Pornography: Men Possessing Women

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In recent years, she had become increasingly disabled. Operations to replace her knees, worn down by years of obesity, left her in constant pain. Through the course of human history, women have always been objectified and subjected to a certain form of control and humiliation. However, with the advent of capitalism, pornography turned things upside down, canonised and brought to the surface every kind of perversion imaginable. The constant, unchanging element is the debasing and humiliation of women. Objectification in it's ultimate forms. It is an industry created by men, for men. Even in our "sex positive" and pro sex work empowerment "feminism", this constant never had changed. Males are the highest consumers of pornography in all its forms even in the pseudo "safe" medium and faux liberation of the only fans camgirling. That year she met the writer John Stoltenberg. They lived together for more than 30 years, with Dworkin encouraging John in his work to educate young men about rape and sexual assault.

Book Genre: Feminism, Feminist Theory, Gender, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Politics, Sexuality, Sociology, Theory, Womens, Womens Studies And what Dworkin gets at is that this is all very, very convenient for men. Most dudes are perfectly fine with all this. And that neither of them experienced, even for a second, anything resembling what freedom felt like the few times they've experienced something like real freedom.

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I wondered if my own attitude to porn would change when I had a daughter. It didn't, really (except obviously for the fact that the amount of free time anyone had to look at porn, or anything else, disappeared). What has become more acutely obvious to me is how the exercise of female sexuality is derided from some quarters. After we watched the documentary After Porn, Hannah and I had a conversation about what we'd do if our daughter ever went into porn. I can't say I'd be enthusiastic about it, but I know for sure I wouldn't think any less of her, and I would be furious about the way some people talk about these women. In this regard Dworkin's arguments don't help at all, because ultimately she still considers everything to do with (male) sexuality disgusting and corrupting. When young women put on the Dworkin x-ray specs for a moment, they see female victims everywhere - not just in the sex industry. Women who like porn, any women who has been seduced by a man, women in the gym, women who wear make up ... and any of us who do not see the penis as a "symbol of terror" must have been brainwashed by misogynist culture. "We ingested it as children whole, had its values and consciousness imprinted on our minds as cultural absolutes," Dworkin wrote in Woman Hating in 1974. Dworkin can't accept that anyone could take part in porn of their own free will – or if they do, it must be a free will corrupted by male-supremacist society to the point where it can no longer be taken as their own. That means she's forced into what seems to me to be the absurd and antifeminist position of denying their agency completely: less sophisticated women may think they know what they want, but Andrea Dworkin knows better. Stoya or Sasha Grey might see themselves as intelligent and articulate businesswomen with a lot of sexual curiosity; Andrea Dworkin sees only ‘the dummy forced by the pimp-ventriloquist’. N2 - I argue that Dworkin has much to teach us in today’s neo-liberal world. Her argument is not primarily a causal one, despite sometimes 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 underlying analysis. It may even be that pornography is less pivotal than she thought; but even then, the form of her analysis and the substance of her argument, far from being rhetorical and/or fallacious, are exactly what we need 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 excuse either for ignoring or misinterpreting it. In places her argument certainly remains within liberal constraints; in others, however, it is profoundly anti-liberal: but this internal tension does not detract from its pertinence. All reasonable points, though a little disingenuous – I think it's unarguable that at least some porn is deliberately intended to be degrading, and sought out for that reason. This is something that's become both more marked and, conversely, more balanced over the last decade or so: while one part of the industry has become increasingly gonzo and extreme, at the same time there has been a rise in big-budget, high-production-value ‘couples porn’ like the wildly successful X-Art. Nor is it easy in practice to make out a gender divide in consumers for each type; women have become actively engaged with all areas of the porn industry in a way that mirrors, perhaps, the explosion of written genres like erotic romance which are overwhelmingly written and read by women.

I find it hard to believe I'm the only man that does not relate to her idea of how men watch porn. My main feeling when I'm watching it, apart from the obvious arousal (assuming it's any good), is some kind of diffuse astonished gratitude, like I'm being given some disproportionate gift from a stranger. And I think even if you stopped me in the middle of watching the most degrading porn imaginable, I wouldn't see the slightest link between what was on the screen and the idea that women shouldn't also be high court judges and CEOs. But Dworkin was no feminist separatist or man-hater. She despised those men who choose to hurt women and children. In Heartbreak (2002) she described the deep sense of betrayal she felt from men in the political left who used pornography. Usually, the term sex objects means that women are shown as "body parts"; they are reduced to being physical objects. What is wrong with this? Women are as much their bodies as they are their minds or souls. No one gets upset if you present a women as a brain or as a spiritual being. Yet those portrayals ignore women as physical beings. To get upset by an image that focuses on the human body is merely to demonstrate a bad attitude toward what is physical. If I concentrated on a woman's sense of humor to the exclusion of her other characteristics, would this be degrading? Why is it degrading to focus on her sexuality? Underlying this attitude is the view that sex must be somehow ennobled to be proper. And, for that matter, why is a naked female body more of an "object" than a clothed one? She graduated in literature from Bennington in 1968, and soon after moved to Amsterdam and married a Dutchman. Among the events that led her to the anti-violence movement was the abuse she endured in that relationship. "I was a battered wife," she said, "and pornography entered into it. Both of us read it, and it helped give me the wrong idea of what a woman was supposed to be for a man." Dworkin manages to draw from literature and art in this analysis. Here is a quote from D H Lawrence:Originally published in 1981, Andrea Dworkin's nonfiction masterpiece, "Pornography: Men Possessing Women," is one of the most powerful books I have ever read. Dworkin was born in New Jersey and had what she described as an idyllic childhood in many ways. She attended a progressive school and grew up to lead a bohemian life in the 1960s.