Abstract:
Rae Langton and Caroline West argue that pornography silences women by
presupposing misogynistic attitudes, such as that women enjoy being
raped. More precisely, they claim that a somewhat infamous pictorial,
‘Dirty Pool’, makes such presuppositions, and that it is typical in this
respect. I argue for four claims. (1) There are empirical reasons to
doubt that women are silenced in the way that Langton and West claim
they are. (2) There is no evidence that very much pornography makes the
sorts of presuppositions that Langton and West's explanation of
silencing requires it to make. (3) Even ‘Dirty Pool’, for all its other
problems, does not make such presuppositions. (4) Langton and West
misread ‘Dirty Pool’ because they do not take proper account of the fact
that pornography often traffics in sexual fantasy. The broader lesson
is that we need to read pornography more sensitively if we are to
understand its capacity to shape socio-sexual norms (for good or for
ill).
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