Pornography can liberate women from traditional representations

The argument

Pornography allows for an escape from the outdated misconceptions about women and sex. Traditionally, women were supposed to be seen as uninterested in sex. If they portrayed too much curiosity or interest, they could be labelled as promiscuous. The mechanism described is a double bind rather than a simple prohibition: the expectation and the penalty work together, so that an absence of visible desire is required and any departure from it is punished by a label attached to the woman rather than to the conduct. It was clear that a woman's interest in sex was to be strictly for the purpose of procreation, the pleasure was for men alone. That division is what the argument identifies as the underlying arrangement. Where one party's participation is justified by an outcome and the other's by enjoyment, the two are not doing the same thing, and only one of them is understood to have an interest of their own at stake. Pornography allows for a new perspective on sex and gives women the opportunity to free their repressed sexuality. The claim rests on visibility. A representation showing women as desiring rather than merely available makes available a picture of sex that the traditional arrangement does not contain, and what can be depicted can then be recognised and claimed. Instead of reinforcing the traditional views that women only engage in sex for romance, to please their partner, and to have children, pornography introduces the modern concept that sex can simply be enjoyed as it is. Each of those three traditional justifications locates the reason for a woman's participation somewhere outside her own pleasure, and removing the requirement for any justification at all is what the argument treats as the change. Pornography allows women to redefine themselves through exploring their sexuality without shame, since shame attaches to desire only where desire is held to need an excuse.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Many anti-pornography feminists believe that pornography actually keeps women in their traditional roles instead of freeing them. This sect of feminists believe that pornography was created to objectify women, and that women in pornography are simply sexual objects to the men. These feminists believe that pornography is simply a perpetuation of traditional gender roles, and that the female experience is not accurately displayed.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Broadly accurate as an account of one tradition, though narrower than presented — historians have contested the repressive reading, finding abundant early modern material that treats female desire as real and in places medically necessary. More to the point, establishing that a restriction existed says nothing about which remedy escapes it. [Rejecting P2] The premise asserts the content rather than examining it. Commercial pornography is produced overwhelmingly by and for a male audience, and its conventions — whose pleasure is depicted, whose body is framed, how scenes are structured and end — are the ground on which anti-pornography feminists argue that it restates the traditional arrangement in permissive language. A depiction of a woman enjoying sex is not the same as a depiction made from her point of view. [Rejecting P3] "Liberates" moves from representation to effect without evidence. Escaping one script by adopting another is not freedom from scripts, and the objection on record is precisely that the new one prescribes availability where the old prescribed reticence. The conclusion also changes subject: the question concerns feminist positions on prostitution, and nothing in the premises bears on the sale of sex rather than on its depiction.