Pornography is everywhere, and it raises a host of difficult questions. What counts as pornography, first of all? When does material cross the line from being erotic to being objectionable? Where does a person's entitlement to sexual freedom end and another person's right not to feel objectified begin? How should rights be weighed against consequences in deciding what laws and policies ought to be adopted? Philosophers Andrew Altman and Lori Watson explore these and other issues in this succinct (...) and readable for-and-against volume. (shrink)

Political deepfakes have prompted outcry about the diminishing trustworthiness of visual depictions, and the epistemic and political threat this poses. Yet this new technique is being used overwhelmingly to create pornography, raising the question of what, if anything, is wrong with the creation of deepfake pornography. Traditional objections focusing on the sexual abuse of those depicted fail to apply to deepfakes. Other objections—that the use and consumption of pornography harms the viewer or other (non-depicted) individuals—fail to explain (...) the objection that a depicted person might have to the creation of deepfake pornography that utilises images of them. My argument offers such an explanation. It begins by noting that the creation of sexual images requires an act of consent, separate from any consent needed for the acts depicted. Once we have separated these out, we can see that a demand for consent can arise when a sexual image is of us, even when no sexual activity was actually engaged in, as in the case of deepfake pornography. I then demonstrate that there are two ways in which an image can be ‘of us’, both of which can exist in the case of deepfakes. Thus, I argue: if a person, their likeness, or their photograph is used to create pornography, their consent is required. Whenever the person depicted does not consent (or in the case of children, can’t consent), that person is wronged by the creation of deepfake pornography and has a claim against its production. (shrink)

Rae Langton and Caroline West argue that pornography silences women by presupposing misogynistic attitudes, such as that women enjoy being raped. More precisely, they claim that a somewhat infamous pictorial, ‘Dirty Pool’, makes such presuppositions, and that it is typical in this respect. I argue for four claims. (1) There are empirical reasons to doubt that women are silenced in the way that Langton and West claim they are. (2) There is no evidence that very much pornography makes (...) the sorts of presuppositions that Langton and West's explanation of silencing requires it to make. (3) Even ‘Dirty Pool’, for all its other problems, does not make such presuppositions. (4) Langton and West misread ‘Dirty Pool’ because they do not take proper account of the fact that pornography often traffics in sexual fantasy. The broader lesson is that we need to read pornography more sensitively if we are to understand its capacity to shape socio‐sexual norms (for good or for ill). (shrink)

ABSTRACT In ‘Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game’, Rae Langton and Caroline West borrow ideas from David Lewis to attempt to explain how pornography might subordinate and silence women. Pornography is supposed to express certain misogynistic claims implicitly, through presupposition, and to convey them indirectly, through accommodation. I argue that the appeal to accommodation cannot do the sort of work Langton and West want it to do: Their case rests upon an overly simplified model of that phenomenon. I (...) argue further that, once we are clear about why Langton and West's account fails, a different and more plausible account of pornography's influence emerges. (shrink)

In a recent and provocative essay, Christopher Bartel attempts to resolve the gamer’s dilemma. The dilemma, formulated by Morgan Luck, goes as follows: there is no principled distinction between virtual murder and virtual pedophilia. So, we’ll have to give up either our intuition that virtual murder is morally permissible—seemingly leaving us over-moralizing our gameplay—or our intuition that acts of virtual pedophilia are morally troubling—seemingly leaving us under-moralizing our game play. Bartel’s attempted resolution relies on establishing the following three theses: (1) (...) virtual pedophilia is child pornography, (2) the consumption of child pornography is morally wrong, and (3) virtual murder is not murder. Relying on Michael Rea’s definition of pornography, I argue that we should reject thesis one, but since Bartel’s moral argument in thesis two does not actually rely thesis one that his resolution is not thereby undermined. Still, even if we grant that there are adequate resources internal to Bartel’s account to technically resolve the gamer’s dilemma his reasoning is still unsatisfying. This is so because Bartel follows Neil Levy in arguing that virtual pedophilia is wrong because it harms women. While I grant Levy’s account, I argue that this is the wrong kind of reason to resolve the gamer’s dilemma because it is indirect. What we want is to know what is wrong with virtual child pornography itself. Finally, I suggest alternate moral resources for resolving the gamer’s dilemma that are direct in a way that Bartel’s resources are not. (shrink)

A book in which analytic philosophers examine the portrayal of sex in art and the possible artistic value of pornography proves a disappointment. Although a transcendental objection to pornographic art is rebutted, the papers employ barren philosophical methods that divert energy away from significant problems and into scholastic quibbles.

This book provides an introduction to philosophical treatments of pornography. It considers relevant debates in ethics, aesthetics, feminist philosophy, political philosophy, epistemology, and social ontology thus offering a comprehensive examination of the topic. While offering an introduction, the book also puts forward substantive philosophical views on pornography.

Claims that pornography cannot be art typically depend on controversial claims about essential value differences (moral, aesthetic) between pornography and art. In this paper, I offer a value-neutral exclusionary claim, showing pornography to be descriptively at odds with art. I then show how my view is an improvement on similar claims made by Jerrold Levinson. Finally I draw parallels between art and pornography and art and advertising as well as show that my view is consistent with (...) our typical usage of the term “pornographic art.”. (shrink)

Rae Langton famously argues that pornographic speech illocutionarily subordinates and silences women. Making good this view hinges on identifying the context relevant for fixing such force. To do so, a parallel is typically drawn between pornographic recordings and multipurpose signs involved in delayed communication, but the parallel generates a dispute about the right illocutionary force-fixing context. Jennifer Saul and myself argue that if pornographic speech is akin to multipurpose signs, its illocutionary force is fixed by the actual decoding context: of (...) using/viewing pornographic recordings. By contrast, Claudia Bianchi argues that the relevant context is intended/expected decoding. Here I take issue with Bianchi’s view. Her intentionalist account faces two serious objections. First, the collapse objection: Bianchi’s intentionalist view is so formulated that it collapses into that endorsed by Saul and me. This undermines Bianchi’s case against us. Second, the dissonance objection: looking at a different aspect of Bianchi’s view, and one that does depart from the positions of Saul and myself, shows that her analysis is too intentionalist and cannot be used to elucidate pornography’s illocutionary force. Bianchi’s view should hence be rejected. This nevertheless leaves open further theoretical avenues of research, which I briefly discuss at the end of the paper. (shrink)

We investigate the question of whether (and if so why) creating or distributing deepfake pornography of someone without their consent is inherently objectionable. We argue that nonconsensually distributing deepfake pornography of a living person on the internet is inherently pro tanto wrong in virtue of the fact that nonconsensually distributing intentionally non-veridical representations about someone violates their right that their social identity not be tampered with, a right which is grounded in their interest in being able to exercise (...) autonomy over their social relations with others. We go on to suggest that nonconsensual deepfakes are especially worrisome in connection with this right because they have a high degree of phenomenal immediacy, a property which corresponds inversely to the ease with which a representation can be doubted. We then suggest that nonconsensually creating and privately consuming deepfake pornography is worrisome but may not be inherently pro tanto wrong. Finally, we discuss the special issue of whether nonconsensually distributing deepfake pornography of a deceased person is inherently objectionable. We argue that the answer depends on how long it has been since the person died. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to show that pornography dehumanizes women through essentialization. First, I argue that certain acts of subject-essentialization are acts of subject-dehumanization. Second, I demonstrate, by reviewing evidence about the linguistic material that we find in and around pornography, that pornography systematically deploys content that essentializes women in the ways identified as problematic. It follows that pornography dehumanizes women.

To be radical about pornography used to mean that one favored less censorship; now it often means that one favors more. That political change reflects a shift in the dominant paradigm of pornography and its putative evils. Until quite recently, most people who believed pornography wrong thought that it offended against decency and propriety and was therefore obscene. That was certainly the view of the law. English judges first created the crime of obscene libel in 1727 on (...) the basis that such expression tended to corrupt the morals of the King's subjects, a thought that inspired most subsequent legislation in the common‐law world. Sometimes the underlying concern really was paternalistic: pornography degrades and corrupts its producers and consumers; the law forces them to become better people. More often, however, it was just moralism of the familiar sorts: the view that a majority of a community is entitled to enforce its moral views on the rest, either because that is democratic or because that is just what it means to be a community. The obscenity paradigm thus had two features. First, it was illiberal: it ranked personal autonomy below realizing the good, enforcing the majority will, or embodying communitarian values. Second, it was gender neutral: to understand the nature of pornography did not require theorizing relations between men and women. On the obscenity paradigm, pornography was a matter of virtue versus vice, majorities versus minorities. (shrink)

Pornography has attracted a good deal of academic and political attention, primarily from feminists of various persuasions, moral philosophers, and legal scholars. Surprisingly less work has been forthcoming from film theorists, given how much pornography has been produced on video and DVD and is now available through live streaming video over the Internet. Indeed, it is not until 1989, with the publication of Linda Williams’ groundbreaking Hard Core, that pornography is distinguished, in terms of its content, intent, (...) and governing conventions, as a filmic genre of its own. Still, not all pornography exists as film, and so a full discussion of it must encompass its other manifestations (e.g., magazines, websites, comics, etc.). The central questions about pornography are these: (1) What is it? How is it to be defined? (2) What are its effects? (3) How, if at all, ought it to be regulated? While these questions are simple, providing answers to them, as we shall see, is complicated. There is plenty of disagreement about how to define pornography; research about pornography’s effects is not univocal; and this in turn leads to substantial debate about what can and may be done about pornography. It is to these matters that the bulk of this essay is addressed. To begin, however, we will take a brief snapshot of the emergence of pornographic film and of the pornography business as it exists today. (shrink)

I defend pornography as an important aspect of freedom of expression, which is essential for autonomy, self-development, the growth of knowledge and human flourishing. I rebut the allegations that pornography depraves and corrupts, degrades women, is harmful to children, exposes third parties to risk of offence or assault, and violates women ’s civil rights and liberties. I contend that suppressing pornography would have a range of unintended evil consequences, including loss of beneficial technology, creeping censorship, black markets, (...) corruption and extensive social costs. (shrink)

This collection of eleven new essays contains the latest developments in analytic feminist philosophy on the topic of pornography. While honoring early feminist work on the subject, it aims to go beyond speech act analyses of pornography and to reshape the philosophical discourse that surrounds pornography. A rich feminist literature on pornography has emerged since the 1980s, with Rae Langton's speech act theoretic analysis dominating specifically Anglo-American feminist philosophy on pornography. Despite the predominance of this (...) literature, there remain considerable disagreements and precious little agreement on many key issues: What is pornography? Does pornography constitute women's subordination and silencing? Does it objectify women in harmful ways? Is pornography authoritative enough to enact women's subordination? Is speech act theory the best way to approach pornography? Given the deep divergences over these questions, the first goal of this collection is to take stock of extant debates in order to clarify key feminist conceptual and political commitments regarding pornography. This volume further aims to go beyond the prevalent speech-acts approach to pornography, and to highlight novel issues in feminist pornography-debates, including the aesthetics of pornography, trans* identities and racialization in pornography, and putatively feminist pornography. (shrink)

Is pornography within the coverage of the First Amendment? A familiar argument claims that it is not. This argument reasons that the free speech principle protects the communication of ideas, which appeal to the reason ; pornography communicates no ideas and appeals to the passions rather than the reason ; therefore pornography is not protected by the free speech principle. This argument has been specified in different ways by different writers. The most prominent and careful of these (...) are Frederick Schauer and John Finnis. Both founder on the attempt to distinguish pornography from art, which both would protect. If art, film, and literature should be protected, then this protection should extend to the pornographic subsets of these genres. (shrink)

The primary purpose of depictive works of pornography, we take it, is sexual arousal through sexually explicit representations; what we callprototypical pornography satisfies those aims through the adoption of a ceteris paribus maximally realistic depictive style. Given that the purpose of sexual arousal seems best fulfilled by establishing the most robust connections between the viewer and the depictive subject, we find it curious that not all works of pornography aspire to prototypical status. Accordingly, we target for philosophical (...) scrutiny several non-standard but putatively pornographic forms: Tijuana Bibles, hentai manga, and slash-fiction. We find that works of these genres possess certain depictively or fictively oriented properties that appear at least prima facie incompatible with prototypical pornography, and thereby to pose two pressing questions that anyprima facie viable analysis of pornography must answer: the depiction question and the fiction question. By answering these questions, we can not only arrive at a deeper understanding of the aims of pornography and the reasons for which significant sub-genres of pornography might diverge from the prototypical ideal, but also perhaps better understand what lies at pornography’s edge, and so better understand the ways in which pornography might relate to what lies beyond. (shrink)

Philosophers involved in the ‘porn-or-art’ debates standardly assume that pornography is centrally about sexual arousal, while art is about something else. I argue against this assumption and for the view that there is no single thing that pornography (or art) ‘is about’. This suggests that there is no prima facie reason for claiming that some x cannot be both pornography and art. I further go on to develop an understanding of (what I call) ‘porno-art’ - a wholly (...) new kind of thing developing from the extant categories of pornography and art, but still distinct and separate from them. (shrink)

According to Catharine MacKinnon, pornography itself subordinates women by ranking women as inferior to men and legitimating acts of violence and discrimination against us. As such, pornography is directly implicated in women's diminished moral and civil status. It follows that pornography is not a form of speech, but rather an action, and so does not deserve first amendment protection. I argue that MacKinnon does not adequately support her claim that pornography is an action but instead shows (...) that it is harmful speech. While this might be grounds for limiting it, MacKinnon does not adequately support the view that pornography is especially harmful in comparison to other sorts of misogynist and sexist speech. Hence we lack reasons to limit pornography alone. (shrink)

While pornography addiction currently circulates as a comprehensible, diagnosable, and describable way to make sense of some people’s ostensibly problematic relationship with pornography, such a comprehensive description of this relationship has only recently been made possible. The current analysis makes visible pornography addiction as situated within a varied history of concerns about pornography, masturbation, fantasy, and technology in an effort to bring to bear a conceptual critique of the modern concept of pornography addiction. Such a (...) critique in turn works to offer an alternative to treating the study of pornography addiction as the discovery of a new disease, instead conceiving it as the propagation of old forms of knowledge under a new moniker. (shrink)

When Susan Sontag addresses the problem of pornography and relates it to Hegel, she is not merely describing a path in European philosophy aimed to construct a new language, but she is also committing this aim to the importance of re-reading culture. The fashion in which pornography describes reality is meaningful when we are trying to approach Hegel in his aim to construct a post-religious language that finally will make ready-to-hand life as life. Politics, and society, being two (...) essential elements to understand reality, become singularly interesting when analyzed through the gaze of Sontag in combination of Hegel’s philosophy. The conservative morals that reign over what we understand as pornography, and the cultural moment of Europe since the most progressive moments of the 19 th century, describe a fatalist landscape for the future of society and politics. Yet, the learnings from Hegel remain meaningful. In this paper I examine how a post-religious philosophy, aimed long ago by Hegel’s contribution to philosophy, can serve to the understanding of a post-pornographic society: a society that is able to learn from the contributions of Frankfurt’s school with regards to an efficient cultural tissue, and defeat the old religious morals that are inserted in the backbone of politics and philosophy still today. (shrink)

Pornography has been defined as sex separated from personality. In other words, life’s deepest need to express desire and affection and perpetuate the species is reduced to appetite and the satisfaction of appetite. War in many ways does the same. It depersonalizes killing by pitting stranger against stranger—uniformed or otherwise. Fatalities are reduced to numbers. Such killings are dignified by slogans (“Vietnamizing the Vietnamese” or “Operation Iraqi Freedom”),. Preparing troops for the killings in war is everything from oratory to (...) close order drill, parades and honors. Denis de Rougemont in LOVE IIN THE WESTERN WORLD has even traced this to the legend of Tristan and Isolde in which Tristan chooses a military life to define his manhood after leaving Isolde. All of these manifestation and pretenses gloss over the brutality of war just as films, photographs and other promotions disguise pornography as mere excitement. (shrink)

La porno straight est un genre littéraire, photographique et cinématographique socialement et historiquement situé, facilement accessible, jusque dans l’univers domestique – le câble – et le domaine professionnel – les écrans de veille. Je ne connais pas la pornographie..

Catharine MacKinnon has claimed that pornography is the subordination of women. Rae Langton has defended the plausibility and coherence of this claim by drawing on speech act theory. I argue that considering the role of context in speech acts poses serious problems for Langton's defence of MacKinnon. Langton's account can be altered in order to accommodate the role of context. Once this is done, however, her defence of MacKinnon no longer looks so plausible. Finally, I argue that the speech (...) act approach (adapted to account for context) offers an appealing way to make sense of disagreements over pornography; but also that this will probably not be so appealing to most proponents of the speech acts approach. (shrink)

The article addresses the critical strategy of profanation in the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, focusing on the example of pornography. Agamben’s references to pornography as a site of radical political transformation have recently been criticized as abstruse, vacuous or absurd. Moreover, his own work on the concentration camps in the Homo Sacer series has been disparagingly referred to as ‘pornography of horror’. This article ventures to refute these accusations by interpreting Agamben’s paradigmatic use of pornography in (...) the context of his wider project of profanation, understood as the overcoming of all social separations and the return of objects of social praxis to free use. Read in this context, pornography is grasped as the paradigmatic site of the constitution of the unprofanable, the epitome of the late capitalist ‘society of the spectacle’ and thus the primary target of profanatory criticism. In the remainder of the article we elucidate the logic of Agamben’s profanatory strategy and conclude that, far from being politically irrelevant, profanation constitutes the condition of the actualization of Agamben’s messianic ideal of a generic and non-exclusive community. (shrink)

We refine a line of feminist criticism of pornography that focuses on pornographic works' pernicious effects. A.W. Eaton argues that inegalitarian pornography should be criticized because it is responsible for its consumers’ adoption of inegalitarian attitudes toward sex in the same way that other fictions are responsible for changes in their consumers’ attitudes. We argue that her argument can be improved with the recognition that different fictions can have different modes of persuasion. This is true of film and (...) television: a satirical movie such as Dr. Strangelove does not morally educate in the same way as a realistic series such as The Wire. We argue that this is also true of pornography: inegalitarian depictions of sex are not invariably responsible for consumers' adoption of inegalitarian attitudes toward sex in reality. Given that pornographic works of different genres may harm in different ways, different feminist criticisms are appropriate for different genres of pornography. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: History of Obscenity/Pornography Law Arguments against Pornography Based on Harm Arguments against Pornography Based on Equality.

In the last twenty years, recorded messages and written notes have become a significant test and an intriguing puzzle for the semantics of indexical expressions (see Smith 1989, Predelli 1996, 1998a,1998b, 2002, Corazza et al. 2002, Romdenh-Romluc 2002). In particular, the intention-based approach proposed by Stefano Predelli has proven to bear interesting relations to several major questions in philosophy of language. In a recent paper (Saul 2006), Jennifer Saul draws on the literature on indexicals and recorded messages in order to (...) criticize Rae Langton's claim that works of pornography can be understood as illocutionary acts – in particular acts of subordinating women or acts of silencing women. Saul argues that it does not make sense to understand works of pornography as speech acts, because only utterances in contexts can be speech acts. More precisely, works of pornography such as a film may be seen as recordings that can be used in many different contexts – exactly like a written note or an answering machine message. According to Saul, bringing contexts into the picture undermines Langton's radical thesis – which must be reformulated in much weaker terms. In this paper, I accept Saul's claim that only utterances in contexts can be speech acts, and that therefore only works of pornography in contexts may be seen as illocutionary acts of silencing women. I will, nonetheless, show that Saul's reformulation doesn't undermine Langton's thesis. To this aim, I will use the distinction Predelli proposes in order to account for the semantic behaviour of indexical expressions in recorded messages – namely the distinction between context of utterance and context of interpretation. (shrink)

This essay explains the prevalence of porn consumption by modeling it as a form of simulation. According to simulation theory (Gordon 1986, Goldman 2006) people predict and explain other’s behavior by using their own mind to model the mind of a target individual, much like an engineer might use a model aircraft to simulate the behavior of an actual aircraft. However, the cognitive mechanisms required for simulation have application outside of psychological interpretation. For example, it is plausible that while consuming (...) pornography individuals simulate the actual activities as depicted by the pornographic material. On this construal, viewers of pornography think and feel as though they are truly having the depicted experience: from the psychological and phenomenological perceptive of someone watching a pornographic video, they really are being sexually pleasured by others, and in just those specific ways. The goal of this essay is to develop the pornography-as-simulation model and examine both its social and theoretical implications. (shrink)

Technology facilitates certain behaviours. This underlies the argument that the Internet may not be as benign as we might like to think. It is argued in this paper, through examination of the case of the capture of a large number of people on charges of possession of child pornography, that the Internet constitutes a kind of unintentional entrapment. Some consequences of this are explored.

This article results from the experimental convergence of five elements. Three of these are seemingly unrelated names: the Anglican philosopher John Milbank, the German critical theorist Walter Benjamin, and the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ. The remaining two are themes that seem to have little relation to each other: the explosion of online pornography, which is making addicts of younger and younger users, and Christology or the study of the nature and work of the Second Person of the Trinity.

One striking feature of pornographic images is that they emphasize what is depicted and underplay the way it is depicted: the experience of pornography rarely involves awareness of the picture’s composition or of visual rhyme. There are various ways of making this distinction between what is depicted in a picture and the way the depicted object is depicted in it. Following Richard Wollheim, I call these two aspects, the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of pictorial representation ‘recognitional’ and ‘configurational’, respectively. Some (...) pictures emphasize one of these aspects while underplaying the other. Pornographic pictures try to trigger as little attention to the ‘configurational’ aspect as possible. Instead of examining pornography, where the ‘configurational’ aspect of experience is underplayed, I focus on a historical attempt to create images of the female body where the ‘recognigional’ element is the one that is underplayed and the ‘configurational’ elements of the picture form an essential part of our experience. The pictures I have in mind are André Kertész’s series of photographs from 1933, called Distortions. I argue that Kertész’s Distortions are in this respect the counterpoint of pornography: they may be the least pornographic representations of the female nude. Instead of ignoring the ‘configurational aspects of the picture, making the picture transparent and fully at the service of showing the female body and thus to trigger arousal, Kertész aims to achieve the exact opposite. His photographs strip the female body of all its sexual connotations and draw our attention to the formal features of the picture – which is quite a feat in the light of the subject matter of these pictures that normally draw our attention away from the formal features of pictures. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I present and assess arguments both for and against censorship of pornography, explaining why the case on each side is inconclusive. In an effort to move beyond issues of censorship and to address the growing problem of violence in pornography, I propose a distinction between erotica and violent pornography. I then utilise this distinction to evaluate the moral status of, and certain social responses to, violent pornography. I show why most arguments that violent pornography (...) is morally wrong rest on assumptions that either may not be true or do not apply to all instances of violent pornography. I also indicate why the only unconditional moral argument against violent pornography—an argument I find reasonable—will not be universally acceptable. Finally, I discuss two alternatives to censoring violent pornography. I argue that the first, which adapts Joel Feinberg's right of reasonable avoidability, is too weak, while the second, which advocates refusing all subsidy and support for violent pornography, is ultimately too strong as a social response in a society committed to freedom. (shrink)

In contrast to [Susan] Sontag, who used the tools of literary criticism to evaluate sexually explicit fiction, I will use the conventions of pornography to interpret a dramatic monologue in which an expected sexual encounter fails to take place. In analyzing Rossetti’s “Jenny,” I will employ an interpretive model based on the work of [Steven] Marcus, [Susan] Griffin, and [Andrea] Dworkin. Despite different assumptions about sexuality—Marcus is a Freudian, Griffin believes in a mystical eros residing in the psyche and (...) waiting to be rediscovered, Dworkin regards heterosexuality as a construct for subjugating women and masking men’s homoerotic drive—they share several ideas applicable to “Jenny.” Although pornography features, and indeed perpetuates, various kinds of masculine power, especially the powers of money, class, and culture, it purports to be ahistorical in order to obscure its status as ideology. It depicts male sexuality as fear-laden aggression resulting in very little pleasure; thus it is not liberating on either a political or a personal basis. Pornography does not include “others.” Women are present only to be silenced, objectified, treated as screens on which a man projects his fantasies. Marcus, Griffin, and Dworkin are all concerned with what Suleiman calls “the representational or fantasmatic content” of pornography and “the political implications of that content.” The risks of emphasizing the representational—most especially, the denigration of language and style that result from Dworkin’s approach—can, as Suleiman says, be mitigated by careful attention to a particular text .In Rossetti’s poem, a young man attempts to purchase a night’s pleasure with a London prostitute named Jenny. After she thwarts his plans by falling asleep, he spends the night meditating about her beauty, speculating about her past, present, and future, and thinking about the causes of prostitution. Although Rossetti’s subject matter is consistent with the etymological definition of pornography as “writing about prostitutes,” he avoids the explicit depiction of sexual activity which has been the common element in most modern accounts of the genre. Indeed, the only physical contact between the narrator and Jenny occurs at daybreak when he places coins in her hair and gives her a parting kiss. Robin Sheets is associate professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. She has written on Thackeray, George Eliot, and other Victorian writers and is coauthor of The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and American, 1837-1883. (shrink)

This article provides an overview of the key philosophical themes and debates in discussions of pornography. In particular, I consider the major positions on how pornography ought to be defined, when (and if ) it should be regulated, whether it is best understood as speech (or action), whether there is evidence that is it harmful. I argue in favor of what is known as the civil rights approach to pornography, as reflected in the work of Catharine MacKinnon.

Catharine MacKinnon argues that pornography is action, rather than speech. She argues further that the speech/action distinction is what delineates the scope of the First Amendment. It follows, she thinks, that pornography does not fall within the scope of the First Amendment. I argue that the legal distinction between speech and action on which MacKinnon relies is unstable and therefore cannot determine which utterances fall within the scope of the First Amendment. Indeed, attempting to sort utterances by means (...) of the speech/action distinction in order to make this determination can lead to a paradox, which I call the “viewpoint paradox”. That an utterance expresses a particular viewpoint is typically sufficient for its qualifying as speech; yet MacKinnon’s argument that pornography is not speech pivots are her claim that it is an act of subordination because it expresses a particular viewpoint about women. (shrink)

Section 1 proposes a new philosophical account of melancholy. Section 2 examines the reasons why one might think that pornography and melancholy are incompatible. Section 3 discusses some successful examples of melancholic pornography and makes the case that feminist pornographers are particularly well-placed to produce such material.

Pornographic speech harms women by playing a key role in sustaining the social conditions through which women's liberty and equality are undercut. Though there is a principled moral and constitutional basis for pursuing a legal strategy in fighting pornography, we should not overestimate the effectiveness of the law or underestimate its potential dangers. The struggle against pornography must be waged through education, expressive exploration, and protest, not through the law.

This paper aims to provide a "real", as opposed to "merely stipulative", definition of "pornography". The paper first argues that no extant definition of "pornography" comes close to being a real definition, and then goes on to defend a novel definition by showing how it avoids objections that plague its rivals.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Tools of Folk Psychology The Modern Perversion of Mental Simulation Conclusions and Assessments Notes.

For a few years in the 1980s, Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women appeared to have changed the intellectual landscape – as well as some people’s lives. Pornography, she argued, not only constitutes violence against women; it constitutes also the main conduit for such violence, of which rape is at once the prime example and the central image. In short, it is patriarchy’s most powerful weapon. Given that, feminists’ single most important task is to deal with pornography. (...) By the early 1990s, however, the consensus had become that her project was a diversion, both politically and intellectually. Today, who would argue that pornography is a crucial political issue? I shall argue that Dworkin has in fact a great deal to teach us – perhaps even more today, as we are going through the neo-liberal revolution, than thirty years ago. Her argument is not a causal one, despite in places reading as if it were. The legal route she chose as the ground on which to fight may well be a dead end, but that does nothing to undermine the force of her analysis. Nor does the fact that she makes arguments that might not be recognized as professionally philosophical or social scientific undermine their substantive force. It may even be that pornography itself is not the sole key she thought it was to understanding and dealing with political realities; but even if that were so, the form of her analysis, far from rhetorical and/or fallacious, is exactly what is needed to counter the depredations of neo-liberal “common sense”. That she herself found it difficult to find a language beyond that of liberalism to express her argument is no reason either for ignoring or misinterpreting it. (shrink)

I have taken a Kantian approach to the issue of pornography and degradation. My thesis is that by perpetuating derogatory myths about womankind, for the sake of financial gain, the pornography industry treats the class of women as a means only, and not as composed of individuals who are ends in themselves. It thus de-grades all women, as members of this class, imputing to them less than full human status.

Sade's personal fate has too long encouraged critics to concentrate on his personal isolation and personal revolt. Extraordinary as his life was, the light that it throws on his work casts into shade the intellectual context that was much more important to its generation than his actual experience. This book is about how Sade took a pure version of eighteenth-century materialism and rendered it into an even purer form of pornography. The eternal yet unequal clashing of atomic bodies became (...) the endless torture of human ones. It traces the intellectual genealogy that links Sade to his materialist forebears (d'Holbach, Condillac, Buffon, Diderot, La Mettrie, Robinet, Delisle de Sales) and shows how the germs of cruel pleasure were already present in elements of their work, as much in their rhetoric and stylistics as in their arguments. Sade, aided by his grounding in the interpretative techniques of illicit clandestine and libertine literature, read them attentively and developed their presentation as well as their content into a flawlessly logical and self-referential system. Thus the arrogant philosopher (the author / the libertine) did not just mouth his cruel positions but enacted them, proving the behaviour of matter as he/she did so. This reading of Sade's work refers its principal elements - shape, style and contents - back to the hardcore of materialism, offering an account which, while not making it more tolerable, renders it at once more accessible and more comprehensible. (shrink)

The Supreme Court views the word “obscene” as akin to word “pornographic”. Nothing is “obscene” unless it tends to cause erotic states in the mind of the beholder, and anything that produces this kind of “psychic stimulation” is a likely candidate for the obscenity label whether or not the induced states are offensive to the person who has them or anyone else aware of them. Recent Supreme Court decisions on the permissibility of pornography, particularly the various judicial formulae the (...) court has produced to deal with the problem, are reviewed. It is shown that the Court has vacillated between different legitimizing principles, applying either a liberal offense principle mediated by balancing tests or a thinly disguised moralism. (shrink)