Why write about pornography? Why write about this monstrous curse that we have to suffer in the last days? It’s so much easier to shut our eyes, shut our ears, and shut our mouths, than to speak about this evil. However, the problem is that, in our world as it currently is, pornography has now completely surrounded us and has infiltrated into all of our lives, even if we never consume it ourselves.
I sometimes worry that, as members of the CofJC, we are rather unprepared for the full-on assault being waged against so much of what is good and right in the world by the pornography industry. Of course, as a people we understand that pornography is wrong (i.e., sinful), and that to consume (or to make) pornography is to break God’s commandments – specifically, the law of chastity. But beyond this foundational position, I find that the issue of pornography is rather undertheorized in our tradition. As a case in point, in the ‘Help for Me’ manual in the Life Help: Pornography series published by the Church, there is only part of one paragraph – twenty-two words – which suggests why pornography is wrong. [1] The rest of the manual is dedicated to helping our members stop their consumption of pornography; an extremely worthy goal, surely, but not a grappling with the deeper moral and spiritual themes regarding the evil nature of this practice. Not only that, but the issue of pornography is in danger of becoming more undertheorized as our leaders seem to say less and less about it.
In my own work as a philosopher, and also as a disciple of Christ, I have come across an unexpected source of interest - and frankly, inspiration - on this topic: the work of the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, who was one of the leading voices of the anti-pornography, anti-prostitution and battered women’s movement from the 1970’s until her death in 2005.
And now, let me explain how I came to this point.
I come face to face with the evil of pornography a couple of times a year, when I teach it as a unit in my Social Ethics class in the philosophy department at the University of San Diego. I have a large amount of freedom over the topics I cover in my syllabus, so no one is making me discuss the ethics of pornography with my students. But I choose to put it on the syllabus because I know that, statistically speaking, nearly all of my male students will be consumers of pornography, as well as some of my female students. Clearly pornography is a significant social practice, and therefore, like many of our other social practices, it deserves to be put under ethical scrutiny.
But that doesn’t mean that I enjoy teaching the ethics of pornography. On the contrary, it is a unit that I always approach with a certain degree of trepidation, and also with profound sadness. Whenever I study the material to teach the topic, I always feel as if I am in some kind of dark and dreary wasteland - that I have been consigned for a time to wander in a spiritual wilderness. Although there are, of course, religious arguments against pornography, those arguments tend not to be taken seriously by contemporary ethical theory. So, the pornography debate in philosophical discourse goes on with a kind of atheistic impulse, with the pro-pornography position arguing from the liberal point of view, which is that freedom is the most important value in sexual expression, and since something that is freely done, sexually, is never wrong, there is therefore simply nothing immoral about pornography. The main anti-pornography position tends to be from the feminist point of view, which is that pornography is, in reality, nothing more than the exploitative use of women for men’s sexual pleasure.
As I continued to work on the ethics of pornography, I often wondered why I kept doing this to myself. Why did I keep reviewing this debate between the liberals and feminists – when neither seemed to have particularly strong arguments? Why did I keep going into the spiritual wilderness? And then, as I continued to study the anti-pornography, feminist side of the argument, I came across the writings of Andrea Dworkin. Dworkin’s voice was, indeed, like a lone voice in the wilderness. In the moral and spiritual dearth of this debate, where sexual nihilism has such a stronghold, I found in Dworkin a strong, solitary figure, whose stance against pornography seemed to me to be deeply moral, disturbingly insightful, and incredibly brave. Even though she was writing from what she insisted was an atheistic position, she reminded me of a John the Baptist-type figure, or even an Old Testament kind of prophet, radically denouncing the sexual, economic and political practices of her time as immoral and exploitative.
Of course, I do not agree with everything Dworkin wrote. But as any philosopher knows, agreement is not the point of a philosophical examination of an argument. Rather, the point is to find what we can learn from the work of Andrea Dworkin regarding the ethical nature of pornography. As a woman in the CofJC, Dworkin has given me much to think about regarding sexual desire, sexual boundaries, the imbalance of power between men and women, the commodification of sex, and the failure of ‘sex positivity’ to deliver genuine freedom and equality for women in their sexual relationships with men.
***
There is no way to soften the shock that comes from a confrontation with Dworkin’s rage, defiance, and furious rhetoric. She often makes what appear to be extreme claims, it is true. And once again, I want to invoke the wilderness motif as we approach Dworkin.
As I was preparing this piece, I turned one day in my scriptures to Luke 4, which gives an account of Jesus’s temptation. I was taken aback by the very beginning of the passage (Luke 4:1): ‘And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost, returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.’ Although I had always interpreted ‘the wilderness’ in this context as a solitary place where Jesus could commune with His Heavenly Father in preparation for his ministry, this time I was struck with the impression that here ‘the wilderness’ could also be a place where we have to face difficult things – and that sometimes, the Spirit will lead us there. I also noticed the connection between the wilderness and the possibility of temptation, in the sense that the wilderness motif acts as the backdrop against which Jesus’ temptations take place. In other words, in a challenging, hard space, where things are not particularly clear and there seems to be a lack of Heavenly communication, is where perhaps we can see more clearly how temptation operates upon us, and the conditions under which we are particularly susceptible to it.
In the account of the temptation of Jesus, He is tempted three different times, in three different ways (and I am now going to work from the account in Matthew 4). First, Satan tempts Jesus to use His divine power to turn rocks into bread, in order to satisfy His physical appetites. Jesus refuses with the response: ‘Man shall not live by bread alone’. Second, Satan tempts Jesus to jump off of a high tower, to see if His Father will save Him, and therefore prove to Himself that He really is the Son of God. Jesus refuses with the response: ‘Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God’. Third, Satan tempts Jesus by offering Him all the political power in the world, if Jesus will worship him. Jesus refuses with the response: ‘Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.’ (Matthew 4:3-10).
Although, of course, a proper analysis of this scriptural account is outside the scope of this article, I want to point out that we seem to have three different lessons about temptation here. First, there is the temptation to use or pursue our physical appetites outside of the boundaries that the Lord has set for us. Second, there is the temptation to assert or to act out our identity in any way that we want or deem ‘authentic’, rather than in the way that God has commanded us to live by our identity as God’s children. Third, there is the temptation to prioritize and idolize political power over the spiritual/transcendent realm. I want to argue here that we can map some of Dworkin’s arguments against pornography onto these three categories of temptations, and in doing so, try to navigate our way as Christians with her through this dark and dreary space.
In a sense, the lesson from the first temptation – that as human beings we are tempted to go beyond, or even eliminate boundaries for our physical appetites – is fairly easy to find in Dworkin. Stated positively, the lesson would be that there are moral boundaries upon our physical appetites – in this context, upon our sexual appetite. Indeed, I think a good place to start with Dworkin is to notice that a driving premise of her entire work is that there is a moral dimension to sexual activity. Although she certainly did not have any sympathy for something like the law of chastity, she argued that sex is important, morally speaking. It is not something we should treat lightly, as if there are no moral consequences attached to it. Indeed, it has profound consequences upon those that participate in it:
‘Sexual intercourse is not intrinsically banal, though pop-culture magazines like Esquire and Cosmopolitan would suggest that it is. It is intense, often desperate. The internal landscape is violent upheaval, a wild and ultimately cruel disregard of human individuality, a brazen, high-strung wanting that is absolute and imperishable, not attached to personality, no respecter of boundaries; ending not in sexual climax but in a human tragedy of failed relationships, vengeful bitterness in an aftermath of sexual heat, personality corroded by too much endurance of undesired, habitual intercourse, conflict, a wearing away of vitality in the numbness finally of habit or compulsion or the loneliness of separation. The experience of [having sex] changes people, so that they are often lost to each other and slowly they are lost to human hope. The pain of having been exposed, so naked, leads to hiding, self-protection, building barricades, emotional and physical alienation or violent retaliation against anyone who gets too close.’ [2]
It's important to note here that because Dworkin held that there was this moral dimension to sexual activity, this immediately put her in an antagonistic relationship to the liberal tradition, which vaunted the freedom of sexual activity, to the point where liberal apologists had no cogent theoretical basis for establishing any real boundaries upon any sexual activity. True, liberalism has the ‘harm principle’, which is that the liberty of the individual should only be limited in cases where the individual uses their liberty to cause harm upon another person. But when it comes to sexual ethics, one notices that the liberal theorist finds it almost impossible to define what ‘harm’ might mean. And here is where, for Dworkin, we immediately meet the issue of pornography. For, according to Dworkin, the ‘essential truth of pornography’ is that ‘any violation of a woman’s body can become sex for men.’ [3] In other words, pornography is defined by a boundlessness of male desire. Dworkin argued that anything could become sexual for men, no matter how violent, cruel, or sadistic. Thus, for Dworkin, pornography is the ultimate expression of privileging the sexual appetite over any and all moral considerations.
But there is something else going on here. A careful consideration of the idea that sexual desire could cannibalize the moral dimension of one’s existence should be extremely harrowing in itself, but Dworkin’s analysis goes deeper. She asserts that men need to believe certain things about women in order for this boundlessness of male sexual desire to be contemplated, and then justified, in the first place:
‘The questions now really are: why is pornography credible in our society? How can anyone believe it? And then: how subhuman would women have to be for the pornography to be true? To the men who use pornography, how subhuman are women? If men believe the pornography because it makes them [orgasm] – them, not the women – what is sex to men and how will women survive it?’ [4]
Dworkin argues that what men must believe about women in order for pornography to be credible is essentially the belief in what she calls ‘male sexual domination’. According to Dworkin, there is an ‘ideology’ and a ‘metaphysics’ to this notion of male sexual domination, a whole system of ideas and concepts which work to create a kind of male ‘identity’, or ‘self-understanding’. Allow me to explain.
The ideology of ‘male sexual domination’ is that ‘men are superior to women’ and that ‘physical possession of the female is a natural right of the male; that sex is, in fact, conquest and possession of the female, especially but not exclusively phallic conquest and phallic possession.’ [5]
The concept of sex as possession is crucial here, since this implies the notion of the male sexual desire as the desire to possess, which is a ‘desire that objectifies in its search to own and control.’ [6] Furthermore, this ideology of male sexual domination also holds that ‘the sexual will of men properly speaking and naturally defines the parameters of a woman’s sexual being, which is her whole identity.’ [7]
With these ideological premises in place – that is, that men are superior to women, that the sex act is the act of the male possessing, owning, and objectifying the female, and that the male sexual desire defines the whole identity of the female – Dworkin then moves on to the ‘metaphysics’ which undergird this system of male sexual domination. And the metaphysics here are quite simple. It is that, ontologically speaking, women are whores:
‘This basic truth transcends all lesser truths in the male system. One does not violate something by using it for what it is: neither rape nor prostitution is an abuse of the female because in both the female is fulfilling her natural function; that is why rape is absurd and incomprehensible as an abusive phenomenon in the male system, and so is prostitution, which is held to be voluntary even when the prostitute is hit, threatened, drugged or locked in. The woman’s effort to stay innocent, her effort to prove innocence, her effort to prove in any instance of sexual use that she was used against her will, is always and unequivocally be an effort to prove that she is not a whore. The presumption that she is a whore is a metaphysical presumption: a presumption that underlies the system of reality in which she lives.’ [8]
Here I think Dworkin asserts one of the most foundational points of her work. The perception of women by men to be always sexually available - always for the ‘taking’ - because the female nature is, at its essence, to be there as a sexual object, is an idea that Dworkin points to again and again as one of the only explanations as to why men so often seem incapable of understanding women as having their own identity quite apart from whatever sexual desires are projected onto them by men. It is a lack of understanding rooted in either an inability, or a refusal, to see the female as a fully human, distinct person, rather than as a subhuman object of male desire.
This lack of understanding, however, is not just a benign, passive misunderstanding. Rather, it leads to abusive sexual practices, where women are used sexually against their (actual) will, and then blamed for not liking it:
‘The metaphysics is the same on the Left and on the Right: the sexuality of the woman actualized is the sexuality of the whore; desire on her part is the slut’s lust; once sexually available, it does not matter how she is used, why, by whom, or by how many, or how often. Her sexual will can exist only as a will to be used. Whatever happens to her, it is all the same. If she loathes it, it is not wrong, she is.’ [9]
With this notion of the metaphysical status of women as whores in the system of male sexual domination in place, we can return to Dworkin’s question of what men must believe about women in order for pornography to be ‘credible’. And indeed, it is simply this: that in order for pornography to be credible, men must believe that women are subhuman, sexual objects; not a ‘who’, but a ‘what’, upon which men can project their own sexual desires, willfully imagining those desires to be those of the female.
With the female status now locked in as ‘what’, not ‘who’ – that is, as a ‘thing’ rather than a person, we have a crucial piece in place in order to analyze why pornography does what it does to any moral framework. Pornography demands fealty to the boundlessness of male sexual desire: anything can be eroticized in pornography, and it will be, no matter what the cost. And according to Dworkin, the cost is always born by women, who are seen as things to be manipulated within this boundlessness, rather than as persons with an intrinsic dignity. Therefore, with the female herself within this mindset incapable of offering any oral boundary to male sexual desire, pornography will inevitably engender the cruelty of men. Indeed, pornography, by definition, cannot distinguish between ‘nice sex’ and ‘cruel sex’, between dignity and exploitation, between love and violence:
‘Pornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; that sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history.’ [10]
To say that male sexual pleasure is tied to exploiting and hurting is, again, to evoke Dworkin’s idea of the ideology and metaphysics of the system of male sexual domination. Again, in this system, men identify with a nature that is superior to women, and view women with an inferior nature, which is wholly sexualized, and wholly available for men to access, according to the male sexual will. Thus, pornography is the shockingly toxic combination of male domination and unleashed male sexual desire:
‘Pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual exploitation, is encoded in it. It’s what men want us to be, think we are, make us into; how men use us, not because biologically they are men but because this is how their social power is organized. From the perspective of the political activist, pornography is the blueprint of male supremacy; it shows how male supremacy is built … In cultural terms, pornography is the fundamentalism of male dominance. Its absolutism on women and sexuality, its dogma, is merciless … Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy, of sadism, of dominance.’ [11]
I want to just pause here for a moment, and remind ourselves of the claim I made earlier in the paper – that some of Dworkin’s arguments against pornography can be mapped on the three categories of temptations that we see in the account of Jesus’ temptation. We started out examining the temptation to ignore or eliminate boundaries on our physical appetites, and certainly this boundlessness of pornography is a central aspect of Dworkin’s critique. But our analysis of Dworkin’s work has also moved, I would argue, into the second lesson from the temptation of Jesus – that as human beings we are susceptible to the temptation to conceptualize or pursue our identity or self-understanding in a way that is contrary to eternal principles embedded in God’s commandments. Said another way, this is the basic temptation to assert our will – our ego, our “I” - over God’s will, which results in the demand that our actions be justified our based on what we understand ourselves to be. Dworkin’s assertion of a system of ‘male sexual domination’, which is developed and supported by a cultural network of concepts which articulate a certain kind of sexual self-understanding for men – and the way in which men relate to women with that self-understanding - seems to me to be a very perceptive reading of the temptation that many men face as they learn how to navigate their sexual desires.
Now, as I have recounted it here, Dworkin’s assertion of a system of male sexual domination does seem rather extremely drawn in some ways. As a happily married heterosexual woman, and as someone who will be the first to defend the goodness of men, it is sometimes hard for me to go ‘into the wilderness’ and hear Dworkin saying these things. But whereas my natural starting point for thinking about sexual ethics is my happy marriage, Dworkin’s starting points are rape, prostitution, and pornography. And the truth is that our society does not take any of these things particularly seriously; indeed, our society will go to great lengths to justify men who participate these things. But it is in precisely these things that we see the tendency to objectification, exploitation, and violence in the male sexual appetite. And since these things are so prevalent, how can we deny that this is what the male sexual appetite demands, when it is unbridled and unrestrained?
In other words, for Dworkin, male sexual desire has a tendency toward objectification, toward a possession of woman-as-thing, not love of woman-as-person, and innately understands itself as such. In Dworkin’s secular world, this desire is almost incapable of understanding itself in any other way – nor would it choose to. However, reframed in the light of the Christian lesson of temptation, we can say that Dworkin’s critique of the male sexual desire is to say that this objectification is a temptation to which men are susceptible. Indeed, we could say that Dworkin’s critique here is of the sexual desire of the natural man, who is an enemy to God (and therefore to women as well). And the Christian exhortation is that men can reject the natural man, and choose a different – and righteous - self-understanding of how they relate to their sexual desires.
Now, of course, there is female sexual desire as well, with an accompanying sexual self-understanding for women. As we have seen, Dworkin is particularly critical of male sexual desire, but women come under a certain degree of criticism here as well. The problem for women, as Dworkin sees it, is that their sexual desires, too, are developed within this same cultural framework of male sexual domination. This means that while male sexual desire has a tendency toward objectification, female sexual desire responds to this by participating in that objectification – that is, the woman ‘complicitly’ participates in her own objectification [12]:
‘To become the object, she takes herself and transforms herself into a thing: all freedoms are diminished and she is caged, even in the cage docile, sometimes physically maimed, movement is limited: she physically becomes the thing [he sexually desires]. It is especially in the acceptance of object status that her humanity is hurt: it is a metaphysical acceptance of lower status in sex and in society … in becoming an object so that he can objectify her so that he can [have sex with her], she begins a political collaboration with his dominance….’ [13]
This female sexual self-understanding as object does not result in just some light-hearted sexual fun with men; on the contrary, it has profoundly negative consequences for a woman’s perception of her humanity, as well as how she is able to perceive and relate to the humanity of other women:
‘The significance of the human ceases to exist as the value of the object increases: an expensive ornament, for instance, she is incapable of human freedom – taking it, knowing it, wanting it, being it. Being an object – living in the realm of male objectification – is abject submission, an abdication of the freedom and integrity of the body, its privacy, its uniqueness, its worth in and of itself because it is the human body of a human being.’ [14]
‘Knowing one’s own human value is fundamental to being able to respect others: females are remade into objects, not human in any sense related to freedom or justice – and so what can females recognize in other females that is a human bond toward freedom? Is there anything in us to love if we do not love each other as the objects we have become? Who can love someone who is less than human unless love itself is domination per se?’ [15]
Again, a Christian re-framing of this sexual self-understanding for women is to say that, given the system of male dominance in which they live, it is a temptation for women to lean into their objectification, since this is the only real power they can leverage in this system. Again, as for men, the Christian exhortation is that woman can choose a different – and righteous - self-understanding of how they relate to their sexual desires: in this Dworkin-inspired Christian analysis, the righteous path here would be to recognize their own intrinsic dignity, their own human worth as an embodied human being, which will give them the spiritual power to resist objectification. Indeed, it would seem that somehow, women – like men, but in a different way - have the Christian duty to resist the temptation to believe the underlying metaphysics of male sexual domination in the first place.
Still, we are Christians living in a fallen world, and the rules of sexuality in our fallen world are, as Brannon notes, ‘defined by man, not woman: the community has rules; and the rules of the community protect male power.’ [16] In our fallen world, sex is always about ‘power, control, and domination, because the community wants it that way’. [17] And for Dworkin, it is the proliferation of pornography that ensures that these male definitions, male rules, and male self-understandings surrounding sex remain this way, and are replicated into the future Women are certainly complicit in this but they are not the inventors of the system of male sexual domination.
I want to move on now to the third lesson from the temptation of Jesus, which I identified as the temptation to prioritize and idolize political power over the spiritual/transcendent realm. For I think we see Dworkin engage with this idea, too, in her analysis of pornography, in the sense that she argues for the ineffectualness of political solutions alone to problems that have a much deeper cultural, moral – and I would argue, spiritual – basis.
One place that we can see Dworkin critique the idolizing of the political is in her scathing analysis of the political ideal of sexual freedom. In our society’s post-1960’s-sexual-revolution-age, what can the political demand for sexual freedom mean for women, when they still exist in a system of male sexual domination where they are seen, ontologically speaking, as whores? Dworkin saw clearly that the demand for increased sexual freedom in this current system would not be good for women, as sexual freedom in this system would be driven by male sexual desire, and therefore could only point toward more objectification, more exploitation, and more pornography:
‘The new pornography industry is a left-wing industry: promoted especially by the boys of the sixties as simple pleasure, lusty fun, public sex, the whore brought out of the bourgeois home into the streets for the democratic consumption of all men; her freedom, her free sexuality, is as his whore – and she likes it. It is her political will as well as her sexual will; it is liberation … the politics of liberation are claimed as indigenous to the Left by the Left; central to the politics of liberation is the mass-marketing of material that depicts women being used as whores.’ [18]
‘On the Left, the sexually liberated woman is the woman of pornography. Free male sexuality wants, has a right to, produces, and consumes pornography because pornography is pleasure. Leftist sensibility promotes and protects pornography because pornography is freedom … Freedom is the mass-marketing of woman as whore. Free sexuality for the woman is in being massively consumed, denied an individual nature, denied any sexual sensibility other than that which serves the male.’ [19]
Here, Dworkin draws a stunningly insightful picture of the triangulation between sexual liberation, political freedom, and the market forces toward the commodification of women-as-sex in pornography. Once sexual liberation in the political sense is realized, there is a seamless move from the sexual objectification of women to the sexual commodification of women. And the commodification of women only serves to reinforce the objectification: the woman of pornography is an object for ‘everyone’s consumption’. That is, mass market pornography drains the individual woman of her personhood and instead promotes the abstracted notion of ‘woman-as-sex’, so that she can be ‘massively consumed’ by countless men.
There is something politically powerful about pornography because it invokes the ideal of personal freedom – indeed, it can move from the personal and the political, and then back again: the personal sexual freedom in pornography is viewed as something that should be a political right; because it is a political right, the personal sexual freedom expressed in pornography is always justified. But the political potency of pornography really only underscores the right to pornography, not the rejection of pornography, and pornography requires an object. Thus, sexual liberation for women in our democratic, capitalist society can only be meaningful when it means to be free to be the object of this right to pornography. It is a freedom to be ‘massively consumed’.
And this points to a related, deeper question: that of the ability of women to say ‘no’ to men, sexually, in this world of sexual political “liberation”, when women are still considered whores:
“In this reductive brave new world, women like sex or we do not. We are loyal to sex, or we are not … “I like it” is the standard for citizenship, and “I want it” pretty much exhausts the First Amendment’s meaning for women. Critical thought or deep feeling puts one into the Puritan camp, that hallucinated place of exile where women with complaints are dumped, after which we can be abandoned. Why – socially speaking – feed a woman you [cannot have sex with]? … the pressure on women to say yes now extends to 13 year old girls, who face a social gulag if they are not hot, accommodating, and loyal; increasingly they face violence from teenage boys who think that intercourse is ownership … the girls are [having sex] but they are not getting free or equal.” [20]
For Dworkin, then, political reforms toward “liberation” are very limited in what they can do in a society where the more fundamental power dynamics of sex have not been addressed. She particularly called out the Left for having a blind faith in political progress while refusing to address the exploitation inherent in pornography:
‘Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore; profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat … poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of dispossessed women who have only themselves to sell; violence by the powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex; slavery is not wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery; torture is not wicked or cruel when the tormented are women, whores …The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics, too.’’ [21]
One thing I find very perceptive in Dworkin’s critique of the political is the way in which she identifies the power of invoking political ideals to mask the deeper reality of moral evils. It is true that the political ideal of freedom is deeply seared into the American psyche, and it is incredibly tempting to see it as the final – and most noble – answer to whatever problem we may face. I see this tendency in my students every time we discuss the ethics of pornography. Sooner or later, the class usually agrees that although pornography probably really is ethically wrong, political freedom is more important than anything else, so there is nothing to be done about the pornography industry. Not only do I see this tendency in my students; I also see it in myself, as I, too, am someone who is tempted to idolize the ideal of political freedom. The thought has occurred to me that if I ever stop teaching the ethics of pornography, it will be because I gave into the temptation to let my love – my worship, even - of political freedom give me an excuse to turn a blind eye to the horrendous moral evils in pornography.
Now, as a self-identified lover of political freedom, let me try to push back a little bit here against this temptation: a love of political freedom need not – and indeed should not - turn one’s attention away from the moral evils of what is allowed under political freedom and the free market. On the contrary. In the case of pornography, one can recognize that pornography is a politically free, legally sanctioned activity, while at the same time completely eschew the consumption of pornography in one’s own personal life, precisely for moral and spiritual reasons. Certainly, this seems to be the approach that we take in the Church: pornography use is wrong for the user. However, we say almost nothing about pornography as a politically sanctioned, commercialized social practice which serves to reinforce the objectification and dehumanization of women.
Whatever discussions are happening now in the Church about pornography, they all seem to be focused on helping the individual user stop their consumption of pornography – again, an extremely important goal. Frequent use of pornography is often referred to in the Church as a ‘sex addiction’, which turns our approach toward pornography into an approach toward an addiction in the more general sense. Our focus comes to rest on the repentance, redemption and spiritual rehabilitation of the addict, with an emphasis on God’s love and mercy. For instance, in the Help for Me manual, pornography users are reassured that: ‘God’s love for you is endless. He will love you forever.’ [22] They are warned about the destructive ‘cycle of using pornography and shaming yourself.’ [23] Indeed, addressing the spiritually debilitating effects of shame seems to be one of the central aims of the Help for Me manual.
These are true and beautiful messages, and I applaud them. I might add one thing, however: pornography is not just about the user. After reading Dworkin, focusing so much on the shame of the user strikes me as slightly myopic. Pornography is often seen as a sexual fantasy – a shameful, sinful one, but still a fantasy. But, as Dworkin continually reminded us, pornography is not fantasy. Pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry that takes place in the material world. It is performed on real women, with real bodies and real lives. And while feeling shame about using pornography might occur just because of the intense sexual aspect of it, it also seems urgently important to look beyond one’s personal shame and understand the wider evil of the exploitative nature of pornography, as a systemic practice used to harm women. Indeed, Dworkin argued that shame is useless if it doesn’t lead people to make real change – not only in themselves, spiritually, but also in the world, materially:
‘The shame of men in front of women, is, I think, an appropriate response both to what men do and to what men do not do. I think you should be ashamed. But what you do with that shame is to use it as an excuse to keep doing what you want and to keep not doing anything else; and you’ve got to stop. You’ve got to stop. Your psychology doesn’t matter … your shame and your guilt are very much beside the point. They don’t matter to us at all, in any way. They’re not good enough. They don’t do anything.’ [24]
‘ … men come to me or other feminists and say: “What you are saying about men isn’t true. It isn’t true of me. I don’t feel that way. I’m opposed to all of this.” And I say: don’t tell me. Tell the pornographers. Tell the pimps. Tell the warmakers … Say it to your friends who are doing it. And there are streets out there on which you can say these things loud and clear, so as to affect the actual institutions that maintain these abuses. You don’t like pornography? I wish I could believe it’s true. I will believe it when I see you on the streets ….’ [25]
Thus, I think there is a sense in which, Dworkin does call us as a society to a kind of repentance. We need to repent as individuals - absolutely. But that spiritual and moral reformation within us, personally, then needs to lead us to make change politically. We cannot idolize the political by ignoring the moral, and we cannot focus on the moral while ignoring the political. It becomes all of a piece; we cannot have one without the other.
***
In Matthew 11, Jesus has a conversation with ‘the multitudes’ concerning John the Baptist. He asks them why they went to the wilderness to go see John: ‘What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind? But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they that wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses. But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet.’ (Matt 11:7-9)
I’ve always found this passage intriguing, strange even. But after reading Dworkin, it means more to me. Jesus is trying to get His hearers to think about why they went out to the wilderness to go hear John preach. What was it that they liked about him? Did they go to see a lone man fighting against the powers-that-be? Did they go to see him because of how he was dressed? Or maybe, it was because they could tell he was some sort of prophet – that he had a really important message from God that no one else was willing to give.
Why, as a woman in the CofJC, do I go into this wilderness and read Dworkin? I go because I think she saw some things that I could not see until she pointed them out. I go because I think she insightfully identified some key temptations for human beings – the temptation to eliminate boundaries upon our physical appetites, the temptation to assert the will of our self-understanding, and the temptation to idolize the political over the moral and spiritual – and showed how these temptations are absolutely at work in pornography, both in the way that it is consumed and the way that it is justified. I go because she stood up for women like I’ve never seen anyone do before. I go because no one in my own religious tradition speaks in this way about this incredibly important issue. I go because she makes me cry, because she touched my heart, because she challenges almost all of my assumptions. I go because after my encounter with her work, I am a better disciple of Jesus Christ.
And aren’t all these things the mark of a kind of prophetess, after all?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
H. Brannon, ‘Redeeming Radical Feminism: Andrea Dworkin and Augustine in Conversation’, Church Life Journal (McGrath Institute for Church Life, University of Notre Dame), August 19, 2021. https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/redeeming-radical-feminism-andrea-dworkin-and-augustine-in-conversation/#_ftn24.
S. Ditum, ‘Porn Will Destroy You’, Unherd, December 21, 2021. https://unherd.com/2021/12/porn-will-destroy-you
A. Dworkin, Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, eds. J. Fateman and A. Scholder (Semiotext(e): South Pasadena, CA, 2019), p. 254.
‘Help for Me’, in Life Help: Pornography, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/help-for-me/overview-for-individuals?lang=eng. Retrieved August, 2024.
NOTES:
[1] ‘Help for Me’, in Life Help: Pornography. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/help-for-me/overview-for-individuals?lang=eng --- [Back to manuscript].
[2] A. Dworkin, as quoted in S. Ditum, ‘Porn Will Destroy You’, Unherd, December 21, 2021. https://unherd.com/2021/12/porn-will-destroy-you/ --- [Back to manuscript].
[3] A. Dworkin, Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin, eds. J. Fateman and A. Scholder (Semiotext(e): South Pasadena, CA, 2019), p. 254. All further references to Dworkin will be from this edition, which is a compilation of selected parts of her work. [Back to manuscript].
[4] Dworkin, p. 131. [Back to manuscript].
[5] Dworkin, p. 150. [Back to manuscript].
[6] H. Brannon, ‘Redeeming Radical Feminism: Andrea Dworkin and Augustine in Conversation’, Church Life Journal (McGrath Institute for Church Life, University of Notre Dame), August 19, 2021. https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/redeeming-radical-feminism-andrea-dworkin-and-augustine-in-conversation/#_ftn24
--- [Back to manuscript].
[7] Dworkin, p. 150. [Back to manuscript].
[8] Dworkin, p. 151. [Back to manuscript].
[9] Dworkin, p. 155. [Back to manuscript].
[10] Dworkin, p. 145. [Back to manuscript].
[11] Dworkin, pp. 133-134. [Back to manuscript].
[12] Brannon, ‘Redeeming Radical Feminism’. I am indebted to Brannon’s work here in my analysis of Dworkin’s notion of female sexual self-understanding.
[Back to manuscript].
[13] Dworkin, pp. 256-257. [Back to manuscript].
[14] Dworkin, p. 256. [Back to manuscript].
[15] Dworkin, p. 258. [Back to manuscript].
[16] Brannon, ‘Redeeming Radical Feminism’. [Back to manuscript].
[17] Brannon, ‘Redeeming Radical Feminism’. [Back to manuscript].
[18] Dworkin, p. 156. [Back to manuscript].
[19] Dworkin, p. 157. [Back to manuscript].
[20] Dworkin, pp. 230-231. [Back to manuscript].
[21] Dworkin, p. 157. [Back to manuscript].
[22] Help for Me’, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/help-for-me/does-god-still-love-me?lang=eng --- [Back to manuscript].
[23] Help for Me’, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/help-for-me/does-god-still-love-me?lang=eng --- [Back to manuscript].
[24] Dworkin, p. 209. [Back to manuscript].
[25] Dworkin, pp. 205-206. [Back to manuscript].
Full Citation for this Article: Hamilton-Bleakley, Holly (2024) "Andrea Dworkin on Pornography: A Latter-Day Saint Woman’s perspective," SquareTwo, Vol. 17 No. 2 (Summer 2024), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleBleakleyDworkin.html, accessed <give access date>.
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