Pornography

Why can pornography be harmful

it can cause some people to commit acts of sexual violence

Example of primary harm

murder, rape, assault, and discrimination on the basis of race and gender.

Primary Harm

those in which the alleged harm is commonly taken to be intrinsically harmful, even though the precise way in which the harm is harmful might yet be further explored.

Sexually Violent Material

whips, chains, torture, and rape

McElroy

Argues that if we get rid of porn it is a violation of women's rights

Mackinnon

Argues that if we have porn it is a violation of Women's rights

The Argument that Pornography is Violence (MacKinnon)

"Pornography defines women by how we look according to how we can be sexually used. Pornography codes how to look at women, so you know what you can do with one when you see one...Men treat women as who they see women as being. Pornography constructs who that is." "In pornography, there it is, in one place, all the abuses...the rape, the battery, the sexual harassment, the prostitution, and the sexual abuse of children. Only in the pornography it is called something else: sex, sex, sex, sex, and sex, respectively." "Pornography...eroticizes hierarchy, it sexualizes inequality. It makes dominance and submission into sex...To the extent pornography succeeds in constructing social reality, it becomes invisible as harm." "Pornography...is a political practice, a practice of power and powerlessness...Sex forced on real women so that it can be sold at a profit and forced on other real women; women's bodies trussed and maimed and raped and made into things to be hurt and obtained and accessed, and this presented as the nature of women in a way that is acted on and acted out, over and over...Pornography is integral to attitudes and behaviors of violence and discrimination that define the treatment and status of half the population."

The Attorney General's Argument

1. Evidence shows that there is a causal relationship between exposure to sexually violent/degrading materials and an increase in aggressive behavior directed towards women. 2. An increase in aggressive behavior towards women will increase the incidence of sexual violence. 3. Thus, the evidence strongly suggests that substantial exposure to sexually violent/degrading materials bears a causal relationship to antisocial acts of sexual violence and, for some subgroups, possibly to unlawful acts of sexual violence

Three types of pornographic materials

1. Sexually Violent Material 2. Non-Violent but Degrading Material 3. Non-Violent and Non-Degrading Material

Porn (Supreme Court Definition)

a) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find as a whole to appeal to the prurient interest (having or encouraging an excessive interest in sexual matters) b) depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by an applicable state law; and, c) taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. 2

Secondary Harm

harmful but not in the sense that it is in anyway less important, but in the sense that the concern is not with what the act is, but what it will lead too