The Philosophy of Pornography by Lindsay Coleman

Author:Lindsay Coleman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

MacKinnon’s argument used (1) as premise. Some of Langton’s work takes off from (2): she explores how pornography, considered as speech, works its power. My own concern relates to (3). Here we find Easterbrook’s reason for treating pornography as speech: its effects depend upon mental intermediation. In my final section, I consider how mental intermediation is to be understood if it can serve to mark out that which a right to freedom of speech and expression guarantees.

Easterbrook was ruling on Dworkin and MacKinnon’s definition of “pornography,” from which Langton quotes above. Their definition was evidently designed to cover material extant and in use more than thirty years ago when pornography was mostly bought in shops; but with some adjustments, it might be used to capture some material now extant—now that the Internet has made film showing a woman physically and verbally abused readily available.[14] At any rate some of the same kinds of depiction of women that MacKinnon includes in the scope of pornography are found in what many mean by “porn” nowadays. In film on present-day websites, women are certainly depicted as “dehumanized as sexual objects, enjoying pain or humiliation or rape.” The top website found with a simple search for the single word “porn” immediately offers choices within it under the heads of such tags as slut, gagging, dp, humiliation, domination, slave, slapped, degradation, choke, used, brutal, shame, choking, vicious, violated, destroyed, puking.[15] A customer can take his pick, although any particular choice of material will perforce combine many of these themes. The customer also has “access to total degradation,” but for that he does have to pay. (He has no need to pay for rape scenes, however: these are accessible on five of the top ten sites that may be found using the two words “free porn.”)[16]

Let me use the word “porn” then, as I think MacKinnon and Langton have both used “pornography,” so that it would cover the material picked out by Dworkin and MacKinnon’s definition when that is updated to include the new kinds of violation of a woman that have come to be shown in readily accessible websites. On such an understanding of porn, explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity is not eo ipso porn. Plenty of pornography, as some may understand that, does not qualify as porn: it is not my concern, and perhaps has never been the concern of so-called “anti-porn feminists.” Dworkin and MacKinnon wanted to define certain material by reference to what it does, and then to say what sorts of material may be included as being such as to do that.[17]

However exactly one might want to circumscribe the material of concern (which I am calling porn), if it is to be understood in the speech act terms in which Langton wants to understand it, isolating it as a category will not be achieved by saying simply that it is material meeting such-and-such conditions. The reason is that a speech act, in the paradigm case at least, involves not only an utterance (here “material”), but also a speaker, a hearer, and a context.

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