Feminism and Pornography

This chapter explores some of the influential cultural, industrial, and legal factors that have fostered polarized American feminist positions on the question of pornography. It begins with concerns emerging from the women’s liberation movement, which grew out of radical feminist insights about heterosexuality and the role of male sexual violence in maintaining patriarchy. Next it considers the growth and greater visibility of mainstream pornography in American society throughout the 1970s, a shift that opened many women’s eyes to its often sexist and violent content. Feminist antipornography organizing moved to the forefront of the women’s movement as new activist groups seized the issue and turned to boycotts, public education, and—later—legal remedies to try to control pornography’s spread. The chapter discusses the rise of a countermovement intent on defending sexual speech and women’s erotic rights as antipornography turned increasingly toward the state, endorsing a groundbreaking—but sexually chilling—antipornography civil rights ordinance developed by the author Andrea Dworkin and the legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon. In the years following the Supreme Court’s rejection of the ordinance, antipornography activists embraced new approaches, such as a campaign against sex trafficking and the concept of pornography addiction, in the hope of finally achieving legal suppression.