Pornography is not just men looking. It is men producing images for men to consume. And consume it we do. In 1984, for example, 200 million issues of 800 different hard- and soft-core magazines were sold in the United States alone, generating over $750 million.
And most of the images produced by men to be consumed by men are images of women. In 1970, the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography found that 90 per cent of all pornographic material is geared to male heterosexuals and 10 per cent is geared to male homsexuals, and that consumers of pornography are "predominately white, middle-class, middle-aged married males." Though today more women are both producing and cosuming pornography, and men always appear in gay male pornography, the percentages probably remain comparable, I'd estimate that now male heterosexual pornography might compose 80 per cent of the market, with that for gay men constituting 15 per cent, and for women, the remaining five per cent. ...
To some women, pornography is, in the words of Susan Brownmiller, "the undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda." To these women, pornography graphically illustrates the subordination of women in our culture. And what is particularly objectionable about pronography is that it renders this brutal subordination so that men can experience sexual arousal and pleasure from it. Pornography, as John Stoltenberg puts it, "makes sexism sexy." And they feel it is a major cause of men's violence against women - especially rape. As Robin Morgan wrote, "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice."
Other women ... have claimed that pornography has helped them to break away from the traditional passive definitions of women's sexuality and to claim a more active, vital sexuality. ...
... I think that men have been the silent spectators in the debate about pornography because, quite simply, we don't know what to say. ...
... Men need to raise the issue, to examine the role of pornography in our lives. A lot is at stake. Although most pornographic images are of women, pornography is, at its heart, about men. It is about men's relationships with sexuality, with women, and with each other. It is about women as men want them to be, and about our own sexual selves as we would like them to be. Whether or not pornographic images determine our sexual behaviors, there is little doubt that these images depict men's fantasies about sexuality - both women's sexuality and our own. ...
Feminist writers such as Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Griffin, Catharine MacKinnon, and Robin Morgan have also confronted the traditional liberal idea that pornography is protected by the First Amendment right of freedom os speech. Their argument is that pornography is not freedom of expression but itself a form of censorship: Pornography silences women, suppresses the voices of women's sexuality, constrains women's options, and maintains their subordination in a male-dominated world. We live, they argue, in a culture in which simulated (or real) rape, mutilation, torture, or even murder of a woman are routinely presented to men by men, with the intention (and effect) of making men experience desire, of turning men on, of eliciting erection. ...
If a man's freedom of speech requires the silencing of women, there is nonly partial freedom and surely no justice. Pornography "is not a celebration of sexual freedom," writes Susan Brownmiller, "it is a cynical exploitation of female sexual activity through the device of making all such activity, and consequently all females, 'dirty.'" Pornography is "designed," she continues, "to dehumanize women, to reduce the female to an object of sexual access, not to free sensuality from moralistic or parental inhibition." Pornograhy does not represent a liberating breath of free sexuality in the normally stale and fetid air of conservative censoriousness; it is only the sexualization of that traditional patriarchal world. Pornography is not rebellion; it is conformity to a sexist business-as-usual. (From Introduction: Guilty Pleasures, pgs. 1-15) |
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