"Pornography: Not A Moral Issue"

Essay by afghanroseCollege, UndergraduateA, November 2004

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Synopsis:

In this article Catherine Mackinnon is speaking from her point of view on Pornography. In her article she uses political aspects to further her argument on pornography. She believes pornography is widely obscene, which illustrates women having less power than men. Mackinnon speaks about pornography being a more political matter rather a moral issue.

Critical-Thinking:

In her article she states that "Pornography is not imagery, it is some relation to a reality elsewhere constructed. It is a distortion, reflection, projection, expression, fantasy, representation, or symbol. It is sexual reality." In her article she mentions a book called Pornography: Men Possessing Women by Dworkins, which presents a theory that the gender is equal to which pornography is a core constitutive practice. "The way pornography produces it meanings and constructs and defines men and women as such. Gender is what gender means. It has no basis in anything other than the social reality its hegemony constructs.

The process that gives sexuality its male supremacist meaning is therefore the process through which gender inequality becomes socially real".

The conventional understanding of pornography as a moral issue is that he term "moral" is all basically based on concepts through good and evil, which are parallel. Under the male supremacy the distinctions are that female is private, moral, valued, subjective, and the males are public, ethical, factual, and objective.

"Pornography through a feminist view is a form of forced sex. Sexual liberation in the liberal senses frees male sexual aggression in the feminist sense." What may be love and romance in the view of a liberal may be hatred and torture in the feminist view. Pornography constitutes the meaning of what sexuality is. Men treat women as what they see women to be, just as they are and nothing else.