When Andrea Dworkin published Pornography: Men Possessing Women in 1981, her argument was uncompromising: pornography must be banned, literally and urgently. As she would in 1987’s Intercourse – in which she infamously outlined heterosexual sex as a key site of oppression for women (an argument that was reductively reframed by popular media to the line “all sex is rape”) – Dworkin writes passionately, painting with broad and beautiful brush strokes. To understand her fervour, we must remember how suddenly pornography had come to the fore with Dworkin’s lifetime: she was born in 1946 and died 20 years ago last month.
In the years before Pornography’s publication, a slew of US Supreme Court cases had battled over the legal treatment of sexually explicit material. In 1957’s Butler vs State of Michigan, the Court struck down a state law preventing the printing of material not fit for children, and in the same year, Roth vs US held that material with “the slightest redeeming social importance” was protected by the First Amendment’s right to freedom of expression. In 1964’s Jacobellis vs Ohio, the Court overturned Ohio’s conviction of a theatre owner who had screen Louis Malle’s film The Lovers; while the majority created the “community standards” test for pornography, Justice Potter Stewart’s concurrence created the better-known “I know it when I see it” one. But not all decisions were for liberalisation. On a single day in 1966, the Court upheld the conviction of the publisher Ralph Ginzburg, who mailed the magazine Eros from post offices in Blue Ball and Intercourse, Pennsylvania, under a federal obscenity statute, but rejected Massachusetts’ finding that Fanny Hill was obscene. Stanley vs Georgia (1969) held that states could not prohibit the private possession of pornography. But the landmark ruling Miller vs California (1973) allowed for obscenity statutes based on local community norms, which would severely curtail nationwide theatrical releases of pornography.
Nationwide theatrical releases of pornography? It may seem unimaginable today, but Dworkin was writing in the so-called Golden Age of Porn, inaugurated by Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie (1969) and Howard Ziehm’s Mona the Teenage Nymph (1970), the first 35mm adult film released in theatres nationwide (though, due to pornography’s still uncertain legal status, screened without credits). High-production value pornography was entering the mainstream, screened across the country, nearly making top-ten lists, and even garnering critical praise. In 1972, Deep Throat – a major preoccupation of Dworkin’s – became a box-office success reviewed in the New York Times; Roger Ebert gave a positive three stars to The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) and a more ambivalent two-and-a-half stars to the X-rated Alice in Wonderland (1976). Marlon Brando’s notorious Last Tango in Paris was, according to Andy Warhol, inspired by Blue Movie.
By 1980, things had begun to take a turn. Introduced in 1976, the consumer VHS would soon usher in the video era, with theatrical screenings of dirty movies now a relic remembered mainly from the date scene in Taxi Driver (1976). But it was of more interest to Andrea Dworkin that Linda Lovelace, the supposedly insatiable star of Deep Throat, published the memoir Ordeal in 1980. In it she claimed that her husband and producer Chuck Traynor had taken advantage of her when she was a teenager recovering from a serious car crash, becoming violent, abusive, and forcing her to move away from her family to New York City, where he became her pimp. The story she told here – one in which Traynor watched her even while she used the bathroom, held a gun to her head as he eavesdropped on her phone calls, and initiated her into prostitution through a brutal gang rape – was starkly at odds with that of the two pro-porn autobiographies she had previously published, Inside Linda Lovelace and The Intimate Diary of Linda Lovelace (both 1974), and many doubted her revised account.
Dworkin did not. To her, Lovelace’s anti-porn turn proved the truth of pornography: that, as Robin Morgan put it, “Porn is the theory, rape is the practice.” For Dworkin, pornography was “the blueprint of male supremacy… the fundamentalism of male dominance… the essential sexuality of male power”. The book is alive with Dworkin’s propulsive, almost incantatory insistence: “Pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women’s bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity – the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he’s got her.” For her, pornography was never about the individual woman: “The very power to make the photograph (to use the model, to tie her in that way) and the fact of the photograph (the fact that someone did use the model, did tie her in that way, that the photograph is published in a magazine and seen by millions of men who buy it specifically to see such photographs) evoke fear in the female observer unless she entirely dissociates herself from the photograph: refuses to believe or understand that real persons posed for it, refuses to see the bound person as a woman like herself.”
That meant, for Dworkin, that one could not be a feminist and support pornography; could not be a leftist and support pornography. “The new pornography is left-wing,” she wrote, “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.” Pornography was far from the harmless, even healthy, expression of natural urges (as claimed by those who cited, for example, that violence had reduced in Denmark since the country legalised pornography). Instead, she wrote, “Pornography exists because men despite women, and men despise women in part because pornography exists.”
Others disagreed. Ellen Willis, whose essay “Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?” is an ur-text of so-called sex-positive feminism, wrote in her New York Times review of Pornography that “in Andrea Dworkin’s moral universe the battle of the sexes is a Manichaean clash between absolute power and absolute powerlessness, absolute villains and absolute victims.” Rejecting the book’s conclusions, Willis writes that “cultural images influence behaviour… only because they articulate and legitimise feelings that already exist. Pornography that offers concrete images of how to act out hatred of women may invite imitation and re-enforce an atmosphere of complacency towards sexual violence, but the hatred and complacency that produce violence are built into the culture. In short, pornography is a symptom, not a root cause.” For Willis, the anti-porn feminists, despite their good motives, were unwitting allies of the pro-family values Christian right.
These were the wings of the Sex Wars, in which second-wave feminism came to an impasse over the issue of sexual freedom. On one side was the Women Against Pornography (WAP) movement led by Dworkin, Morgan and Susan Brownmiller. For them, true sexual freedom meant reshaping society towards sexual equality. Dworkin was, as Willis noted, highly critical of the supposedly sexually liberated (writing in Right-Wing Women that “the Left only champions women on its own sexual terms – as f**ks; they find the right-wing offer a tad more generous”; she expressed admiration for the conservatives Richard Brookhiser and Maggie Gallagher, and in opposing pornography, indeed did ally with the right). In her view, the idea that pornography was a simple outlet of pre-existing, immutable desires was naive and retrograde, a male fantasy in feminist clothes.
The sex-positive feminists rejected the anti-pornography view as a traditionalist, exclusionary prudishness. In 1979 and 1980, Willis and Deirdre English published pieces in the Village Voice and Mother Jones arguing against the anti-pornography feminists. Prominent feminists from the lesbian S/M community rejected the equation of consensual sexual fantasies of violence and actual violence. The new right was ever-more in ascension, and attacks on abortion rights, feminism and sexual minorities were a live concern. The clash came to a head at a 1982 feminist conference at Barnard College titled “Towards a Politics of Sexuality”, organised by a group including Willis and Gayle Rubin. WAP picketed outside, wearing shirts that said “For a feminist sexuality” on the front and “Against S/M” on the back.
Despite this conflict, the movement against pornography carried on. Together with Catharine MacKinnon, a law professor, Dworkin worked to craft city ordinances that allowed women to sue creators and distributors of pornography for violating their civil rights, spending 1983 and 1984 drafting anti-pornography ordinances for Minneapolis and Indianapolis that never made it into law. But it is the sex-positive faction that has, of course, won the day (as has its close relative, “choice feminism”). Popular feminism is pro-sex, pro-pornography and pro-sex work (and to judge the reaction to the Oscar-winning Anora, under pressure only to be ever more so). In the 1990s, the second wave of feminism gave way to the third, and academic feminism shifted more towards discussions of kink, non-heteronormative lifestyles, and the search for autonomy.
The tide may yet turn. In recent years, the pornography industry has been wracked by controversy. Disturbing allegations around underage pornography, rape videos and revenge porn led Pornhub to remove over 75 per cent of its content library, remove its download feature, require verification for uploads, and moderate its content more rigorously. Mia Khalifa, a prominent performer, has spoken about her regrets about briefly participating in the industry and the difficulty of having content removed, stating “corporations prey on callow young women and trap them legally into contracts when they’re vulnerable”.
The legal landscape is again in upheaval, too. The new right manifesto Project 2025 states, unambiguously, that “pornography should be outlawed”. Since 2023, 19 American states, home to more than one third of Americans, have passed laws requiring websites that display pornographic content to verify that visitors are over 18 years of age, including Texas’s stringent age-verification law, which requires site visitors upload their IDs and sends warnings, such as about the link between pornography and prostitution, to even verified adult users. As before, much anti-pornography legislation appears to be driven by the right; but with radical feminism – including that of Dworkin – finding favour among young feminists, it remains to be seen whether they might take up the mantle.
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