ABSTRACT

Antiporn feminists and their critics have both overlooked the dose-response relationship, commonly speaking of exposure to pornography as if it were an all-or-nothing phenomenon. The author has urged that the best feminist argument against pornography focuses on the harms that arise due to the eroticization of inegalitarian relations between women and men. If this is right, then attempts to gather evidence for the harm hypothesis should concentrate on specifically inegalitarian pornography while using egalitarian pornography and erotica as controls. Pornography eroticizes the mechanisms, norms, myths, and trappings of gender inequality. Its fusing of pleasure with subordination has two components: it does so in terms of its representational content by depicting 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; inegalitarian pornography presents these representations of subordination in a manner aimed to sexually arouse.