Pornography

Pornography is writing, graphics, or imagery depicting sexuality. The word comes from the Greek, meaning "writing about prostitutes".

Definition Issues

The meaning of "pornography" fluctuates according to use and historical context. Criteria such as exploitation, violence, and obscenity have lead to very divergent acceptations of the term.

There is also debate over the difference between pornography and erotica: whether one exists at all, and what it would be.

History of pornography within the women's movement

Within feminism and the women's movement, pornography has been a subject of significant controversy. State and religious regulation of pornographic and erotic imagery has often been tied to state and religious regulation of female sexuality and reproductive rights. The "Free Love" movement, a western feminist movement in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was a political movement that argued for the liberation of sexuality; in the US and England, censorship of this political literature was done along with censorship of so-called pornographic or obscene literature.

Feminist critiques of pornography as an industry and as a cultural practice in the 1970s (see especially Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon; see also Kate Millett) were accompanied in the west by significant change in access to contraception, the "sexual liberation" movement, and the "Gay Liberation Movement", leading to the "feminist sex wars", which were an often contentious debate in the movement about pornography and sexual practice. (See the Barnard Conference; Gayle Rubin.) Women's bookstores and women's centers sometimes refused to carry materials they deemed sexually exploitative of women, such as SAMOIS' lesbian SM anthology. Proposals to create new regimes of legal regulation of sexuality led to some implementations of Catherine MacKinnon-style legislation. These have led to state interception and censorship of some feminist and lesbian works on sexuality; their effectiveness in redressing their feminist authors' critiques has yet to be evaluated. (US Minneapolis; Canada Little Sisters)

In the 1990s, the so-called feminist sex wars largely died out; "sex-positive feminism" largely replaced them, and queer, leather, and sex worker activist movements often worked together to improve working conditions for sex workers, safe sex practices in communities, legal rights of sex workers or sexual minorities, and to study sexual history and practices. However, while the "feminist sex wars" as a discrete historical debate ended, feminist interrogation of sex practices and the sex industry continue.

In the US, the issue has taken on some urgency under the conservative regimes, which have fostered and fomented a moral panic about child sex abuse. The legal restrictions on minors' sexuality (minors meaning less than 18yo in most jurisdictions, but ranging from 16 to 21 in various US states) have led to significant infringements on young women's rights of access to reproductive health care, and to significant abuses of lesbian and gay youth. These contemporary regulations and abuses echo older regulations of sexuality that particularly affected women and gay men, but they are now restricted primarily to young adults. The regulation of and restrictions on youth sexuality have led to significant curtailment and infringements of information targeted to youth about sexuality, under the same laws aimed at curtailing exploitation of youth in pornography, and access by youth to pornography.

Some issues of current interest include:

• Legal status of sex workers and sex work
• Unionization of sex workers
• Sexual exploitation of minors by adults, and regulation of minors' sexuality by adults (family) and the state

Pornography & literary genres

There is debate over the difference between pornography and erotica: whether one exists at all, and what it would be.

While the film and pictorial pornographic industries have long been dominated by material produced for a male audience (largely straight but with a substantial gay minority), a significant market of text-based writings for a female audience developed starting in the 1970s in the English-speaking romance market. These included primarily contemporary romances (Harlequins, Silhouettes, etc.) with lines dedicated to more or less sexually explicit works and so-called "bodice-rippers" (historical romances that could include quite explicit scenes of sex). By contrast with the historical market for text-porn aimed at men, which typically included little or no characterization and only enough plot to get the characters together, these stories were primarily marketed as fiction, with erotic content embedded within a plot (however formulaic) and characterization (however thin). Men's pornographic writings were found in pornographic magazines (e.g., Penthouse "letters") and as individual books, usually sold at porn stores and in news stands with porn magazines.

Beginning in the 1970s, a new market for explicitly female-oriented text writings began, described as "erotica". "Erotica" typically had a somewhat more literary quality than men's literary porn; its level of sexual explicitness varied. Over time, "erotica" has developed into a recognized (if not quite respected) genre of its own, and reclamation of older erotic texts (such as the stories by Anaïs Nin) created a literary history to accompany the new market. The literary history, and the evolving market, focused not just on women as audience, but on men as well; however, female-targeted erotica is still a very significant component of the erotica publishing market. Literary histories of erotic writing find a wide variety of erotic writing from mainstream writers as well as earlier markets of commercially produced erotic writing. State and religious suppression of such work is a common theme historically and in the present-day.

Amateur-written pornography (as distinguished from pornography written to be sold commercially) primarily developed out of women audiences; slash is typically amateur fanfiction written by women, for women, with sexual or romantic content. Famously it began with women writing "Kirk/Spock" slash, and it is typically thought of as writing that creates gay relationships between male characters of a work, although it has expanded and is also used to refer to lesbian relationships and even straight relationships that are "non-canon"; or at its broadest, simply used to refer to fanfic oriented toward various "pairings" whether canonical or non-canonical.

Video/photographic pornography and sex worker industries

In the real world, some parts of the pornography industry keeps close ties to prostitution; some feminists have noted that inasmuch as pornography is largely comprised of videos and images of actual people being paid to have sex, it is effectively a form of prostitution in itself (a definition which pornography actors usually contest). Both industries thrive on the exploitation of women as sexual objects for men's consumption, in a patriarchal society in which men disproportionately control economic and political resources, and in which sexuality in general and women's sexuality and reproductive rights in particular are regulated by the state, religious institutions, and sexist socio-cultural practices.

There are some attempts at creating less exploitative pornography, or making pornography designed to appeal to women or lesbian consumers, and there is a large amount of male-on-male pornography marketed towards men, in which women do not generally appear. However, the largest market within pornography is aimed at heterosexual male audiences and consumers. Critiques of the overwhelming oppression of women within the industry are usually aimed at that larger share of the market, but the smaller markets do not significantly shape the overall market, and critics would argue that those smaller markets cannot revolutionise the industry in its wider context as an expression of patriarchy.

In the late 1990s early 21st century in the US, the moral panic around child sex abuse has led to numerous efforts to regulate speech and expression. These have led to significant suppression of feminist and queer content, such as information about breast exams; teen gay & lesbian support groups; feminist science fiction; and so on. One recent federal statute attempted to criminalize images that appeared to be of youths under 18yo, thus leading to concerns about comic books and animation. Samuel R. Delany, who has pushed the bounds of sex in SF, has published some of his pornographic works with blatantly fictitious ages (see, e.g., Equinox).

Related Titles

• Andrea Dworkin's Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981)
• Joanna Russ's "Pornography By Women For Women, With Love" (an examination of K/S slash)