Pornography: Men Possessing Women
By Andrea Dworkin
Plume, 1979
Anti-sex. Reactionary. A man-hating shrew out to destroy sexual liberation by victimizing women. Andrea Dworkin’s stature is mythic as the caricature of the woman who gave feminism a bad name in her fight to analyze, then criminalize porn. Who wants to be a censor and a prude? Apparently Andrea Dworkin. So she was cast out, denounced and ridiculed – told to shut up for the sake of the pornographers’ free speech.
But just about no one bothered to criticize what she was actually writing. To Dworkin, porn isn’t merely a picture or story about sex. It is the act of “men possessing women,” something so ubiquitous that we didn’t have a word for it. Dworkin provided one and bothered to report on what porn does and how. She says the etymology of the term itself is the “graphic depictions of whores.” And whores get used. Porn sexualizes degradation from the softcore gauze of Playboy’s ever-ready bunnies to the current industry standard of “gonzo,” where the pussy is ignored in favor of throat-fucking and hard anal. Availability is expected, violation preferred. It is the depiction of a generalized reality.
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