The Case Against Pornography

“The questions now really are: why is pornography credible in our society? How can anyone believe it? And then: how subhuman would women have to be for the pornography to be true? To the men who use pornography, how subhuman are women? If men believe the pornography because it makes them come – them, not the women – what is sex to men and how will women survive it?”

– Andrea Dworkin, “Pornography: Men Possessing Women,” pg. xxxv

In December of last year, I was aimlessly scrolling on social media one night when I came across a post that stopped me in my tracks. It was published by a prominent media platform in Lebanon, and it was about the Gisele Pelicot case. The headline is what got my attention: “marital rape case.”

Something about that rubbed me in the wrong way. It felt like they were missing the root cause behind the monstrosity of the case. The Pelicot case is much more than a marital rape case. It is the outcome of a culture hyperfixated on visuality where the objectification of the human body reigns supreme. It is directly related to and cannot be separated from the utterly misogynistic and violent pornography industry that endangers the lives of children and women – and men. After all, the website on which Dominique Pelicot invited men to rape his wife on camera was, at its core, a pornography website. The chat room where he invited over fifty men to rape his unconscious wife, instructing them not to wear any aftershave or to smoke beforehand, was called “Without Her Knowing.”

The fact that the multi-billion dollar pornography industry was gapingly missing from the analysis made by this so-called “politically progressive” media platform is only indicative of the total normalization of porn in our society. Since the 1960s, radical feminists have warned us about how the growing porn industry would cause an upsurge in rape cases. Robin Morgan put it best when she said "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice." Today we are seeing their warnings materialize.

The Gisele Pelicot case is the case against pornography.

Talking about porn is not very fashionable, let alone critiquing it. It is better to act as if it doesn’t exist or has nothing to do with you, otherwise you run the risk of looking like a crazed right-wing conservative. But the reality is that pornography has everything to do with us and how we live our lives because it intervenes on the most intimate aspect of our lives: sex. And it is ubiquitous, far more than we would like to admit to ourselves.

The Normalization of Porn

“This summer, for the first time, I watched an X-rated film on Canal Plus. My television set doesn’t have a decoder; the images on the screen were blurred, the words replaced by strange sound effects, hissing and babbling, a different sort of language, soft and continuous. One could make out the figure of a woman in a corset and stockings, and a man. The story was incomprehensible; it was impossible to predict any of their actions or movements. The man walked up to the woman. There was a close-up of the woman’s genitals, clearly visible among the shimmerings of the screen, then of the man’s penis, fully erect, sliding into the woman’s vagina. For a long time this coming and going of the two sex organs was shown from several angles. The cock reappeared, in the man’s hand, and the sperm spilled onto the woman’s belly. No doubt one gets used to such a sight; the first time is shattering. Centuries and centuries, hundreds of generations have gone by, and it is only now that one can see this – a man’s penis and a woman’s vagina coming together, the sperm – something one could barely take in without dying has become as easy to watch as a handshake.”

– Annie Ernaux, “Simple Passion,” pg. 2

My (male) classmates began speaking casually about pornography from as young as ten or eleven years old. It was simply part of the daily parlance. In high school this only became more prevalent; classmates would speak about the kind of porn they liked to watch and would open videos in class and on campus. It seemed normal – at least, it seemed normal for boys to watch it, and for girls to pretend like it had nothing to do with them but quietly entertain the lurid conversations of their male counterparts. The names of porn stars were widely known and commonly used as the brunt of jokes. Our favorite TV show was Friends, and anyone who’s watched a couple of episodes of the sitcom knows how omnipresent pornography is in it – pornography is mentioned or referred to in nearly every episode. As a university student, my male friends would share what their favorite “porn genres” were during gatherings. This was, again, supposed to be normal. That kids and young teenagers are routinely exposed to pornography is evidenced in a post made by a Lebanese photographer and artist, Myriam Boulos, as part of her “Sexual Fantasies” series:

The tone of this description always seemed strange to me: the author of the post, as well as the artist who is sponsoring it, is very much portraying her exposure to pornography at the mere age of nine as a liberating or exciting thing rather than a violent appropriation of her innocence and childhood. It is bizarre. Are we really doomed to a reality where children learn about sex – the most intimate of unions – through Pornhub? Louise Perry likes to call this “sexual imprinting,” where people learn about sex through porn rather than human relationships.

It may be important to give a little bit of context as to how we got here. Pornography first emerged (at least in the visual format to which we are accustomed) in the 1960s, when it was seen as a vehicle for liberation as part of the counterculture of the time. As the “sexual liberation” movement grew, it suddenly wasn’t so anti-capitalist anymore. By 1981, the pornography industry in the US was already larger than the record and film industries combined (Dworkin 1981, pg. 192). Porn was carried by cable television and was starting to be marketed for home use in video machines. Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin evocatively remarks that the advancement of technology constantly demands the creation of more and more porn to meet the market it opens up: “The technology by its very nature encourages more and more passive acquiescence to the graphic depictions. Passivity makes the already credulous consumer more credulous. He comes to the pornography a believer, he goes away from it a missionary. The technology itself legitimizes the uses of women conveyed by it” (192). Indeed, the pornography of today is quite a ways away from the Playboy magazines of the 1960s. Today it is a multi-billion dollar, profit-making, product-oriented industry beaming the most extreme content into the pockets of anyone who has access to a smartphone.

For Louise Perry, pornography is a prime example of what she calls “limbic capitalism,” a “technologically progressive but socially regressive business system that makes money by manipulating the limbic system.” The limbic system is the part of the brain responsible for feeling, whereby our brains seek out stimuli that were advantageous in the ancestral environment (e.g. bright colors for fresh fruits). Porn exploits this primitive part of our brain by exaggerating sexual stimuli in the same way that all capitalist enterprises manipulate our natural impulses but “strip away anything truly nutritious.” In the simplest of terms: Porn is to sex what McDonalds is to food.

Those reading this post might be wondering: So what? So what if porn is ubiquitous and normalized? Isn’t pornography just a representation of the most natural of all human acts? This argument that pornography is nothing but a harmless “depiction of sex” has been used by proponents of the industry since the 1980s. The next section will elucidate exactly what is wrong with this argument.

Objectification is Violent

“The fact that pornography is widely believed to be ‘depictions of the erotic’ means only that the debasing of women is held to be the real pleasure of sex.”

– Andrea Dworkin, “Pornography: Men Possessing Women,” pg. 191

Pornography is inherently violent because what porn does, in its essence, is objectify, dehumanize, and commodify the human body, and that is violent to its core. If you think that pornography is harmless, you have likely become desensitized to the extent that it objectifies our bodies, and this is likely because our entire culture has become subsumed by the commoditization of the human spirit and body. The result is that we no longer see objectification as violence.

As “reactionary feminist” Mary Harrington has written: People who are filmed or photographed taking part in sexual acts are “not in a relationship with you,” but are rather “reduced to a resource for you to use.” This, quite simply, produces a form of media that normalizes intimate objectification – objectification of both men and women – and abuse. The camera frame’s “objectifying power” is evinced in Dworkin’s description of a photograph in a pornography magazine she encountered:

“In the photograph, all visual significance is given to the ass of the woman on her knees, which is in the foreground, exaggerated by the light markedly on it, and to its echo, the raised buttock of the woman reclining. The camera is the penile presence, the viewer is the male who participates in the sexual action, which is not within the photograph but in the perception of it. … The symbolic reality instead is expressed in the posture of women exposed purposefully to excite a male viewer. The as is exposed and vulnerable, the camera has taken it; the viewer can claim it.”

– Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, pg. 36

Human bodies are transformed into an amenity for our own enjoyment and pleasure, for our use. And because of the fact that most pornography corporations are owned by men – starting with Hugh Hefner in the 1960s and Feras Antoon in the 2010s – the objectification that is rampant in pornography is primarily catered towards the sexual desires and pleasure of men. As a result, mainstream porn polarizes pure agency (relegated only to the the male performer who is often subjecting his female partner to violent or degrading acts) and a "physically evacuated, vacant passivity now conflated with ‘femaleness.’” A woman becomes a sex toy.

Louise Perry has argued that we live in an era of “sexual disenchantment,” where we increasingly view sex as an activity that is devoid of any meaning at all. In other words: sex isn’t special and we can regard it just like any social interaction. This idea is pervasive and quite seductive in today’s climate. But sex is an intimate and essentially meaningful act whereby two bodies are becoming one. We fail to see how our insistence to evacuate sex of any meaning alienates us from our own bodies. We also fail to see how our widespread sexual disenchantment is a direct result of the pornography industry which trains our brains to regard sex as a spectator sport to enjoy alone and in front of a screen. Pornography removes love and mutuality from sex, “turning people into irrelevant body parts.” It is, again, quite bizarre to me that hardcore Marxists and leftists who avow to be against consumerism and like to pontificate on commodity fetishism don’t see pornography as a critical vehicle turning human beings into dehumanized and depersonalized merchandise.

Pornography is the Theory, Rape is the Practice

“I came to the anti-porn movement from the anti-rape movement.”

– Andrea Dworkin

“Everyone that watches “Deep Throat” is watching me being raped.”

– Linda Marchiano, former porn star

Defenders of pornography are quick to point out that “not all porn” is violent. The previous section was written partly in response to them. This section, in turn, elaborates on the premise that in actuality, as much as 90% of online porn does feature violence in the form of physical abuse as well as objectification. And so the “nonviolent porn” those detractors are so quick to bring up is nearly non-existent, and if it does exist, no one is watching it.

Andrea Dworkin called pornography the “nerve center” of all forms of abuse. Through pornography, strategies for sexual assault are both planned and communicated to men who then go out and do them to women who are trained to accept it from years of watching pornography. Maybe this seems like an extreme or absurd argument to make. Unfortunately, facts exist to back it up.

Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) is full of harrowing stories from women who suffered the consequences of their male partners’ investment in pornography. Here is an example:

“They got married. During the course of their marriage he began to consume more and more pornography. He would read excerpts to her from the magazines about group sex, wife swapping, anal intercourse, and bondage. They would go to pornography films and wet T-shirt contests with friends. … He brought his friends home to act out the scenarios from the pornography. She found the group sex humiliating and disgusting, and to prevent it she agreed to act out the pornography in private with her husband. She began feeling suicidal…. Increasingly, when she was asleep he would force intercouse on her.” (Dworkin, 1981, xix)

This is still widespread today, as signified by an article in the Irish Independent on the increase of female patients suffering injuries from “rough sex” fueled by pornography. In anti-sex trafficking activist Laila Mickelwait’s book, Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking (2024), she shares some stories behind the videos that populate Pornhub’s website:

“A man in Alabama named Rocky Shay Franklin drugged, overpowered, and repeatedly raped a 12-year-old boy. Franklin filmed the assaults and uploaded twenty three of the rape videos to Pornhub. The videos were monetized with advertisements and sold as pay-to-download content. Pornhub and Franklin split the profits from the sale of each video.” (10)

“A fifteen year old girl from Broward County, Florida, was missing for a year. She was finally found when her distraught mother was tipped off by a Pornhub user that he recognized her daughter on the site. The mother found fifty-eight videos of her child being raped on Pornhub that were uploaded by an account named “Daddy’s_Slut.”” (12)

“GirlsDoPorn, a sex trafficking operation out of San Diego California, tricked, coerced, and forced over one hundred women into sex videos that were uploaded to one of Pornhub’s most popular “partner channels” and viewed over 600 million times on the site.” (13)

If these “anecdotal” pieces of evidence are not enough to convince you of the misogynistic nature of pornography, it may satisfy you to know that as the police were arresting Gisele Pelicot’s abusers in 2023, a report was published which revealed that “as much as 90% of online porn featured violence towards women:”

“Women… are humiliated, objectified, dehumanized, assaulted, tortured, subjected to treatment that is contrary to human dignity… the women are real and the sexual acts are real and the violence is real. The suffering is often perfectly visible and at the same time eroticised.”

Conclusion

“I suggest that the women who have experienced the sadism of pornography on their bodies – the women in the pornography and the women on whom the pornography is used – are also survivors; they bear witness, now, for themselves, on behalf of others. … These women will not abandon the meaning of their own experience. That meaning is: pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women’s bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity – the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he’s got her.”

– Andrea Dworkin, “Pornography: Men Possessing Women,” pg. xxv

The Gisele Pelicot case should have served as the ultimate evidence of the extreme brutalities integral to the porn industry and what this does to our society and to our women. It is the ultimate act of dehumanization and objectification: A woman becomes an “unconscious thing, to be used by strangers.” Her dehumanization was engineered by her husband of 38 years for the sexual enjoyment of men. It is worthwhile to note here that women being raped while drugged is among the most popular categories in porn, and, unsurprisingly, is included in the categories of porn that Dominique Pelicot himself watched.

People like to talk about porn as if it were an “exercise in fantasy.” This is not a meaningless sleight of phrase, it is a purposeful attempt to obscure the very real human beings who are implicated in and directly affected by the production and the release of pornography photos, films, and videos. The use of this word is, as Dworkin has said, “part of the pornographer’s effort to hide what they really do.” Again, this may seem like an absurd or extreme claim to make. One only needs to look at how Pornhub has defended its ‘teen porn’ category, writing that it is“‘legal’ and ‘consensual’ content made to satisfy ‘various user fantasies’” (Mickelwait 2024, 13). Essentially, they are saying these are merely adult actresses only made to look like underage teens for the sake of user fantasies — and for some reason, everyone seems to believe them. The use of the word “fantasy” in the context of pornography is intentional: it characterizes the industry as an industry of make-believe that exists only in the head of the male consumer.

But these are real acts, and they are being done to real people.

And there will be no such thing as bodily autonomy and dignity for women and children – and men – when pornography still has such a tight grip over our culture.

Sources:

Against Pornography: The Feminism of Andrea Dworkin [Documentary]. 1991. YouTube.

Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1981.

Mickelwait, Laila. Takedown: Inside the Fight to Shut Down Pornhub for Child Abuse, Rape, and Sex Trafficking. Penguin Random House, 2024.

Steinem, Gloria. “Erotica and Pornography: A Clear and Present Difference.” https://masculinisation.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/erotica-and-pornography-a-clear-and-present-difference-by-gloria-steinem.pdf