Andrea Dworkin: Pornography, Men Possessing Women, Women's Press, 1981, £4.75. Susan Griffin: Pornography and Silence, Women's Press, 1981, £4.75. Beatrice Faust: Women, Sex and Pornography, Penguin, 1982, £1.95.
For Mary Whitehouse and her moral army pornography represents an attack on traditional morality, on the sanctity of marriage and the family; it is explicitly about sex and therefore dangerous. For some sexual radicals pornography expresses an escape from sexual repression and even a form of sexual therapy; being explicitly about sex it promises new freedoms. Liberal concern about pornography has been caught in a balancing act between these views: between the defence of free speech and the need for censorship, between the importance of preserving private choice and the importance of maintaining public good, particularly in the sense of not offending the reasonable citizen and of protecting the young from corruption. Socialists have been overwhelmingly absent from these debates. And feminists do not fit into them.
Feminist analyses and politics around pornography have developed a different focus. The questions shift — not how shall obscenity be defined? or what is permissible in public/in private? but what is the meaning of pornography in our culture? what is pornography about? Although there are differences of style and approach in the work of Andrea Dworkin and Susan Griffin, both are centrally concerned with these questions. Andrea Dworkin explores 'the meaning of pornography and the system of power within which it exists'. Her particular theme is the power of men in pornography — 'Men possessing women'. Susan Griffin's study 'shows that pornography is an expression not of human erotic feeling and desire, not of a love of the life of the body, but of a fear of bodily knowledge and a desire to silence eros'.
These are powerful books, insisting that we recognise what pornography is about. Dworkin's writing is driven by rage at what she has discovered in her study of pornography. She looks to the ancient Greek derivation of the word: porne meaning 'whore, specifically and exclusively the lowest class of whore ... in our language sluts, cows (as in sexual cattle, sexual chattel), cunts'; graphos meaning 'writing, etching or drawing'. 'The methods of graphic depiction have increased in number and in kind' (the whole technology of still pornography, film, video etc) but 'the content is the same'. Pornography is an expression of male sexual domination; whores exist only within such a framework. The major theme of pornography is a celebration of male power. Its standard values are repeated (literally) ad nauseum: 'the excitement of humiliation, the joy of pain, the pleasure of abuse, the magnificence of cock' (p.215). There are variations: men who are poor, weak, black may become victims of abuse almost as women are: pregnancy can be depicted as a 'whore-like' state of bondage and humiliation; black women are abused in particular ways in which skin directly symbolises sex — victim and slave. Griffin points out that black women are sometimes depicted also as the slaves of (white) sexual slaves.
Dworkin shows that the way in which the woman is objectified in pornography is as a thing against which masculinity and male sexuality are defined. She indicates some of the continuities between pornography and the everyday world: the way in which advertising echoes pornographic images; the way in which force, a frequent dimension in pornography, has been established as a part of normal sexuality — men's natural response to women's 'low sex drive' (thanks to Kinsey and his associates in this instance); the way in which everyday household objects become objects of sexual torture — a symbolic link between pornography and domestic violence? Besides showing Kinsey's contempt for women and the masculine bias of his 'scientific' research into human sexual behaviour, a longer chapter demolishes the claims which have been made for the Marquis de Sade as revolutionary and sexual liberator. His commitment to sex was a commitment to male power, to the pornography and practice of rape and violence against women.
Susan Griffin similarly characterises de Sade and identifies many other representatives of the 'pornographic mind' in myth, in pornography itself, in history (Hitler for example). Her study is of the 'pornographic mind' which sustains oppression, which dominates our culture, which silences women, which feeds racism and anti-semitism and which opposes itself to the possibility of human liberation. Yet through this extraordinary exploration of horror and degradation Griffin weaves the possibility of alternatives, symbols of life and growth and liberation. Finally she asserts 'we have choice'.
Having read these books, I am left with many questions. The arguments built up by Dworkin and Griffin are compelling. But there are problems too. There's the way in which a vast sweep of history — from ancient Greece to the present (Dworkin), or the whole of Judaeo-Christian culture (Griffin) are seen as telling the same pornographic story. Especially in Griffin's book, culture (the victory of the pornographic mind) attacks and distorts nature and the struggle seems to be to recover an essential nature, an essential eros. No particular attention is focused on the contemporary situation in which pornography is flourishing (except in so far as many examples discussed are from recent publications, films etc); there is no analysis of the pornography industry and its international connections. There is little to suggest how we can develop creative, non-oppressive expressions of sexuality, sensuality and love against the destructiveness of male-dominated sexuality. (Although the possibility is strongly implied by Griffin.)
But other feminists are taking up these questions: the discussion and extension of feminist analysis is under way. Perhaps the most accessible and devastating contributions are to be found in Alice Walker's writings, in four of the stories in You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down. What is most significant about the books by Andrea Dworkin and Susan Griffin is that they radically challenge the way we view pornography. They reflect the development of a feminist politics against pornography. The political importance of this becomes even clearer if one compares their work with Beatrice Faust's more recently published book Women, Sex and Pornography. This is a [illegible] discussion of masculinity, feminism and pornography. It opens with a [illegible] discussion about pornography for women and ends with a quotation from 'wise Dr. Kinsey'.
The political issues raised by feminist critiques of pornography are important ones for the Left — perhaps particularly for men on the Left. These issues cannot wait until 'after the revolution' or even until the present great capitalist crisis is over. For it is in this crisis that pornography thrives, alongside the resurgence of traditional pressures to keep women at home, economically dependant, subservient wives, devoted mothers ...
As Andrea Dworkin says: 'The Left cannot have its whores and its politics.'
MARGARET COULSON has been active in women's liberation for many years.
Notes
1. Published by Women's Press. Also in Take Back the Night edited by Laura Lederer published by Morrow Quill Paperbacks.
2. See: Pat Masters and Jane Shallice: 'The Politics of Pornography', International Vol.6 No.2, July 1981.