In her new book, "The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century," philosopher Amia Srinivasan, who is quickly becoming one of the most high-profile feminist thinkers in the English-speaking world, describes teaching Oxford students about second-wave anti-porn activism. She assumes her students, for whom porn is ubiquitous, will "find the anti-porn position prudish and passe." They do not. Rather, they're in complete agreement with assertions that could come straight from Andrea Dworkin.
"Could it be that pornography doesn't merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real? I asked. Yes, they said," writes Srinivasan. She continues, "Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for the marginalisation of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it."
Porn, the students say, provides the script for their sex lives, one that leaves them insecure and alienated. A man in Srinivasan's class was unsure if sex that was "loving and mutual" was even possible. The women wondered if there was a connection between the lack of attention to female pleasure in so much porn and the lack of pleasure in their lives. "The warnings of the anti-porn feminists seem to have been belatedly realised: Sex for my students is what porn says it is," writes Srinivasan.
Sex positivity — the idea that feminism should privilege sexual pleasure and fight sexual repression — has dominated feminism for most of my life. It was a reaction to puritanical trends in feminism that ignored the reality of women's desires.
Some second-wave feminists had treated heterosexual sex — as well as remotely kinky queer sex — as inherently degrading, if not counterrevolutionary, which naturally drove many women away from feminism. (In a 1972 Village Voice essay, Karen Durbin described dropping out of the women's movement in part because she was "hopelessly heterosexual.") Sex-positive feminism understood the demand for celibacy or political lesbianism as a dead end and saw sexual fulfilment as part of political liberation.