The manufacture-for-use of pornography and women's inequality

Journal of Political Philosophy

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 174-193

  Vadas, Melinda ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 18844394289     PISSN: 09638016     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9760.2005.00219.x     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. This view is best expressed by the women of the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (FACT) in Caught Looking (New York: Caught Looking, Inc., 1986).
2. The liberal feminist Wendy Kaminer has been an able spokeswoman for this view. Her most recent account is in "Feminists Against the First Amendment," Atlantic (November 1992), 110-18.
3. This is only part of Dworkin and MacKinnon's definition of pornography, but it is the most crucial one for the purposes of this discussion. The complete text of the Pornography/Civil Rights Ordinance is given in their Pornography and Civil Rights: a New Day for Women's Equality (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Organizing Against Pornography, 1988).
4. have previously examined the claim of an identity relationship between pornography and women's subordination in "A First Look at the Pornography/Civil Rights Ordinance," Journal of Philosophy, 17 (1987), 487-511.
5. If I were to employ the old distinction between real and nominal definitions, I would say that Dworkin and MacKinnon's definition of pornography is real, while mine is nominal. That is, my definition merely restates or reorganizes what one would find in dictionary entries under "pornography," while theirs captures the ontological structure of pornography. But, as I hope to show, material that meets the nominal definition of pornography will also meet the real definition.
6. Ronald Dworkin, Life's Dominion (New York: Knopf, 1993), pp. 28-9. Ironically, Dworkin himself fails to apply the inside-out approach to the pornography issue. I believe that his failure is, at its root, due to his acceptance of the false belief, almost axiomatic for liberals, that women's identification as rapable is a fact of nature. The belief in the naturalness of women's rapability precludes one from even correctly describing, much less finding the solution to, the problem of pornography. My aside, then, of "using as theory-free a notation as possible" is somewhat disingenuous. No notation is theory-free: the theories one must be free of are the wrong ones.
7. I also use the term "manufactured-for-use" in the description of pornography to emphasize the empirical fact of its mass quantity. American makers of pornography alone sell over ten billion dollars a year. That the pornography industry is truly an industry does not by itself prove or even suggest that its products are not speech (the newspaper industry is also an industry), but recognition of the actual nature of pornography's mass production is a truthful counterbalance to the often-sketched picture of anti-pornography activity as being aimed at the lonely artist in his garret.
8. This definition leaves open the question of whether pornographic material is representational; that is, the "object" of "any object" might or might not be representational.
9. Life's Dominion, pp. 119-20, my emphasis.
10. I tend to think that there is something truthful about the claim that pornographic sex is fantasy sex, and I think that element of truth is this: the pornographic object is a material analogue to the pornographic object that exists purely in male fantasy, i.e., to a purely mental pornographic object. But whatever the status of other sorts of mental objects, the pornographic mental object, according to the arguments offered below, must also be non-representational. I owe this insight to Panayot Butchuarov.
11. I am using the notion of an appetitive desire to indicate a desire whose satisfaction requires the body in more than the most general causal sense - in that sense, all desires require that one have a body. Appetitive desires and their satisfactions are charted and identified by certain bodily changes in a way that propositional desires - "desires that" - are not. In our research prone culture, we are typically familiar with what these identificatory bodily changes are.
12. To say this is not to say that appetitive desires cannot be educated and re-educated, for of course they can, and in fact the feminist project depends on the possibility of such re-education. But the re-education of appetitive desires has ontological limits - e.g., no one can have the number seven for breakfast. (The feminist re-education project requires that pornographic objects cease to be experienced as women.)
13. I am not claiming that sexual desire is in all ways like hunger, only that it is like hunger in that the object that satisfies it cannot be representational. Roger Scruton is one philosopher who finds many differences between hunger and sexual desire (Sexual Desire: a Moral Philosophy of the Erotic (New York; Free Press, 1986), but he does so largely through distinguishing between sexual desire proper and "curious pleasures" aimed only at orgasm. In my view, Scruton only re-labels the ontological problematic discussed in this essay by stipulatively requiring that sexual acts take place only between persons.
14. It might be objected that, in the act of pornographic consumption, it is not the pornographic object that produces the consumer's satisfaction, but his own hand, and that the sexual object of his act should be identified with that which causally produces the penile friction that leads to his orgasm. So we should say that he sexually consumes his hand or, perhaps, that he sexually consumes himself. But to make this claim is to confuse that which occurs and is identified at the level of social or practice meaning with that which occurs and is identified at the level of sheer causality. Human life is lived at the level of meaning. And at the level of that meaning, a meaning created by the practice of the sexual, it is the consumer's sexual appropriation of the presented pornographic object that produces his orgasm. His sexual act is meaningfully identified as the act of consuming that particular pornographic object. At the level of sheer causality, the consumer's hand movements do indeed produce the penile friction that makes his orgasm physically possible, but these hand movements are as extra-sexual as the air he must breathe: both are causally necessary for his act of sexual consumption to occur, but neither is part of his sexual act as such. (I would like to thank Joyce Trebilcot for helping me to clarify this point.) In those cases in which a man uses pornography to aid him in his sexual consumption of a flesh-and-blood woman, I believe it is correct to say that he consumes both the pornography - i.e., the pornographic woman - and the flesh-and-blood woman simultaneously. The objections most women have to such scenarios are based, I believe, on their inchoate recognition of this duality. (Though the duality of the object consumed is not dependent on women's recognition of its duality. Human life is not only lived at the level of meaning, it is lived at the level of dominant meaning, a dominance in which women as such do not participate.)
15. Pornography might be said to serve as a substitute for what is really desired, but since appetitive substitutes also cannot be representations, this does not affect my point. A dried out apple can, for example, substitute for a desired cheese sandwich in satisfying hunger, but a photograph of the apple cannot.
16. "A First Look at the Pornography/Civil Rights Ordinance," p. 496.
17. The civil libertarian Franklyn S. Haiman sums up the difference between speech and non-speech by saying that symbols, in representing or standing for something else "... are not it; they are about it." (Speech and Law in a Free Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 31.) If ever there were something that was non-representational in being "it" and not "about it" that thing would be a sexual object, pornographic or otherwise.
18. Though my analysis is intended to apply primarily to pictorial pornography - which is now pornography's paradigmatic form - I believe it can be extended to purely written pornography. Briefly, the absence of a formal or functional distinction between a piece of purely written pornography and a woman entails that, as consumed to sexual satisfaction, the words are not speech because not representational - rather they are a sexual object. A man's ability to consume written pornography to sexual satisfaction does not show that speech can be a sexual object, but shows that what is in other contexts speech can be a sexual object. As is the case with pornographic images, when the piece of written pornography re-appears in a context other than that of sexual consumption, it becomes the speech that represents the pornographic object itself. Though it may seem paradoxical that the consumer must know a given language before he can consume a pornographic object that is itself not speech, this fact does not entail that the pornographic object is speech, and the paradox dissolves when we understand that the consumer's knowledge of a language here is like the knowledge of a password that would allow him entrance into a room filled with machinery for his use. Without the password, use of the machinery is impossible, but the machines are not thereby speech - rather, they are that which speech, or the ability to use speech, gives access to. Similarly, it is knowledge of speech that gives the consumer of written pornography access to the pornographic object, an object that is not speech, but a woman. At the opposite end of written pornography - opposite, that is, in terms of the transparency of the object's non-representational identity as a woman - is the new pornography of "virtual reality." These holographic, "interactive" pornographic women are more obviously women and more obviously non-speech objects than are the previous forms of pornography. The manufacture-for-use of these pornographic objects also represents the fastest growing aspect of the virtual reality phenomenon. See "Hi-Tech Porn," On The Issues (Fall 1994), p. 7.
19. There is a tangential empirical proof of pornography's non-representationality that follows from our standard system of sexual classification. According to this system, sexual types are classified on the basis of sexual object orientation. (I am not here suggesting that this system of sexual classification is morally, politically, or intellectually acceptable, only that it is the one commonly used.) Thus, for example, men whose primary sexual object choice is other men are homosexuals, those who choose children as sexual objects are pedophiles, and so on. If pornography were representational, the men who consume it would be "photophiles," a species of pervert. Since American men alone consume ten billion dollars a year of pornography, the hypothesis of pornography's representationality entails that we are virtually awash in perverts. (It could be said that if these same men also sexually consume women they would be bisexual - having the two sexual object choices of women and representations - so they might be only half-perverts.) A conceptually more serious point is that, since the overwhelming majority of men who consume pornography are not only indistinguishable from the male heterosexual norm but represent the norm itself, an analysis that finds them to be sexual perverts is akin to one that finds the standard metre off-size.
20. Toward a Feminist Theory of State (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 124.
21. follow MacKinnon in the use of the terms "man" and "male:" "Male is a social and political concept, not a biological attribute, having nothing whatever to do with ... body as such. " (Ibid., p. 114.) So of course biological males can be treated as women, and biological females can act as men.
22. The identity of the pornographic object as a non-representational female sex object is not affected by the consumer's "identifying with" the object. If the object is sexually consumed, it is formally female, even if the consumer is a woman who imagines herself to be that object.
23. "To be rapable, a position that is social and not biological, defines what a woman is." Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of State, p. 178.
24. This is my explanation of the feminist claim (made, I believe, by Andrea Dworkin, though I cannot find the source) that "pornography is the lie that makes itself true."
25. I have focused here on consent because of its conceptual prominence in rape as rape is ordinarily defined. However, from a feminist perspective, the focus on consent as being that which divides permissible from non-permissible sex acts is itself problematic. A non-sexist sexual practice requires not so much the conceptual moving of women's consent into the practice - though that would certainly be an improvement over our present state of affairs - as dismantling the consent standard in favor of a standard of sexual acceptability that measures or marks a co-present subjectivity. The present role of men's consent in identifying the sex act as such does admit of forcing a man to have sex (as is said to be the case in some of the recent rapes in Bosnia) but it is still the case that the man must, all things considered, consent to performing the sex act before it can be said to have taken place, whereas for a woman no consent, however circumscribed, is similarly required.
26. An informal marker for a conceptually anomalous act would be the query, when one is presented with evidence of its occurrence, "Why would anyone do that?" We might, for example, greet the evidence that someone has taken to eating used automobile parts with such a query. Our practice of food consumption really does not have a conceptual place in it for this sort of activity; in a phrase, such activity does not make sense. At present, however, the act of rape makes perfect conceptual and sexual sense. Men rape because they like the sort of sexual experience rape provides. Some men rape because they prefer sex without consent to sex with consent. Some men rape because sex with consent is not available to them. But, typically, men rape because they want the sex rape is. (Of course, the rapist may want other things too, such as humiliating the victim or performing an act of "ethnic cleansing.")
27. I borrow this phrase from the Black Marxist philosopher Charles W. Mills, who speaks of the "extent to which race structures one's life and penetrates to one's ontic bones." See his "Under Class Under Standings" in Ethics, 104 (1994), p. 862.
28. Recent suggestions (see, for example, Patrick D. Hopkins' "Rethinking Sadomasochism," Hypatia, 9 (1994), pp. 116-141) that rapability be assumed in an on-again-off-again style, that it be as ontologically ungrounded as the style of one's clothes, are both conceptually incoherent and a historical, for reasons whose expansion is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that the ontologized social characteristics upon which rapability supervenes cannot be voluntarily assumed any more than one can voluntarily assume to be of Hungarian ancestry. One can of course pretend to be rapable, just as one can pretend to be of Hungarian ancestry, but that is not the same thing, nor does it work the same way sexually.