No More Pornography Canutin'?
Here's an interesting article from the Boston Globe about the conspicuous absence of feminist voices against pornography. The industry is expanding, the article notes at the beginning:
“Movies like Boogie Nights and the recent documentary 'Inside Deep Throat' have portrayed the adult industry as an enclave for good-hearted, rough-edged misfits and cultural freedom fighters. Last fall the memoir of porn superstar Jenna Jameson spent a month and a half on the New York Times bestseller list. And the industry itself continues to grow at a torrid pace: Hard numbers are difficult to find, but estimates put it at anywhere from a $3 billion to $14 billion a year industry.”
But the feminists no longer fight it. Why? The article offers various explanations, all of which are plausible, but this one seems the most likely:
“But perhaps it's porn's very ubiquity that has most weakened the anti-pornography case, feminist and conservative. Thanks to the growth of home-video pornography in the 1980s and the more recent shift to the Internet, far more people have access to X-rated material than ever before. As Williams puts it, 'In a way I think [early anti-porn feminists] MacKinnon and Dworkin were able to invoke the kind of horror that they did at pornography at a time when not as many people had seen it. For better or for worse, now it has become part of the vernacular of our way of talking about picturing sex to ourselves.'”
