Feminism

When I was a feminist member of a conservative church, I adopted an anti-pornography feminism as a way of reconciling my religion with my leftist values, but when I became an agnostic, I found myself moving towards sex-positive feminism (although retaining a role for the other kind of feminism within the public domain, or wherever the bounds of freedom and mutual consent would be exceeded by the production or display of pornography). Given its tendency to elicit support from the religious right, does anti-pornography feminism, especially of the more dogmatic type which assumes rather than proves harm from pornography, betray a quasi-religious and sex-negative world-view?

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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 Investigations (New YorkUniversity Press, 1996) and in the section on Rae Langton in my Philosophyof the Social Sciences 29, #3 (1999), pp. 354-88.

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