Is it possible to make a legally meaningful distinction between porn which is abusive and porn which is very rough? I think this question is very relevant for our time.
Some people think that all pornography is, in some sense, abusive. Maybe that's even analytic, if one distinguishes "pornography" from "erotica", as many people do. For what it's worth, I doubt there's any very clean way to make that distinction (these look like what Bernard Williams called "thick" concepts, if ever there were any), so let me just talk about "sexually explicit media". I don't myself see any reason to think that sexually explicit media, as such, has to be abusive or degrading or necessarily bad in some other way, even if most sexually explicit media is in fact bad in some way, such as presenting abusive sex as unobjectionable or even normal. That said, some people like their sex rough, at least some of the time, and some people even like to roleplay situations in which one of the partners is abusive towards the other. None of that is very surprising. Human sexuality is varied and complex, just like humans. Rough sex, in that sense, is not abusive. It is (or at least can be)...
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