualify something as feminist pornography, what exactly is left?" How should Taormino respond to this question?

Facials

These are a much contested trope of mainstream pornography, and their status is somewhat controversial among feminist pornographers themselves, as we'll see next time. Whisnant regards them as uniformly degrading and criticizes Taormino for including such acts in her films, claiming that she "know[s] full well what they mean in a broader cultural context and why they are rewarding for the average porn consumer" (p. 6). What exactly does Whisnant mean here? How, again, should Taormino respond? Is it enough to say that these acts are consensual? (The discussion of anal sex on pp. 9-10 is particularly relevant to this question.)

Racial Language

Whisnant makes a specific criticism of the occurrence of 'race-specific' language in two scenes. (The specific comment that Whisnant mentions, from "Permission", in Rough Sex 3, is at about 14:55 in that clip, which can be found on Canvas.) How problematic do these 'racialized references' seem to be?

Whisnant claims, on the basis of some remarks that Adrianna Nicole makes in the post-scene interview, that she was traumatized by the scene and the after-scene sex (p. 7). Of course, we can't know for sure without asking her. But is there some other way of interpreting Nicole's remarks?

Much of this paper is concerned with the concept of 'sexiness'. Sections 10.2 and 10.3 discuss and criticize some recent work on sexiness due to Linnott and Irving. Section 10.4 discusses a number of concerns about the role that 'being sexy' plays in the lives of women, in particular, and reinforces and elaborates claims we have already seen Eaton make about how what is eroticized in men and women helps to sustain gender inequality.

The key thought is that the traits that make men sexy are traits that it is generally good to have, quite independently of whether they make someone sexy. By contrast, the traits that make women sexy are traits that are otherwise disadvantagous. I.e., for women, being or appearing sexy will often be at odds with their other ambitions. Moreover, it is far more important for women to appear sexy than it is for men: It literally affects women's life prospects in ways it does not affect men's.

In sections 10.5 and 10.6, Maes discusses the role pornography plays in shaping our conception of what is sexy and, largely following Eaton, how feminist pornography might play a role in reshaping that conception. The central idea here is that, if we want to reform the notion of sexiness, then "culturally specific and ultimately changeable processes of socialization...should be the main focus" (p. 210). Pornography is one of these.

Following Eaton, Maes distinguishes 'inegalitarian' from 'egalitarian' pornography.

• Inegalitarian pornography is said to portray men as "confident, active, and in charge" and women as "passive and subordinate", and to portray only a very familar sort of female body as 'sexy' (pp. 210-1).
• Egalitarian pornography, by contrast, "does not eroticize any acts of violence, humiliation, or objectification or any of the gender stereotypes that help to sustain gender inequality". Maes also suggests that it is important that there should be "a narrative that gives equal weighting to male and female pleasure..." (pp. 211-2).

But all of that is very vague, and we get a somewhat better understanding of what Maes has in mind, it seems to me, from his discussion of specific films in section 10.6. One quite general claim that he makes is that it is not enough for the film to portray women as wanting the sort of treatment to which they are subjected. This can, in principle, be the result of 'adapative preferences' (roughly: false concsiousness), where women have been socialized to want what men want them to want.

More specifically, Maes regards Erika Lust's film The Good Girl as being 'female friendly' but not egalitarian, and on two grounds. First, Maes claims that the film wrongly eroticizes Alex's shyness, clumsiness, insecurity, and vulnerability at the crucial moment when she drops her towel. These are precisely the kinds of submissive, passive traits whose eroticization in women is problematic. Second, he criticizes Lust for including a 'facial' at the end, saying that Lust "continues and even celebrates this most prevalent trope of inegalitarian pornography rather than subverting it" (p. 213). Indeed, one might worry that, by having Alex ask Paulo to ejaculate on her face, the film portrays Alex as wanting to be humiliated.

There are two versions of The Good Girl, and I do not know which one Maes watched. The original was released for free onto the web, under a Creative Commons license, in 2004. The 'extended cut' was released as part of Lust's collection Five Hot Stories for Her in 2007. The differences lie in sexual parts of the film and do not amount simply to inclusion of more material in the extended cut: that whole part of the film was re-edited, with some footage being dropped and other footage being included. The parts of the film on which Maes comments, however, are the same in the two versions. (The version on Canvas is the extended cut.)

What should we make of these criticisms? Does Lust's film eroticize Alex's vulnerability, etc? Given how the rest of the sex is shot and scripted, is it plausible that Lust ends the scene with a facial just because that's how it's done in porn? Why does Alex ask Paulo to ejaculate on her face? Here, it will be worth considering the back and forth in "The Great Blowjob Debate".

Maes suggests that pornography could also help to expand the narrow definition of what kinds of bodies are considered sexy. He notes, though, that simply including (say) fat bodies in pornography is not, by itself, going to be liberating. What distinction is he trying to make here? What would pornography that includes fat bodies need to be like to serve the kind of purpose Maes has in mind?

We shall shortly turn to the sorts of questions about the relationship between pornography and art that Maes discusses toward the end of the paper. Before we consider those arguments, however, it might be worth thinking for ourselves about this question: What might be at stake in the question whether pornography can also be art? Do some of the films we have seen seem to straddle that line?

Both these papers are concerned to draw a distinction between pornography and erotic art, and to argue that nothing can be both pornography and art. The arguments they present are similar but importantly different.

I'll be honest: The classificatory question, whether pornography can be 'art', strikes me as not the most interesting one to be asked here. But, in many ways, it is not the question really at issue. Both Levinson and Mag Uidhir are interested in what it is to engage artistically with something and suggest that this kind of engagement is incompatible with what we might call 'pornographic engagement'. I'll discuss this further in the notes.

Levinson

In sections II and III, which you do not need to read, Levinson mentions two other ways one might try to distinguish pornography from erotic art: On grounds of explicitness or on grounds of moral acceptability. He argues that neither of these is successful.

Levinson seems to think it is important that we be able to make a clear distinction between pornography and art. Why?

Levinson's own argument is based upon the different sorts of responses that art and pornography require of us. He summarizes it this way, at the end of the paper:

1. Erotic art consists of images centrally aimed at a certain sort of reception R1.
2. Pornography consists of images centrally aimed at a certain sort of reception R2.
3. R1 essentially involves attention to form, vehicle, medium, or manner, and so entails treating images as in part opaque.
4. R2 essentially excludes attention to form, vehicle, medium, or manner, and so entails treating images as wholly transparent.
5. R1 and R2 are incompatible.
6. Hence, nothing can be both erotic art and pornography; or at the least, nothing can be coherently projected as both erotic art and pornography; or at the very least, nothing can succeed as erotic art and pornography at the same time. (p. 239)

The key premises are really (3) and (4): Premise (5) is meant to follow from them—Because it is impossible both to pay attention to form, etc, adn not to pay attention to it—which leads directly to the conclusion (6).

Premise (3) is supposed to follow from what it is to take an 'artistic interest' in a representation. The 'content' of the representation—what it represents—can be significant, but when we regard the representation as art, we take an interest also in its form: "the way the medium has been employed to convey the content" (p. 232). Thus, one might think here of the choices the artist has made about how the content is represented: the use of paint, or lighting, or what have you.

If we think particularly of photography, the idea is that, in some cases, the photograph is "seen through, or seen past, leaving one, at least in imagination, face to face with its subject" (p. 232, emphasis removed). Much of our engagement with photography is like this. Think of photographs of friends and family, or of photographs in the news. But, when we treat a photograph as art, we precisely do not 'see through it' but consider also the image itself, as it were.

Levinson's thought, then, is that pornography differs from art in precisely this respect: This is premise (4). Since pornography's primary aim is to facilitate sexual arousal in the viewer, it "do[es] not seek to have attention rest on the vehicle of such stimulation or arousal..." (p. 232) but, rather, aims to be "as transparent as possible—[to] present the object for sexual fantasy vividly, and then, as it were, get out of the way" (p. 233).

Levinson writes: "As we all know, pornography is essentially a kind of substitute or surrogate for sex..." (p. 233). Do we all know that? Perhaps this claim is irrelevant to Levinson's case. But perhaps it reflects something important about the way he is thinking about pornography.

What argument does Levinson give for premise (4)? that is, for the claim that pornography both aims and needs to be "as transparent as possible"?

So the basic conflict between art and pornography is meant to be this: Whereas 'art' demands attention to the form or vehicle, any pornographic purpose the image might serve is undermined by such attention, which needs to be focused on what is represented. Thus, discussing certain drawings by Gustav Klimt, Levinson writes:

...[I]t is one thing to say that certain artistic devices, masterfully deployed, can enhance the erotic charge of a representation. It is quite another to say that a viewer's focusing on those devices will enhance the representation's erotic charge for the viewer, that is, render it more stimulating or arousing. There is every reason to think it would not.... (p. 234)

The point here is really one about what we might call the 'aesthetic appreciation' of images. Levinson's point is that such appreciation involves an awareness of the image itself and consideration of how the image works to present its content. But the kind of 'appreciation' that is appropriate to pornography, Levinson claims, 'sees through' the image to focus on the sexual content itself.

If that is right, then what's really at issue here is something like: Is aesthetic appreciation of pornography possible? It's important, though, to see that the question is not whether some single item can be the object of both types of appreciation, separately, so to speak. (Imagine someone using some of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs as an aid to masturbation.) The question is not even just whether one can engage in both modes of appreciation simultaneously. The question is more whether they are at odds with each other, in some fundamental way.

Levinson's claim is thus that artistic appreciation and pornographic appreciation pull in opposite directions:

...[P]ornography's central aim, to facilitate sexual arousal in the name of sexual release, does not...preclude artistic interest from being present in an image. Yet it does...militate against a viewer's artistic engagement with the image, because it enjoins treatment of the image as transparent, as simply presenting its subject for sexual fantasizing, thus entailing inattention to the form or fashioning of the image. (p. 236)

In section VI, then, Levinson considers whether there could be pornography that is "more arousing for some viewers when such viewers attend to or concentrate on aspects of the image as such, such as its form or style or embodied point of view..." (p. 236). His response is that such 'artful pornography' still does not invite us to appreciate the image 'for its own sake', but only to take an instrumental interest in it as a means toward some other end: that of sexual arousal.

In the quotes above, and throughout section VI, Levinson seems to be assuming that, if some bit of pornography invites attention to the image itself, it must do so for the purpose of facilitating sexual arousal. Why does he assume that? Is he right to do so? How might this claim be related to another that Levinson seems to make: that attention given to the 'artistic' aspects of an image must detract from or compete with attention to its 'pornographic' aspects?

Mag Uidhir

Here's Mag Uidhir's version of the argument (p.194):

1. If something is pornography, then that something has the purpose of sexual arousal (of some audience).
2. If something is pornography, then that something has the purpose of sexual arousal and that purpose is manner inspecific.
3. If something is art, then if that something has a purpose, then that purpose is manner specific.
4. If something is art, then if that something has the purpose of sexual arousal, then that purpose is manner specific.
5. A purpose cannot be both manner specific and manner inspecific.
6. Therefore, if something is pornography, then it is not art.

The argument is essentially the same as Levinson's, except that Mag Uidhir's version is focused on the purpose of pornography rather than the expected response. What Mag Uidhir means by "manner specific" is that the way the purpose is achieved is important. In the case of art, it is; in the case of pornography, it is not (he claims). When some purpose is manner specific, then, "the prescribed manner is essentially constitutive of the purpose" (p. 195); that is, the purpose is not just to do X but to do X in a particular way.

The crucial premise, it seems to me, is premise (2): that pornography simply aims at sexually arousing its audience and that the way in which sexual arousal is achieved is completely irrelevant to the success of a film (say) as pornography. Mag Uidhir means this in a very strong sense: "Pornography doesn't even require for its success that the audience recognize, for example, the picture as a picture of a couple having sex" (p. 197). As long as the viewer is aroused, then the film has achieved its purpose, even if what arouses them is (say) just the color of the sheets.

To put it differently, the idea is that, for some film (say) to be successful 'as pornography' is simply for it to arouse its viewer sexually, no matter for what reason that occurs. The director of a film might have had, in creating it, a 'plan' for how to achieve the goal of sexually arousing their audience. But, Mag Uidhir is claiming, it is irrelevant to the success of the flim 'as pornography' whether the audience is aroused for that reason.

What argument does Mag Uidhir give for this claim? Is he right or wrong? It might help here to reflect on some of the films we have seen.

Mag Uidhir regards his argument as better than Levinson's because he (Mag Uidhir) need not deny that some pornography might invite attention to its 'form' and 'manner of depiction'. His need only claim "that the success or failure of such attention and reception"—I take it that he means here such things as "higher production values, at least some attention to style, coherent and interesting stories", and the like—"essentially contributes nothing toward either a thing's being pornography or a thing's being successful pornography" (p. 197, emphasis removed).

What exactly does this last claim mean? What argument does Mag Uidhir give for it? What is the point of the comparison between advertising and pornography that he makes in section IV?

Levinson emphasizes the 'transparency' of pornography: It present[s] the object for sexual fantasy vividly, and then, as it were, get[s] out of the way" (p. 233). Is this consistent with pornography's being manner inspecific in Mag Uidhir's sense?

Mag Uidhir and Pratt (M&P) begin by focusing attention on what they call 'prototypical' pornography: Visual media that employs a 'realistic' style of depiction of a sexual subject matter in order to arouse its audience sexually. This idea, as they note, is related to, and an elaboration of, Levinson's suggestion that pornography is typically 'transparent'.

The film Pirates that M&P mention was only one of a number of 'porn parodies', a form that was popular in the early 2000s. There were whole series of these: Men In Black XXX, Avengers XXX, etc; This Ain't Star Trek and This Ain't Terminator, etc; Game of Bones, Womb Raider, etc. Pirates, which was based upon the film Pirates of the Caribbean, was famous mostly for how expensive it was to shoot. The details of the film do not much matter for our purposes, and you can think instead about any of the other films we have seen that have significant narratives.

M&P are most interested, in this paper, in pornography that isn't 'prototypical', that departs in one way or another from maximal realism, either because (i) it involves some 'non-transparent' form of depiction, such as drawing or animation, and may be purposely unrealistic, or (ii) it is ficitonal.

M&P suggest that such forms of pornography "ought to strike one as puzzling" (p. 141). Why do they think this? One might have thought that if so much pornography turns out to be non-prototypical, then there must be something wrong with their characterization of 'prototypical' pornography. Is there something wrong with it?

In §2, M&P discuss the issue of realism. Their focus is on various forms of pornographic comics, in particular, on forms such as hentai which involve distinctive forms of exaggeration. Such comics, M&P claim, reasonably enough, are pornography: People read them as an aid to sexual arousal; that is very much their purpose. The question in which M&P are interested is: What's the point of such depictions? Why not just use the more realistic medium of photography?

They offer several answers. Some of these are 'external', in the sense that they don't have much to do with the pornographic nature of what is produced. Those answers are compatible with the thought that photography (say) would be better, but it's just not always available. But some of their answers do concern the specific kind of content that comic pornography tends to have:

1. Drawings can represent things that photography cannot, including things that are physically impossible.
2. The abstract way that comic characters are drawn makes identification with them easier.
3. The use of drawing simultaneously allows for a kind of 'distance', so that 'taboo' fantasies can be illustrated without implicating real people.

Do any of these features of comic pornography have echoes in cinematic pornography? or in some cinematic pornography? (One might think here of the 'special effects' in Green Door.)

Why do M&P think that 'identification' with the characters in pornography is important? What are they assuming about what the experience of engaging with pornography involves?

M&P make a number of claims about the nature of comics that are, strictly speaking, outside the scope of the course (and well beyond my competence). But you should feel free to comment on these, since they bear upon their claims about cartoon pornography. (Pratt has worked extensively on the aesthetics of comics. See his webpage, linked above, for some of that work.)

In §3, M&P explore the significance of the fact that much pornography is fictional. They explain what they mean by 'fiction' on p. 150: Roughly, fiction is anything that invites us to imagine some non-factual scenario for "aesthetic, narrative, emotional, didactic, or cognitive" purposes, and for entertainment. The conclusion for which they want to argue (I think) is that there is a tension between being successful as fiction and being successful as pornography.

Unfortunately, their argument for this claim is somewhat hard to unpack. (For me. If anyone has a better idea what the argument is, please say so!) Part of the difficulty is that the term "incidental" plays a large role in their discussion, and it is not obvious to me what they mean by it. But the idea seems to be that the fictional and pornographic aspects of K/S fiction, or of Pirates, are completely separable. You can ignore or misunderstand the story and yet find the 'sexy bits' arousing. If so, then the work in question 'succeeds as pornography' (because it arouses) but 'fails as fiction' (with that particular reader, because they have not imagined the right fictional world, etc).

M&P make rather a lot of the fact that you can ignore the story and just read the sexy bits. But you could also fast forward through an action film and just watch the car chases, or a horror film and just watch the murders, or .... High school girls have forever been passing around novels like Judy Blume's Wifey and just reading the sex scenes. What should we make of this?

So the idea, I think, is that the fictional and pornographic parts of such works merely sit alongside each other, ultimately having little to do with one another. And this is, indeed, a criticism one often hears of 'feature'-type pornography: that the plot is little more than an excuse for the sex, and that the two have little to do with each other. This is the first of the two options that M&P offer at the end of the section for how we should understand fictional pornography (p. 156). The other is to suggest that, while there can be works that are, in some richer sense, both fiction and pornography, such works exist 'at the edge' and are not prototypical.

Why not? The answer seems implicit in this passage, from early in the paper:

Presumably, ... Pirates successfully sexually arouses its audience primarily via that audience engaging with the film as a maximally transparent depiction of actual persons engaging in actual sexual acts ... rather than as a cinematic representation of the fictional-world sexual escapades of the pirate-hunting libertine, Captain Edward Reynolds ... and his equally licentious first officer, Jules .... Qua pornography, to satisfy the purpose of sexual arousal, the audience need not engage with Pirates as a work of fiction; they need only engage with Pirates as a sufficiently transparent photographic depiction of actual persons actually having sex. (p. 140)

That is, the thought is that Pirates succeeds as pornography so long as the audience is sexually aroused by the sexually explicit depictions. In particular, it does not matter whether the story contributes in any way to one's arousal. (Indeed, M&P seem to think that focusing on the story might even detract from the pornographic purpose of the film: arousal.) And this, I take it, has nothing to do with Pirates specifically but is supposed to be true of 'prototypical' pornography quite generally: It simply aims at sexual arousal through sexually explicit depictions; any story such a work might also tell is at best beside the (pornographic) point.

Mikkola

As Mikkola notes, the idea that pornography centrally 'aims at' the sexual arousal of its audience, or that its purpose is primarily that of sexually arousing its audience, is central to much of the debate over whether pornography can be art. Here, she wants to challenge that claim.

As Mikkola notes (and as others also have), it would be unfortunate if we needed a 'definition' of pornography for the purposes of this debate. Most commentators therefore have claimed, as Mag Uidhir does, only that there are certain necessary conditions something must satisfy in order to be pornography. Thus, the relevant claim here is that something is pornography only if it centrally aims at sexual arousal, or if it has as its primary purpose sexual arousal. Mag Uidhir, of course, also needs the claim that the aim or purpose must be 'manner inspecific'. But one might wonder where he gets that claim.

Mikkola suggests that there are two main reasons to doubt that pornography must 'centrally aim' at sexual arousal.

1. Producing sexually arousing material may be a means to some other end, rather than the end of pornographers per se.
2. The supposed pornographic intention of soliciting sexual arousal may be constitutively intertwined with other intentions in a way that makes it impossible to separate the central pornographic intention from additional non-pornographic intentions. (p. 29)

Mikkola's strategy for supporting this point is to look at actual examples of pornography and see what their purposes are. She notes that some pornography produced during the French Revolution, for example, had both the purpose of sexual arousal and the purpose of social criticism. These aspects, Mikkola suggests, are hard to separate, because the fact that the sexual scenario involved Marie Antoinette was important to both of them.

Mikkola refers here to some work by Seiriol Morgan on the nature of sexual desire (in the paper listed as a related reading). Morgan argues that sexual desire, and sexual experience, are more complex than is often supposed and that they involve, or can involve, not just sensation or feeling but 'intentional' aspects: what one is thinking.

Mikkola writes: "To accept that we can separate the pornographic sexual intention from other intentions...implicitly buys into an account of sexual desire that fails to take such intentionality of desire into account" (p. 30). What does she mean by that? Can you give examples from among the films we have watched that illustrate this point?

After noting that the aim of some producers of pornography may be just to make money, Mikkola notes that many 'alternative' pornographers (she seems, for the most part, to have queer and feminist pornographers in mind) do not intend their work simply to arouse their audience but also to do such things as oppose "prevalent beauty myths" and change "our conceptions of and judgements about female sexuality" (p. 32). It is not obvious why such goals should be regarded as less 'central' than the goal of sexual arousal.

On p. 33, Mikkola presents what she regards as a 'simplified' version of the argument that pornography cannot be art. But it is very simplified: Claims about transparency and manner specificity do not appear in the argument. So have a look back at the argument as Levinson or Mag Uidhir presents it. Which premises of their arguments would Mikkola reject? Are her reasons for rejecting those premises adequate?

Smith, Barker, and Attwood

The claim that pornography aims at sexual arousal in a way that is 'manner inspecific' seems implicitly to assume something about how and why people watch pornography. This paper reports some initial results from an empirical study of this question. It dovetails, in a way, with Mikkola's claims about what the aims of pornographers are, looking at that question from the other side, so to speak.

Which of the many 'reasons to watch porn' that these authors discuss might be used to answer the 'exclusionary' arguments? You might want to consider especially the ninth, which is explicitly aesthetic.

Although the paper is titled "Why Do Porn Films Suck?" it is as much about what it would be for a porn film to be good. The real issue here, though, is whether pornography can "afford an aesthetic stance" (p. 163). vB&P seem most interested in whether a pornographic film might 'afford an aesthetic stance' to such an extent that it might count as 'art'. But we might instead simply ask what it extent pornography might profitably be engaged with on an aesthetic level.

In §1; (which you do not have to read), vB&P argue that porn presents a 'paradox', because it has many of the features that typically mark something as 'art', and yet it is rarely regarded as such. My own sense, though I've not worked through this in detail, is that the six 'features' of art that vB&P list (pp. 163-4) can be found in much that would not be regarded as 'art', for example, dance music. The crucial one, I would have thought, is the second: that "artworks tend to have...the kinds of properties we express using aesthetic concepts" (p. 163). vB&P claim that "...when viewing pornography, it is not uncommon to use aesthetic concepts, such as 'beautiful' or 'gorgeous'" (p. 165). But to what are such predicates typically applied: the film? the performers? the performance?

;2 discusses arguments that pornography cannot be art. vB&P's main criticism of Levinson is that he's just wrong that pornography must encourage its viewers to treat images as 'transparent' (p. 171).

In §3, vB&P run through a number of possible explanations of why there is so little pornographic art. The first several of these are dismissed very quickly. If any of them seem to merit more attention, please say so. (Surely there is something to the idea that pornography needs to be evaluted with generic conventions firmly in mind.)

The first suggestion vB&P take seriously is that pornography is, as we might put it, shallow. As they put it, "Perhaps porn is bad the way Spielberg is usually bad; the films arouse strong feelings by pulling on our heartstrings, or the genital equivalent" (p. 178). One might worry that this holds pornography to a very high standard. Of course, vB&P are welcome to investigate porn through whatever lens they like. But is there even very much pornography that is good in the ways Spielberg is good?

Still, there does seem to be something right about this. Most porn does indeed "bring about gratification in an unimpressive way" (p. 179). Might it be a mark of 'better' porn that it is more subtle in this regard? Perhaps one aspect of this is the way in which arousal is not, in such cases, merely 'caused' by seeing sex. Rather, there is an active, imaginative engagement with the complexity of arousal, its psychological as well as bodily aspects. Do any of the films we have seen illustrate this point?

Ultimately, what vB&P want to claim is that pornorgraphy does not typically "afford the aesthetic stance". The reason is supposed to be that most pornography is not just shallow, but superficial in a number of other respects. Many of the details could be questioned here. Many people, for example, would say that even mainstream directors like John Stagliano ("Buttman"), Rocco Siffredi, Belladonna, and Mason do have recognizable styles. But, again, there does seem to be something right about this idea.

Maybe the most interesting suggestion here is that pornography does not "manifest aspirations towards excellence" (p. 181). It hardly provides us, that is to say, with an opportunity to engage with it as opposed simply to 'seeing through it' to its subject-matter: "Porn films lack detectable signs of aspiration or achievement along dimensions of aesthetic worth" (p. 181); these would be the kinds of things about the film itself with which we could engage. Unfortunately, though, vB&P do not say very much about what precisely that means. Are there ways, again, in which some of the films we've seen might illustrate this point?

§4 is devoted, largely, to the discussion of a number of films that might be regarded as both pornography and art. The film Skin, from Dirty Diaries, is among those you've been asked to watch, so you will be able to evaluate for yourself whether it 'affords the aesthetic stance' and, if so, why. Once again, though, one might find the terms of the discussion to be too narrow. Many of the films we have seen, it seems to me, do something of what vB&P want 'art' to do; i.e., they do 'afford an aesthetic stance', though perhaps not to the same extent that 'art' would.

Dyer's paper is one of the very first to look at pornography seriously as film. Although it is concerned primarily with gay male porn, it contains much more general lessons.

One of Dyer's first points is that pornography is, in some respects, similar to other forms of "low" art, in that it appeals to the body and not (just) to the mind. He observes (somewhat as Rubin does) that this is connected to a devaluing of the body in much Western culture. He makes a suggestion here that will be elaborated thoughout the paper: that there might be a form of experiential knowledge that the 'body genres' can reveal that more 'intellectual' genres might miss. (This is also the topic of Linda Williams' paper "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess", which is listed as an optional reading.)

Summing up this idea, Dyer writes:

A defense of porn as a genre (which, I repeat, is not at all the same thing as defending most of what porn currently consists of) would be based on the idea that an art rooted in bodily effect can give us a knowledge of the body that other art cannot.

Even now porn does give us knowledge of the body—only it is mainly bad knowledge, reinforcing the worst aspects of the social construction of masculinity that men learn to experience in our bodies. All the same, porn can be a site for "re-educating desire", and in a way that constructs desire in the body, not merely theoretically in relation to, and often against, it.

Dyer then proceeds to argue, in some detail, that such a project does not require any notion of sexuality as 'pre-cultural' or 'pre-social', as if the only effect that social norms have had on sexuality is to distort its pure form.

The second section of the paper develops an account of the narrative structure of pornography. Of course, Dyer is well aware that this will vary from film to film, but his main point is that there is narrative structure in almost all pornography—contrary to what is often supposed, that its effect is purely visual, purely bodily.

Reflect here on the project Dyer describes in the quotation just above. How might the narrative stucture of pornography affect the kind of 'bodily knowledge' it conveys?

This point gives rise to a criticism of how men's sexuality is represented in pornogrpahy: as an activity that is directed at a very specific and limited goal, that of orgasm (or, perhaps better, ejaculation). As Dyer sees it, this is a reflection of how men's sexuality is socially constructed: as "a classic goal-directed narrative", to borrow the terms in which he describes one film, and with an empahsis on the visual. By contrast, Dyer suggests, women's sexuality is not socially constructed in that way, and genuine lesbian pornography (as opposed to the 'girl-girl' numbers common in straight porn) often does not have the same kind of teleological structure.

Of course, we will have to take Dyer's remarks about Je Tu Il Elle on faith, and a proper evaluation of these claims would require close study of (genuine) lesbian pornography. But we have seen some such material, especially The Crash Pad. In what ways is Dyer's characterization true of such porn?

Dyer suggests, a bit obliquely, that in heterosexual porn women also are "attributed...this narrative sexuality", i.e., a sexuality that shares the teleological structure of male sexuality. What does he mean by that? And what is the difference between the two ways he suggests that fact might be interpreted: as "a recognition of female sexuality as desire [or] a construction of female sexuality in male terms"?

One of the most striking remarks that Dyer makes is that, at least in the gay porn of his time, "...the narrative is never organized around the desire to be fucked, but around the desire to ejaculate". It's worth reflecting on the analogous point about (most) straight porn. In the case of gay porn, what's missing is one aspect of gay sexual life. In the case of straight porn, what's missing is one gender's sexual life. As concerns heterosexual porn, then, Dyer suggests that one central question is whether and how it might manage to capture central aspects of women's sexual experience.

Dyer's response to this is to call for change, both at the level of pornography itself but also at the level of our experience of pornography, so that we become more critical consumers.

Dyer continues with a discussion of the narrative complexity of (some) gay men's porn. These particular films are obviously not ones we all have seen. So let invite you to reflect on the way in which such narrative structures might have been important to gay men of the time. You can also consider, however, whether (and if so, how) Dyer's remarks apply to the films we are watching for this session. Two remarks that might be especially worth thinking about concern the "reconciliation of the desire for romance and promiscuity, security and freedom, making love and having sex" and the way in which pornography can call attention to itself as a kind of voyeurism.