On Pornography

‘Pornography’ seems to me to be one of the urgent and unanswered questions that our culture presents to itself. The sense of urgency is provided by the constant activity in this area: police seizure of material; attacks by feminists on representations and those who market them; and the pornography industry’s own attempts to get increased public acceptance. Now, the Williams Committee ¹ has produced a series of recommendations for replacing the existing unworkable legislation in this area. My sense that the question remains unanswered is perhaps more contentious: several definitions of pornography do exist which are perfectly adequate for their protagonists. Yet they are purely moral definitions, concerned with recruiting for particular ideas of ‘what should be done’ about pornography. They all assume that ‘pornography’ is an inherent attribute of certain representations. This is an untenable assumption: ‘pornography’ is rather a designation given to a class of representations which is defined by particular ideological currents active in our society. These ideological currents are crystallized into particular political groupings which produce their own definitions of ‘pornography’ and propagate them through various kinds of actions against particular representations. Different criteria are used, so that the definition of ‘pornography’, its supposed effects, and methods of limiting them, are areas of struggle between differing positions.