In response to the question, posed at the end---"Given its tendency to elicit support from the religious right, does anti-pornography feminism, especially of the moredogmatic type which assumes rather than proves harm from pornography,betray a quasi-religious and sex-negative world-view?"---I would argue, and have argued, "Yes." There is a type of anti-pornography feminism that assumes rather than defends with reasonable arguments that pornography of all types is harmful in various ways (or it refuses to investigate carefully the issue); this anti-pornography feminism is abundantly sex-negative (making the mistake, for example, of turning a romanticized and stereotypical feminine asexuality into feminism ); and it does not differ appreciably from the religious and politically conservative critiques of pornography. I argue this at length in my 2002 book, Pornography,Sex, and Feminism (Prometheus), although additional and important parts of the argument can be found in Chapter Six of my Sexual...

The claim(nowadays, at least) is mostly associated with feminist legal scholarCatharine MacKinnon---and it is restricted to heterosexual sex inparticular, not homosexual or lesbian sex. Before we proceed, note thatthere is a slight error in the question. The writer moves from "rape"in the first sentence to (in effect) "nonconsensual" sex in the secondsentence. However, it is still being debated whether a nonconsentdefintion of rape is as adequate as, or more adequate than, adefinition in terms of "force." (MacKinnon's writings are implicated inthis debate.) For an account of some of the philsophical arguments, seeJoan McGregor, Is It Rape? , Ashgate, 2005. Hereis one version of the claim in MacKinnon: "Few women are in a positionto refuse unwanted sexual initiatives" from men ("Feminism, Marxism,Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory," in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology ,edited by Nannerl O. Keohane, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Barbara C. Gelpi[Chicago, Ill.: University of...