Feminists are slowly and unsurely engaging in a dialogue to develop a political programme about pornography. In the USA feminist groups against pornography were formed five or six years ago. In this country we have seen the development of Reclaim the Night actions and the formation of Women Against Violence Against Women groups. The demands that are raised and the actions suggested are often framed in terms of increased censorship and control of sexist and pornographic images. Many of the arguments appear to assume an obvious relationship between pornography and violence. This assumption is based on the ideas held by some sections of the women's movement rooting women's oppression in male sexuality alone: implying that liberation for women will only be possible after the destruction of that sexual power. Pat Masters and Jane Shallice argue not for censorship but for a campaign in the labour movement to confront that sexual power.
'Pornography' is not a value free category. It has attached to it very obvious meanings that are sententious and prescriptive. What is encompassed by the term will be negotiated by changing social relationships within society: what we are witnessing at present, particularly in the campaigns of the women's movement against sexist images in advertising, is an example of this renegotiation or fight to define what is pornographic.
Although all feminists have been sharply critical of most pornography, any consensus about our actions about it has been difficult to find, We have no commonly accepted definitions. The Festival of Light campaigns to 'protect' us from pornography which it defines as: 'a deliberate unconcealed incitement to promiscuity and to homosexual and other vice. Its disruptive effect on married life must be obvious to all who have not entirely abrogated the use of common sense'. Meanwhile the most elegant magazines advertise perfumes and diamonds with rape images. Thus we have to define our targets with care.
The modern porn industry has attempted to appropriate 'female sexual liberation'. In Victorian porn men played out their fantasies with prostitutes or servants, women who were obviously class inferiors, in which the exploitative nature of the relationship was unambiguous. Today pornography sometimes features allegedly 'liberated' women as sex partners — some of it even claims to represent women's fantasies.
The feminist critique of pornography has exposed issues which are far from simple questions of vulgarity. Pornography often connects sexual pleasure with violence towards and humiliation of others, especially women. The misogynist and rape content of pornography and advertising has increased in the last decade, to the extent that many feminists consider pornography to be a form of terrorism, used like rape itself to [illegible]
Fantasy and pornography
The essential element for the development of pornography is the confinement of sexuality to a separate and insulated sphere of human existence, The bourgeois patriarchial family is the perfect vehicle for this as it both limits and intensifies the sexual expression of individuals
Sexuality is a commonsense category. It is 'known' and 'understood' by everyone without any real analysis of what it is or how it is formed. Sexuality is 'known' to be a basic human biological drive. Male sexuality is said to be centralised in sexual activity; female sexuality in sexual attractiveness. Male sexuality is understood to be active, spontaneous, imperious and centrally genital, easily aroused by exposure to 'objects' and images and fantasies. Female sexuality is said to be bound by responses to the male, bound within relationships with men, dormant until aroused by a man.
However, this commonsense definition of sexuality has been criticised profoundly by feminists in the last ten years. Cross-cultural and historical evidence has shown that concepts of sexuality vary greatly from society to society and may change over time. Feminists have also argued that the idea of a biologically based sex-drive insufficiently accounts for the many social attitudes and beliefs which surround sexuality, In every society there are absurd and contradictory meanings attached to male and female sexuality which bear little relationship to biological sex.
Pornography
Pornography at one level appears to reflect the fact that sexuality is a complex process of social learning in which fantasy is an important component. But at the most immediate and obvious level it reflects an ideological notion of sexuality in which women function only as the objects of male pleasure. To develop an analysis of pornography, we have to attempt to clarify the term.
Pornography is the exploitation of sexuality, through the exploitation of sexual fantasy. It is the production of a commodity which is produced for men as the sexually 'active', the sexually dominant and dominating group. However fantasies are not just plucked from the air materialising randomly; they are based on people's conceptions of their own sexuality, a sexuality that is formed within unequal social and economic relations between men and women. We are not arguing that there is a direct causal relationship (a schematic a+b=c) between dominant ideology, social values and behaviour and the development of particular fantasies, but clearly they are interlinked and intermeshed.
Sexual fantasy and pornography, a linked commodity form, are inherently secretive, guilt-ridden and private within this society, It is pornography, along with other social products, which forms part of the discourse on sexuality, within which individuals are seeking to define and construct their own sexuality.
Pornography as sexual liberation
Helen Longino, a feminist philosopher, argues that one of the main aspects of youth/student radicalisation of the 1960s and 1970s was sexual rebellion which freed various modes of sexual behaviour from the constraints of social disapproval but also made possible a flood of pornographic material. According to figures provided by Women Against Violence in Pornography in Media (WAVPM) in the United States, the number of pornographic magazines available at news-stands has grown from none in 1953 to forty in 1977, and there are correspondingly dramatic increases in sales of pornographic films. In the USA today, the pornography industry has a turnover of $4 billion.
Traditionally, pornography was condemned as immoral, it was objectionable to describe explicitly or represent parts of the body or sexual behaviour for the purpose of inducing sexual stimulation or pleasure on the part of the reader or viewer. This view subordinates sex to procreation and condemns all sexual interactions outside legitimated marriage. It is this code, argues Longino, that was being rebelled against in the 1960s, and which has given way in many capitalist countries to more open standards of sexual behaviour.
She further points out that: 'one of the beneficial results has been a growing acceptance of the distinction between questions of sexual mores and questions of morality. Hence the old slogan "Make love not war" of the flower people and hippies'. This new morality implies that 'we cannot condemn forms of sexual behaviour, no matter how offensive we might find pornography. We must tolerate it in the name of freedom from illegitimate repression.' Feminists are, however, challenging this assumption and posing the question: freedom for whom? They are arguing that pornography trades on the degradation, exploitation and sexual subordination of women.
It has been argued, especially since the sixties, as part of the 'sexual liberation' of the adult population, that for the consumers of pornography, it is enjoyable, sexually arousing and aids the socialisation of male sexuality. It is said to be therapeutic for isolated men, and can be a 'release' for those men who are unable to have sexual relationships. A leading sex therapist in this country, who uses pornography in sex therapy states that: 'many men are shy and lonely through social diffidence and are also unadventurous in their thinking'
But while pornography may be used for its 'therapeutic value', it may also be used to mould sexuality. Although, of course, the pornographic images of women are exaggerated they are not fundamentally at variance with the common images of women in society. As part of the 'sexual liberation' movement of the sixties, the argument in favour of pornography persuades women that they like the sexual activity that is desired by men.
From fantasy to the real thing
The producers of pornography, the capitalists, are involved in a large and evergrowing market. The profit motive lies behind moves towards more bizarre, more 'exciting' forms of hard core. If exposure to sexual images and fantasies inure the consumers, then there will be an obvious response from the capitalists to explore more bizarre and horrendous images.
One view of pornography is that its illicit nature is important for the men who consume it. But it is unquestionable that if overexposure to 'soft' porn deadens the market, the concomitant will be the use of children, the increasingly horrific violence used against women in the fantasies and images created, and the ultimate enactment of killing culminating in the 'snuff' movies.
As long as one views pornography only in terms of fantasy, one can ignore the use of children, women and men, in the creation of those images. As soon as pornography moves from the word to the photograph, the film or the video, it is necessary for the porn merchants to use real people, in the creation of the product, There is an immediate transference from the fantasy/image to the real and the ideology of the real becomes paramount. The autobiography of Linda Lovelace is the most recent example of the manner in which a woman was subjugated to actions and practices of which she appeared to approve, Only now, fourteen years later, is she able to begin to release herself from that oppression,
No longer is it possible to take the position that porn is simply fantasy and that society cannot control fantasy and human imagination. The traffic in children from South East Asia to the pornographic studios of Germany and Belgium, the raping of women to satisfy the 'needs' of men, the dismembering and mutilation of women in South America in order to satisfy the appetite for profits of the entrepreneurs of sexual fantasy, no longer are encompassed by the term fantasy; the people involved in the creation of the images are real,
A working definition of pornography, from a feminist perspective is presented by Longino: 'verbally or pictorially explicit representations of sexual behaviour that have as a distinguishing characteristic the degrading and demeaning portrayal of the role and status of the human female...as a mere sexual object to be exploited and manipulated sexually'. In pornographic books, magazines and films, women are represented as passive and as slavishly dependent upon men. To the extent that women's sexual pleasure is represented at all, it is subordinated to that of men and is never an end in itself as is the sexual pleasure of men. What pleases women is the use of their bodies to satisfy male desires. Thus the sexual objectification of women is common to all pornography
Therefore Longino argues that 'pornography is not simply its representations of degrading and abusive sexual encounters, but describes sexual behaviour in such a way as to endorse the degradation'. Thus, what is being objected to is not sex or nudity but the form of connection
Pornography and violence against women
In addition, Women are beginning to connect the consumption of pornography with the committing of rape and other acts of sexual violence against women. Pornography and its relationship to violence are the main terms of reference in the debate Whatever the causal relations are, clearly hard-core pornography is not innocent. In fact, the view that pornography leads to violence reflects not so much any new evidence or new study so much as a strongly felt belief that many people share.
Arguments for intervention on pornography whether by the Festival of Light, the Williams Report, or some sections of the women's movement, are premised on the harm of pornography.
Susan Brownmiller, the author of Against Our Will believes the association between pornography and violence is obvious and that there is no need to wait for definitive evidence: 'We supply the ideology: it's for other people to come with statistics Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice'. What attitude should feminists take towards the problematic question of a relationship between pornography and violence?
Beverly Brown, examining the grounds of a feminist intervention, says that the 'logic of intervention is dominated by the liberal argument that it is only harms that justify intervention, that harms must be demonstrable effects.... The Williams/Wolfenden formula, which itself begins from these premises, is emerging as the current legislative strategy for the management of a range of issues around sexuality'. Feminism argues differently, however, on the question of whether pornography is a direct cause of undeniable and great harms. For the search for a direct relationship between a violent act and the consumption of pornography misses the point. It is pornography's relationship to a sexist society which is harmful.
In the United States a group of researchers from Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM) — formed in 1976 in California — viewed 26 pornographic films in San Francisco, in a three month period. Twenty one had rape scenes, sixteen had torture and bondage scenes, two were films for sexual stimulation. Feminist researchers also monitored pornographic magazines. The magazines were divided into two categories: blatantly violent magazines, usually only found in pornography shops, and the more familiar 'tabletop pornography' magazines. In a magazine called Brutal Trio three men successively kidnap a woman, a 12 year old girl, and a grandmother, and beat them senseless. After they have passed out they are raped and beaten again.
From films and miserable magazines in porn shops, to record album covers, to advertisements to Vogue, pornography has come to occupy its own niche in the communications and entertainment media and to acquire a quasi-institutional character. Its acceptance by the mass media, whatever the motivation, means a cultural endorsement of its message. The tolerance of representations of the rape, bondage and torture of women helps to create and maintain a climate more tolerant of the actual physical abuse of women, The tendency on the part of the legal system to view the victim of a rape as responsible for the crime against her — police telling women not to walk the streets at night, not to wear certain types of clothing are but manifestations of this, Pornography can be identified as being injurious to women insofar as it is the vehicle for the dissemination of a deep and vicious lie about women's sexuality. The diffusion of such a distorted view of women's nature in our society as it exists today supports sexist attitudes and thus reinforces the oppression and exploitation of women.
Why do women participate in pornographic production?
In a society that prides itself on the free choice of the individual, if women were to stop modelling for pornographic magazines and films then it is presumed that the industry would shut down, A former pornography model when asked 'How did you get started in the nude modelling business', replied: 'In 1967, just out of high school, I had run away from home "living in sin", with my boyfriend. I wasn't able to keep jobs I tried to get....I had no real skills....we ended up not having enough money to pay the rent....(her boyfriend) thought it was great....he felt proud because my job was a sign that I was a "sexy chick"....men would ask me, "Did you get off on it?"....If a woman showed disapproval of what I was doing, my boyfriend would say "she's just jealous that she can't do it"....I remember feeling nudity was okay and natural, so photos of it must be okay too — except that it didn't feel good....I stopped modelling in 1970, I was exhausted, I wasn't sleeping at night....
'I was physically sick from the long hours of work and I was getting bladder infections from the work conditions....concerning hard core movies: your standards go down - they're forced by circumstances. You become fearful that you'll never be able to work at anything else. You hook into the money, but that doesn't continue unless you'll do more, and more things, you don't want to do....Once you do hard core you can't ever go back to the more "legitimate" modelling....it was degrading and humiliating....since stopping modelling things won't be the same for me. My sex life has never been normal. I can't equate sex with affection. I have these images that never stop running in my head. They're fantasies of women as passive victims. All the scenes disgust me, but I can't stop them....I hate myself....(but) if I don't have them I don't get off sexually...feminists have no consciousness about what it is like out there....'
This women's story could be repeated a hundred fold and our campaigns musn't lose sight of the real women involved in the production of pornography. It is necessary to try and involve them in any strategies or actions that we may take
Women fight back
In Sweden, total population 8 million, 30 million copies of pornographic magazines are sold annually. Many of these use children, and some specialise in third world children. There are pictures of small black children with gigantic penises in their mouths.
Feminists in Sweden have tried to use the 'indecency law', which states that you cannot earn money from other people's bodies, thereby outlawing pimping but not prostitution, to prohibit pornography on the grounds that pornographers are pimps. They have been unsuccessful to date. Several years ago, women attacked the largest newspaper in Stockholm, because they were running ads for pornographic theatres and shops. They invoked the indecency laws saying that the paper was a pimp — it was making money off women's bodies through its ads. Women organised from within and outside the paper — women journalists on the paper said they wanted a voice in the kinds of articles and ads which were carried. The paper eventually cut down its ads, ceased using pictures and 'blatant' words in ads for pornography shops.
In 1976 feminists in the United States were outraged by a billboard of a woman in chains with bruises on her legs and face, and a caption reading 'I'm black and blue from the Rolling Stones and I love it'. Warner Brothers were forced to remove the advertisement after feminists protested by demonstrating and holding a national press conference.
In Britain there have been Reclaim the Night demonstrations, pickets of the Alan Jones exhibition, demonstrations against the 'Miss World' contest, and sexist advertising covered with 'this exploits women' stickers. The establishment of rape crisis centres have been very important in influencing attitudes to sexual crimes. Conferences have been held to discuss what types of action are necessary to prevent sexual attacks on women. Women Against Violence Against Women have diligently picketed the Sutcliffe trial, and leafletted the public on the issues raised by the trial.
Is censorship the answer?
Censorship has been the suggested method of dealing with pornography: the Williams Report being the latest offering. This report argued for restrictions on availability rather than restrictions on production. Based on the assertion that there is an accepted distinction between public and private in sexuality, the report aimed to reduce the visibility of pornography. In arguing that the personal is political, feminism opposes the argument that there should be guarantees of certain freedoms for sexual conduct: there is no inalienable right to the privacy of the sexual.
Pornography however is not a genre of expression separate and different from the rest of life, and cannot be treated whether hard or soft, crude or sophisticated, as an isolated social 'problem'. As Jill Pack argues 'by banning certain images, the ideology that informs them will not go away'. As a collective representation of sexual objectification of women, pornography differs from other feminist issues like rape or wife-battering, which are specific acts against individual women. A response to pornography calls for different solutions and new strategies and actions. We can respond to wife-beating and rape with legal action and by opening rape crisis centres and refuge shelters. But we cannot respond to pornography by calling for censorship. It would merely drive the pornographers and their customers underground while placing enormous power in the hands of the state.
The Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM) in America have dropped their campaign for censorship. This was primarily because of the problems that were highlighted in the many discussions that the women's movement held. Censorship legislation would lump together books such as Our Bodies Ourselves, Liberating Masturbation and Rubyfruit Jungle. Spare Rib was banned in the South of Ireland for containing pictures of women's vaginas and it is reasonable to suppose that censorship would be used for similar sexually and politically repressive purposes in Britain.
Therefore taking on pornography means challenging the very ideas of a sexually exploitative society, We are confronting the sexist double standard which, while condemning acts of violence, in fact ideologically validates them. There are no easy roads to this. Although there are broad areas of agreement on images that are degrading to women, sexuality is still a very controversial issue within the women's movement. Among the left also there has been little discussion. A debate must take place between the left and feminists on these issues to win the widest support for a campaign which will successfully challenge sexist images.
The problem of sexism
One of the preconditions for such a campaign is an analysis of the material basis of sexism, It is recognised by most feminists that men benefit materially from women's oppression. It has even been acknowledged by the state in the passing of the Equal Opportunities Act ensuring that even the bourgeoisie recognise the material privileges of men. Wages, jobs and domestic servicing are the most obvious features but these material interests rest deeper. Men benefit by participating in the determinants not only of their own sexuality but also that of women through the perspective of male dominance.
While it is widely accepted that benefits accrue to men, it appears to be disputed by some on the left that these benefits constitute material interests. As Marxist-feminists we do not accept that the ideology of sexism/male dominance is just 'false consciousness' floating in the air. If this were so all that would be needed to remove and eradicate it would be dispute, debate and education: but the ideology is rooted in very real and concrete material concerns which determine and feed these ideas. If we do not acknowledge that material interests generate these ideas, we will create over-optimism about how the oppression can be destroyed,
We would argue that men have to develop a class interest which overrides their immediate sectional interests. This raises the question of class consciousness — a consciousness which will fight for the liberation of the class — men and the majority of the class — women. We know that the creation of socialism carries no guarantee of women's liberation and so we must struggle now for that consciousness — recognising it will be a struggle within the labour movement precisely because class interest will conflict with present material interests — and in that struggle must be raised the central question of women's liberation in the liberation of the working class.
The next step
The women's movement has been successful in making feminist issues like abortion a campaign of the labour movement, by raising and arguing for support in working class organisations. The task will be harder with a campaign on pornography as it will have to confront areas of male privilege which have been regarded by men and sections of the left as matters of private concern, or worse of little importance, Responses will be extreme as Arthur Scargill's pathetic attempt to defend page 3 in The Yorkshire Miner demonstrated,
Many people who are opposed to censorship believe that intervention by feminists against pornography is merely another form of censorship. We must point out that there is a difference between handing out leaflets which explain the sexist content of, for instance, a film and demanding that such a film be banned. Spontaneous reactions from women to vandalise cinemas that show films like Dressed to Kill reveal the deep outrage of feminists, and focus attention on these issues. We must argue that actions such as these should be aimed at eliminating the demand for such films, not demands for censorship
Raising these issues in the labour movement will be hard work but small beginnings have been made already, The recently launched paper The East End News has a strong anti-sexist editorial policy. The Campaign For Press Freedom is another area in which feminists are able to argue against sexist bias. The anonymous producers of hard core porn are harder to identify and probably will continue to receive the occasional broken window and well aimed tin of paint. Meanwhile we must involve in our discussions and campaigns women who work as strippers, models and prostitutes, At a recent Equity AGM a proposal to support the unionisation of strippers was passed.
There are many questions which should be taken up in the unions: the question of sexual harrassment at work, sexist and titillating material in the media. Discussions between the trade unions and the women's movement will be essential for the success of these campaigns.
More importantly, there is a long way to go to uncover precisely what form non-exploitative, warm loving relations will take, and we can only say at this point that they will not be developed through societies with inequalities structured into them. To get there we need non-sexist sexual images — a lot more of them: perhaps feminist sexuality would confront misogyny with new images. If we can withstand the forces that seek to dominate erotica — misogyny on the one hand and right-wing sexual repression on the other — we may be able to embark on an 'inhibited beginning'.
Meanwhile at the 'soft' end of the market Playboy has been a target for attack by American feminists since 1969. In its desire to be the 'liberator' of women an article was commissioned by the magazine in that year, The article was to be 'fair, objective,...in a tone that is amused but never snide', according to the editor. Hefner however had other ideas. In a confidential [illegible] he wrote: 'What I want is a devastating piece that takes militant [illegible] apart.... These chicks are our natural enemy.... They are unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that Playboy promotes....Let's get to it and make it a real winner.'
Postscript
Our own determination to fight back can be witnessed by the debates that are now taking place in the WLM, by the actions of those women who take on the local porn merchants, and who organise pickets and more direct action. For many of us who grew up in the '50s and '60s, there is now an increasing awareness that under the banner of sexual liberation when the right to have sexual relationships outside the family was being contested, we assumed the position of 'sexually liberated' women by taking on the visions of 'liberation' that were largely determined by men. 'The good screw', 'exciting', 'the independence of sleeping around', What were not being contested in that period, were the definitions of sexuality and sexual activity that women were tacitly agreeing to. Marge Piercy in Vida writes of the pressure that was placed upon Lohania to sleep with Randy, a comrade whom the group were wanting to integrate into their organisation. This appropriation of women's sexual identity in order to 'bring people closer to the organisation', has not been unknown to the left in Britain in the past.
Throughout the last ten years the women's movement, divided as it may sometimes appear to men outside, has a real unity in its assertions about female sexuality, It has insisted on the right of women to determine their own sexuality; the right of women to explore and construct female sexuality in a way that is hostile and aggressive towards the images of female sexuality that have been constructed under a patriarchal form of society.
Many thanks to all the women who contributed to this article.
1 Helen Longino, 'Pornography, freedom and oppression: a closer look' (Take Back The Night, New York 1980).
2 Beverly Brown, 'A feminist interest in pornography: some modest proposals' (MMF 1981).
3 Jill Pack and Mary Ross, 'Porn, law and politics' (Camerawork No 18)