Feminism and Pornography
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3945612 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kate Ellis (0000-0002-4228-8263, Professor of English at Rutgers University and author of The Contested Castle.), Barbara O''Dair, Barbara O'Dair (Entertainment Weekly and contributor to The Village Voice, the LA Weekly and Elle Magazine.), Barbara O’Dair, Abby Tallmer (Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Vassar College) |
| Year | 1990 |
| Issue | 36 |
| Pages | 15 |
| Publication date | 1990-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Feminist Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1395105 |
| OpenAlex | W4233156780 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 13 |
In recent years, the issue of pornography has engendered an intense debate in the feminist community. Dismissed by some as diversionary, it is a debate whose stakes, we feel, are high. Will feminism, having achieved some gains, capitulate to conservative forces, or will it continue to take a stand for the liberation of women in all domains, including the difficult and contradictory domain of sexual expression? We are still asking, in the mid-eighties, what do women want, and the answer is that women have multiple desires and goals. We want to be valued equally with men as earners, but we don't want to contribute to the pollution of the planet and the exploitation of other human beings. We want to be safe from attack and abuse, in our private lives as well as in the public sphere, but we don't want that safety at the cost of challenge, risk, exploration and pleasure. Safety and adventure represent conflicting demands: the relationship between the two, and how to negotiate it, is a key issue in the current debate. The roots of this debate go back to the nineteenth century, when some feminists were in favour of making divorce easier to obtain because patriarchal marriage restricted women's opportunities. Others favoured making divorce harder to get because men were already too prone to abandon women. This is one example of the way in which a certain historical strand of feminism has put women's purity and protection first. The focus on imagery that we see in the debate over pornography is more recent. When feminists set out, in the sixties, to demonstrate the sexist core of our supposedly liberated culture, no better evidence could be found than the portrayal of women in every area of representation. But with the increasing feminist focus on pornography since the mid-seventies, a descriptive tool has turned into a prescriptive one, as images of women came to be seen by many feminists not as one symptom among many, but as the principal cause of
Adventure · Feminism · Human sexuality · Negotiation · Pleasure · Political science · Pornography · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Law · Psychology · Sex work and related issues · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology
A emergência da adicção sexual, suas apropriações e as relações com a produção de campos profissionais
Remediating pornography
Who Cares about Women's Problems? Female Legislators in the 1995 and 1999 Russian State Dumas
The Consequence of Race Mixture
Male gays in the female gaze
A Historical and Empirical Review of Pornography and Romantic Relationships
Anxious Images
Reactions to pornography on a college campus
Does Religious Attendance Moderate the Connection Between Pornography Consumption and Attitudes Toward Women
A Profile of Pornography Users in Australia
Reading between the lines
The Downright Torture of Women
| Unique citing works | 12 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,39 |
| Citation span | 1993 - 2020 (28) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 10 |