Pornography

Feona Attwood

"In our culture, sex is becoming more and more visible, and more explicit. Sexual representations, products, and services are becoming more accessible to a wider group of consumers, and the development of new communication technologies to support, replace or reconfigure sexual encounters are increasingly part of ordinary people's everyday lives"

MacKinnon

"It seems essential to the kick of pornography that it be to some degree against the rules"

gender issue cont.

"Men treat women as who they see women being"

Sallie Tisdale cont.

"porn needs to change, improve, and it's women who will do that improving, and not by ignoring it."

if women controlled porn...

-broaden voice of women -broaden scope of genre -broaden power-base of women

pornography is a gender issue

-built on male perspective -not considered a women's issue -power relations

vulnerability and porn

-corporeal (desire, activity, publicity) -social (,presence and absence)

Enlightenment

-healthy -ordinary -celebratory

Sallie Tisdale

-if more women in porn, it would change the way they're portrayed -agrees with MacKinnon on obscenity law -disagrees with MacKinnon the porn is necessarily violent

moral issue

-law/public policy -culture -religion

Harm? In porn the violence is the sex

-male domination -free speech of men silences speech of women -obscenity laws -dehumanization of women

Impoverished Discourse

-mono-dimensional -debased -impersonal

Pornography in Canada

-obscenity law -adults=legal (w/ consent) -children=illegal

Transgressive Creativity

-pornographic imagination -potential for artistry -new mysticism

Disorder

-psychological malady -social malady

Pornography definition

-sexually explicit -designed to produce sexual arousal in viewers -inherently transgressive

Gilson

...the main issue we might take with consumer interaction with pornography is the way it fosters the pursuit of invulnerability and the cultivation of entrepreneurial subjectivity.

Pornography in Canada

Difficult to define; difficult to demonstrate "harm" nudity/objectification, unexplicit/degrading

Catherine McKinnon

It is essential to the kick of pornography that it be to some degree against the rules, but it is never truly unavailable or truly illegitimate. Thus, obscenity law, like the law of rape, preserves the value of, without restricting the ability to get, that which it purports to devalue and prohibit. Obscenity law helps to keep pornography sexy by putting state power-force, hierarchy-behind its purported prohibition on what men can have sexual access to.

Pornography and Obscenity law

Jacobellis v. Ohio -hard to define, know when you see it

Pornography in Canada

KEY CONCERNS: with "harm", consent, aggression, violence, "undue exploitation"

New testament

Porneia=sexual immorality

Pornography as Mysticism-Susan Sontag

The universe proposed by the pornographic imagination is a total universe. It has the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it, reducing everything into one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative. All action is conceived of as a set of sexual exchanges.

Feminist view 1

anti porn: harm of exploiting female sexuality

Vulnerability critique

both views one-sided; reality or fantasy

Institutionalized Misogyny

debasing towards women

Pornography in Canada

internet and ease of access

expansion of Pornosphere

obscene texts proliferate and become more accessible

Striptease Culture (Brian McNair)

public commodification of personal intimicies

main ethical criterion

responsiveness

Feminist view 2

sex radicals: good of disrupting sexual status quo

Pornographication

the iconography of pornography becomes commonplace

Criminal Code 163

undue exploitation of sex/sex with crime, horror, cruelty, violence

Islam

zina=illicit desire