ABSTRACT
If asked to define pornography, most people would probably talk about
sexually explicit films, photographs and books, which are intended to
be sexually arousing. However, for many academic feminists, porn-
ography is something very different from this. For example, in Only
Words, Catharine MacKinnon writes:
Andrea Dworkin and I have proposed a law against pornography
that defines it as graphic sexually explicit materials that subordin-
ate women through pictures or words. . . . This definition includes
the harm of what pornography says – its function as defamation or
hate speech – but defines it and it alone in terms of what it does –
its role as subordination, as sex discrimination.
