This chapter shows that feminist debates over sex commerce extend to a number of social practices, including pornography, prostitution, trafficking in persons, and the use of sexual images of women to promote products and entertainment. The chapter establishes that feminist theorists are divided on the question of whether markets in sexually explicit materials and sexual services are generally harmful to women. Accordingly, some feminist scholars have explored and developed arguments for restricting sex markets, while others have investigated political movements that aim to advance the rights of sex workers.
Top13.1 Pornography
Eaton (2007) argues that pornography shows the subordination of women to be sexually pleasurable. For this reason, it is more effective than other representational materials in shaping viewers’ attitudes and desires. Eaton further argues that pornography engages and trains us to be sexually aroused at images depicting women as social inferiors, and thereby reinforces the “mechanisms, norms, and myths” that sustain women’s unequal social status. She acknowledges that not all pornography eroticises inequality and focuses her critique on “inegalitarian pornography”. Also, she hypothesises that the harms caused by exposure to inegalitarian pornography range from increasing rates of sex discrimination, sexual harassment and assault to degrading the status of women.
Longino (1980) argued that pornography shows men and women taking pleasure in activities that objectify women and treat women as less than human. By depicting female subjects as dehumanized objects, pornography promotes the idea that women can be treated without moral regard. “What’s wrong with pornography, then, is its degrading and dehumanizing portrayal of women, and not its sexual content. Pornography, by its very nature, requires that women be subordinate to men and mere instruments for the fulfilment of male fantasies (Longino, 1980: 45). Like Kant, Longino assumes that sex is morally problematic because it is difficult to have sex without treating another person as a “mere means” to our own satisfaction. Sexual desire is irrational and leads us to reduce others to their sexual body parts, and thus is objectifying, dehumanising, and degrading. Longino adds a feminist element to Kant by arguing that, because men have greater social power than women, men are able to use women as instruments to satisfy their sexual ends. Pornographic depictions of heterosexual sex, then, glorify and promote the immoral and subordinating treatment of women by men.
Heterosexual acts are inherently violent to women in that they involve men treating women as interchangeable objects whose integrity and boundaries are not respected (MacKinnon, 1987). Ordinary heterosexual acts involve men invading and occupying women’s bodies (Dworkin, 1987). Pornography, then, is equated with visual evidence and documentation of the abuse of women. According to MacKinnon (1987), women in patriarchal societies are not free to refuse sex with men, and therefore their participation in sex with men is not fully consensual. Sex with persons incapable of giving genuine consent, made into a public spectacle via pornography, expands the temporal and spatial parameters of the crime (MacKinnon, 1987). When women view pornography they often relive their own violation and public humiliation (Dworkin, 1987). Therefore, pornography has the power to repeatedly traumatise women. Pornography is used by men “to train women to sexual submission” (MacKinnon, 1987: 188). She believed that pornography represents: