Pornography has never been more free—free in a double sense because nearly anyone in the world can access pornography at little to no cost, and there are seemingly no limits to what can be pornographized. Given the pervasiveness of pornography in the world today, and its real impact on our political and personal lives, last month our Materialist Feminist Reading Group read Andrea Dworkin’s recently re-issued book Pornography: Men Possessing Women. At the end of the session, we considered the question: what ought to be the Left’s position on pornography? Or, as Dworkin provocatively puts it: can the Left have its whores and its politics too?
Our Materialist Feminist Reading Group continues the second wave feminist tradition of consciousness-raising. “Sex” is to feminism what “work” is to Marxism, and consciousness-raising is its method. Consciousness-raising, as Dworkin’s comrade, Catherine MacKinnon, put it, aims to ‘develop female class consciousness through sharing experience.’ And while our reading group is sometimes cathartic, ‘consciousness raising is not “therapy”, which implies the existence of individual solutions and falsely assumes that the male-female relationship is purely personal.’ Rather, consciousness-raising is ‘the only method by which we can ensure that our program for liberation is based on the concrete realities of our lives’, as the Redstockings Manifesto states (Point V).
As convenors of the group, we were struck by how Dworkin’s writing resonated with our realities nearly 50 years after Pornography was first published. Dworkin’s prescience lies in her identification of pornography as a throughline of patriarchal social relations, from the pornographia of ancient Greece (‘pornography’ comes from the ancient Greek pornē and graphos, meaning ‘writing about whores’) to, at the time of her writing, the nude centrefolds of Playboy and Hustler—though perhaps even Dworkin could not predict how streaming, webcamming, and artificial intelligence have allowed porn to reach a new nadir.
Dworkin is iconoclastic, targeting ‘men of the Canon’ like Tolstoy, Sade, Bataille, and Freud. She rethinks Tolstoy’s erotic novella about uxoricide (wife killing) with the added context that Tolstoy’s own marriage was one where ‘he hated [his wife] all the time, and fucked her sometimes’ (Intercourse, 17). She demystifies Sade’s so-called revolutionary sexual libertinism, revealing that the rape and torture depicted in his literature was, in almost every instance, autobiographical. Dworkin extends her critique to ‘low brow’ smut, arguing that all pornography, whether produced by Georges Bataille or Hugh Hefner, comes from a place of real sexual violence. In the case of Tolstoy and Sade, this violence is literal. Even if that weren’t so, Dworkin nonetheless insists that pornography in all forms is a manifestation of material patriarchal social relations.
Given her commitment to the imbrication of the material with the ideological, we think political economists would be well-served by reading Dworkin not as a puritanical ideologue—an insult often levelled against her—but as the materialist she is. Pornography presents a concrete analysis of the material conditions of women’s subjugation, with specific reference to the political economy of pornography. Dworkin refuses to accept that the industry deals in unmediated fantasy and private pleasure, arguing that pornography is fundamentally material in three key ways:
First, ‘pornography happens. It is not outside the world of material reality because it happens to women, and it is not outside the world of material reality because it makes men come’ (Pornography, xxxviii). The women and girls on screen are real. The violence committed against them is real. The profit is real. This seems obvious enough, and yet the most common defence of the industry is that pornography is pure fantasy.
Second, pornography is not merely a reflection of patriarchal social relations; it is constitutive of them. Pornography is the blueprint of male supremacy: ‘every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual exploitation, is encoded in it.’ It lays bare ‘what men want [women] to be, think [women] are, make [women] into; how men use [women]; not because biologically they are men but because this is how their social power is organised’ (Pornography, xxxxix). Like a patriarchal Rosetta Stone, pornography is both an artefact of male supremacy and a script for further violence, objectification, and domination.
Third, the consequences of pornography transcend the screen and affect all women, including those not yet caught up in the industry. It has been linked to increasing rates of violence against women and girls and to the growth in sexual strangulation femicides. It constructs and confirms a patriarchal image of women as ‘whores by nature’ who experience sexual pleasure from their own dehumanisation, humiliation, submission, and pain (Pornography, xxxiii). It hijacks women’s sexuality, teaching us to eroticise our own abjection. It constitutes women as second-class citizens whose bodies can be used on an industrial scale in service of male pleasure. Pornography, then, produces and reproduces women as a subordinated sex class.
If this last point was not clear to us at first, it became so during group discussion. A pattern quickly emerged from the personal experiences we shared. Most of us had been strangled, slapped, and spat on, tied up, put down, and humiliated in the name of male sexual ‘fantasy.’ The violence committed against us was not kinky, subversive, naughty, or rebellious, as we had been told, but was in fact the status quo—has been the status quo historically—and we were subsequently forced to ask ourselves how this violence was any different to that which women experienced outside the bedroom or off the screen. We saw ourselves in the Playboy Bunnies, in the ‘muses’ of Tolstoy and Sade, and in the porneia of ancient Greece. We saw ourselves at the culmination of a historical process whereby pornography had turned us into a class of ‘collectivised cunts,’ in Dworkin’s words (Pornography, 207). As materialists who maintain that men’s domination over women is the first political order, we concluded that the eroticisation of this social formation through pornography is fundamental to its reproduction.
We believe that the Left should adopt what is now, since reading Dworkin, a founding mandate of Materialist Feminist Reading Group: watching pornography is a political act, and disavowing pornography is the correct political choice. As Dworkin argues, the Left has a pornography problem. In the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s, the Left claimed pornography for itself, arguing that it is inherently radical insofar as it resists right-wing sexual puritanism, and thus is central to the politics of freedom. And so the Left brought ‘the whore…out of the bourgeois home into the streets for democratic consumption [by] all men’ (Pornography, 208). To this day, ‘left-wing ideology claims that sexual freedom is in the unrestrained use of women, the use of women as collective, natural resource, not privatised, not owned by one man but instead used by many’ (Pornography, 207).
As one reading group member noted, it now seems impossible to revise this sentiment in left-wing organisations. Arguably, late-stage neoliberalism has given the average man little else but pornography. The US Democrats’ campaign in 2024 to protect men’s right to pornography gives credence to Dworkin’s claim that, on the Left, ‘pornography glut is bread and roses for the masses’ (Pornography, 209).
But consciousness-raising proved its utility in dispelling whatever porn-sickness the Marxists and feminists among us were still harbouring. Using Dworkin to critically interrogate our own social experiences, we were convinced by her contention that the role of pornography is the material constitution of patriarchal social relations. Now, if we could just get the Left to put down the lotion and pick up Dworkin. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.
Author: Lucy Carozza
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