Anti-Porn

The Resurgence of Anti-Pornography Feminism

Julia Long

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781780320267
• eBook ISBN: 9781780320281
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Anti-porn feminism is back. Countering the ongoing 'pornification' of Western culture and society, with lads' mags on the middle shelf and lap-dancing clubs in residential areas, anti-porn movements are re-emerging among a new generation of feminist activists worldwide. This essential new guide to the problems with porn starts with a history of modern pro and anti political stances before examining the ways in which the new arguments and campaigns around pornography are articulated, deployed and received. Drawing on original ethnographic research, it provides an in-depth analysis of the groups campaigning against the pornography industry today, as well as some eye-opening facts about the damage porn can do to women and society as a whole. This unique and inspiring book explains the powerful comeback of anti-porn feminism, and it controversially challenges liberal perspectives and the mainstreaming of a porn culture that threatens to change the very nature of our intimate relationships.

CHAPTER 1

Anti-Porn Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement

The history of anti-pornography feminism is a brave, turbulent and deeply instructive one. Emerging in the late 1970s, in the context of the anger and energy of the women’s liberation movement (WLM), anti-porn perspectives were engendered through processes of consciousness raising and through the development of important theoretical insights into the relationship between cultural practices, representations and women’s subordination. Whilst not initially a central concern within second wave feminism, pornography was increasingly foregrounded by the late 1970s. During the 1980s, the fierce and passionate battles of anti-porn feminists were contested from within the movement itself, in what were regrettably to become known as the ‘feminist sex wars’.¹

This chapter will trace the trajectory of anti-porn politics and activism within second wave feminism,² looking at how they emerged, why they were contested, and how the voices of anti-porn feminists were increasingly silenced from the early 1990s. Focusing on the US and UK movements, where anti-porn feminism was particularly prominent, the chapter does not aim to provide a comprehensive historical account;³ rather, its purpose is to offer a context and background from which to examine the resurgence of anti-porn feminism that is the main subject of this book.

The birth of the women’s liberation movement

In order to make sense of the emergence of anti-porn feminism, it is necessary to understand something of the beginnings of second wave feminism, which in the USA was shaped by women coming from different locations and movements, including middle-class, educated women and women active within the civil rights and radical/leftist, anti-Vietnam war movements. In the early years of the second wave, liberal or reformist feminism constituted the dominant strand of the movement in the USA; the publication of liberal feminist Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) is frequently identified with the ‘birth’ of US second wave feminism. Friedan’s highly influential analysis of the ‘problem with no name’ – the condition of educated, middle-class white American women confined to domestic roles as housewives and mothers – provided an empirical and theoretical basis for the promotion of a liberal feminist agenda, which she pursued through founding, along with others, the National Organisation of Women (NOW) in 1966. From its origins as a response to the lack of political will in the USA to introduce and implement effective laws against sex discrimination in the workplace, NOW championed a reformist approach, lobbying for legislative change and equality of opportunity in areas such as education and employment. Its stated purpose was to ‘take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men’ (Friedan, 1966).

However, even from these early days, hints of what was to develop into anti-porn feminism are discernible. Although NOW focused on legislative change, it nonetheless recognised the significance and impact of the kinds of media images that were to become a focus for the more radical activism that was to follow:

IN THE INTERESTS OF THE HUMAN DIGNITY OF WOMEN, we will protest, and endeavor to change, the false image of women now prevalent in the mass media, and in the texts, ceremonies, laws, and practices of our major social institutions. Such images perpetuate contempt for women by society and by women for themselves. (NOW Statement of Purpose, Friedan, 1966; my emphasis)

Alongside NOW, other more identifiably radical feminist groups emerged during the 1960s, growing out of the frustration experienced by women active in the civil rights, new left and anti-Vietnam war movements. Women involved in such movements had found themselves sidelined, expected to take on subordinate roles and treated as sex objects – as epitomised by the notorious reputed comment from Stokely Carmichael, the leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, that ‘The only position for women in the SNCC is prone’ (King, 1987). Initially, such experiences led women to take action within the movements in which they were involved (Byrne, 1996; Jones and Brown, 1968; Evans, 2007), but soon they began leaving to create their own movement, along with those who wanted to move beyond the liberal feminist agenda of NOW in pursuit of more radical goals. Florynce Kennedy is an important figure in these struggles, bringing the politics of the black power and civil rights movements to bear on a predominantly white feminist agenda. Having joined the New York chapter of NOW in 1967, alongside other African-American feminists (such as Shirley Chisholm and Pauli Murray) and white feminists (such as Kate Millett), she was to leave the following year in view of what she found to be a regressive and racist politics on the part of the national leadership of NOW, which marginalised radical feminism and failed to support black liberation and anti-war movements (Randolph, 2011).

In the UK, the WLM emerged predominantly from radical and new left politics (Gelb, 1986; Weir and Wilson, 1984). Socialism and Marxism were particularly influential in the early days of UK feminism (Gelb, 1986: 108), with the 1966 publication of Juliet Mitchell’s socialist feminist analysis of women’s position under capitalism, Women: the Longest Revolution, providing a landmark for the new movement. Early second wave British feminism mobilised around class more than race (Bouchier, 1983: 56); key moments included the Hull fishermen’s wives’ protest, the strike held by the Ford motor company machinists at Dagenham (Gelb, 1986: 107; Rowbotham, 1972), and efforts to form alliances with and shape trade unions (Weir and Wilson, 1984).

Particularly significant in relation to the development of anti-porn feminism was the impact of the sexual revolution. The 1960s saw an era of decensorship in both the UK and the USA, along with the relaxation of attitudes and laws around divorce, the emergence of the contraceptive pill and changing attitudes to family, sexuality and reproduction. Important legislative changes in the UK included the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 and the legalisation of abortion⁴ in the same year. However, despite the potential and real benefits for women’s liberation of some of these developments, the sexual revolution was characterised by a profoundly male supremacist counter-culture which lionised misogynist writers, such as Norman Mailer and William Burroughs, and created innumerable new cultural arenas for the aggressive sexual objectification and exchange of women in the form of magazines such as Oz and ‘liberated’ practices such as swinging (Jeffreys, 1990). In this way, the sexual revolution and its masculinist heroes framed male sexual use of women as revolutionary, opening up the gateway for the expansion of pornography in the 1970s (Jeffreys, 1990; Dines, 2010; Bronstein 2011).

‘We are a class’: consciousness raising and women on the march

Consciousness raising (CR) played a critical role in the emergence of anti-porn feminism. CR groups were the hallmark of the second wave (Rowbotham, 1989; Arnold, 2000; Gornick, 2000); they were a key means of women’s politicisation through ‘the feminist practice of examining one’s personal experience in the light of sexism’ (Gornick, 2000: 288). Sharing and discussing experiences broke women’s sense of isolation and revealed the commonalities of women’s condition under patriarchy. One important result of this process was the bringing to light of the prevalence of male violence and child sexual abuse within the private context of the family and personal relationships. As we shall see, this painful process of sharing was the first crucial step leading to women’s mobilisation around male violence. Consciousness raising transformed the sharing of personal experience into political analysis and, in turn, to action, highlighting the collective nature of the problem of women’s oppression and generating the vital understanding that such a problem could only be addressed through collective struggle:

We are a class, we are oppressed as a class, and we each respond within the limits allowed us as members of that oppressed class. Purposely divided from each other, each of us is ruled by one or more men for the benefit of all men. There is no personal escape, no personal salvation, no personal solution. (Jones and Brown, 1968)

By the late 1960s, hundreds of women’s liberation groups had emerged in the USA, including the Furies in Washington DC; the Redstockings and the New York Radical Women in New York; Bread and Roses and Female Liberation in Boston; and the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. A similar proliferation of groups followed in the UK, and the late 1960s and early 1970s were to prove an extraordinarily creative and fertile time for the WLM, with women’s liberation groups generating an explosion of feminist actions, ideas and theory.

Whilst pornography had yet to become prominent as an issue, women’s politicisation around objectification was evident from the late 1960s, in the form of high-profile beauty pageant protests. Protesters outside the 1968 Miss America beauty pageant provided a ‘freedom trash can’, into which women threw symbols of their oppression, such as high-heeled shoes, eyelash curlers and girdles. At the 1970 Miss World contest in London, feminists hurled smoke bombs, stink bombs and flour bombs, causing chaos and bringing proceedings to a temporary halt. The televised action was witnessed by millions, and is widely credited with mobilising a generation of women to join the women’s liberation movement in Britain. Of course, such protests took place alongside other mass actions on other issues such as abortion, equal pay and the need for equality legislation. In the USA, for example, the ‘Women’s Strike for Equality’ – with its slogan, ‘Don’t Iron While the Strike is Hot!’ – was organised by NOW in August 1970, mobilising thousands of women across the country to stage various creative actions, including a march of fifty thousand down New York’s Fifth Avenue (Time, 1970). Women were also beginning to make important inroads into bastions of male power, with Shirley Chisholm becoming the first black woman elected to Congress in 1968. In 1971 Florynce Kennedy founded the Feminist Party, from which platform Chisholm was launched as a presidential candidate the following year, becoming the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Nourishing this ferment of activism was the development of radical feminist ideas and theory. Alongside a proliferation of women’s liberation pamphlets, magazines and newsletters, a rich literature was emerging in the form of publications such as The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm (Koedt, 1968); ‘The personal is political’ (Hanisch, [1969] 2006); The Dialectic of Sex (Firestone, 1970); The Female Eunuch (Greer, [1970] 1993); Sisterhood is Powerful (Morgan, 1970); and Sexual Politics (Millett, 1970). Covering a broad terrain of language, literature, culture, religion, sexuality, personal relationships, science and politics, these foundational texts articulated and theorised the nature of women’s oppression under patriarchy, challenging the assumed naturalness and inevitability of women’s subordinate position. In turn, alongside these theoretical works, feminist creativity flowered in different realms, as critical understandings were complemented by the creation of a women’s culture in the form of fiction, street theatre, art, music, publishing companies, cafes, resource centres and bookshops.

During the 1970s, male violence became a central focus of second wave feminism. In response to new knowledge about the prevalence of male violence, feminists set up support services for victims such as refuges and rape crisis centres, and lobbied for changes in police and criminal justice approaches to domestic violence and rape. The focus on male violence was emblematised by collective demonstrations and the assertion of women’s right to enjoy public space freely and safely. ‘Take Back the Night’ and ‘Reclaim the Night’ marches, rallies and vigils were organised by feminists in numerous countries and cities. It was from this focus on male violence that pornography became a topic of feminist concern.

The development of anti-porn feminism in the USA

Radical feminist literature emerging in the USA in the 1970s developed analyses locating pornography and the sex industry within a context of patriarchal male violence against women. As early as 1974, Andrea Dworkin analysed the role of pornography, alongside other influences like myths and fairy tales, as instrumental in the social construction of women’s oppression:

Pornography, like fairy tale, tells us who we are. It is the structure of male and female mind, the content of our shared erotic identity, the map of each inch and mile of our oppression and despair…. Here we are compelled to ask the real questions: why are we defined in these ways, and how can we bear it? (Dworkin, 1974: 54)

Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will argued that pornography is an enabling and instrumental element of rape culture, a culture wherein sexual violence, specifically rape and the threat of rape, enables men to control women, and where rape is consequently tolerated and normalised. For Brownmiller pornography constitutes ‘the undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda’ and ‘the case against pornography and the case against toleration of prostitution are central to the fight against rape’ (Brownmiller 1975: 394, 390), an argument memorably encapsulated in Robin Morgan’s slogan, ‘pornography is the theory, rape is the practice’ (Morgan, 1974).

In her history of US anti-porn feminism, Carolyn Bronstein identifies three factors that motivated women to identify sexually violent media as a major cause of female oppression: the failure of the sexual revolution to deliver sexual liberation for women; new knowledge about the extent and prevalence of male sexual violence, generated within consciousness-raising groups; and the radical feminist critique of heterosexuality. These three factors ‘created a volatile mix of conditions that supported the growth of the anti-porn analysis’ (Bronstein 2011: 7). As Bronstein elucidates, initial campaigns in the mid-1970s were directed at media images that conflated violence and sexuality, with a specific focus on pornography coming later, and not universally endorsed by the feminist groups active in this area. Initially, groups embraced a tactical repertoire of consumer actions, public education, performance art, marches, demonstrations and conferences. They aimed to challenge media representations of male violence against women and sexist portrayals of women; to improve media standards; and to reduce violence against women. Media reform activity, such as pickets and boycotts, therefore preceded the legislative interventions that were to follow in the early 1980s.

The three key groups involved in US media and anti-porn campaigns fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Anti-Porn Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement
• Chapter 2: Pornography and the Feminist Divide
• Chapter 3: Pornification and Its Discontents
• Chapter 4: Reactivating Dissent: Feminist Anti-Porn Activism in the UK
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index