Why Internet Porn Matters (Stanford Briefs)

Why Internet Porn Matters (Stanford Briefs)

Margret Grebowicz

Language: English

Pages: 152

ISBN: 0804786623

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Now that pornography is on the Internet, its political and social functions have changed. So contends Margret Grebowicz in this imperative philosophical analysis of Internet porn. The production and consumption of Internet porn, in her account, are a symptom of the obsession with self-exposure in today's social networking media, which is, in turn, a symptom of the modern democratic construction of the governable subject as both transparent and communicative. In this first feminist critique to privilege the effects of pornography's Internet distribution rather than what it depicts, Grebowicz examines porn-sharing communities (such as the bestiality niche market) and the politics of putting women's sexual pleasure on display (the "squirting" market) as part of the larger democratic project. Arguing against this project, she shows that sexual pleasure is not a human right. Unlikely convergences between thinkers like Catherine MacKinnon, Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, and Jean-François Lyotard allow her to formulate a theory of the relationships between sex, speech, and power that stands as an alternative to such cyber-libertarian mottos as "freedom of speech" and "sexual freedom."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

cyberlibertarian and the (let’s call it) “revolutionary fantasist” position that porn should exist unregulated by the state precisely because of its role in the production of resistant discourses. Is it possible for pornography to be evental? If Gilbert is right about Justine and Mercy, the answer is clearly yes. But is this because of some pornography’s capacity to act as literature in some circumstances and as art in others? If so, is it also possible that Internet pornography does not meet the

tasks of feminist inquiry, and especially of a feminist inquiry into pornography, is to examine such significations in their particularity rather than subsuming them under the blanket category of dark and illegible “desire.” My attempt to revitalize MacKinnon’s commitment to the political force of figuring women as victims has nothing to do with the “correct” way to read her, much less with the correctness of the claim that all women are victims. She, Dworkin, Pateman, as well as Sheila

and pornography offered in the work of Baudrillard coupled with the critique of democracy in Lyotard and of sexuality in Butler together form a vision of Internet pornography as distinctly “American” and uncritical, foreclosing the political field. But these thinkers also give us resources for imagining what would have to be different for pornography to become a critically sexual practice. If we follow Baudrillard in his analysis of the centrality of female pleasure in the pornographic imaginary

arguments using notions like norms, repetition, and “paths of access to social viability” may be made about nonpornographic, real-life sex, and certainly about rape or for that matter any other material practice of subordination (battery, harassment) operative in silencing those who are being subordinated. In fact, at the heart of MacKinnon’s analysis of patriarchy is the idea that domination is prior to gender difference and that heterosexual relations are at their very core relations of

about morality. “It is as if we have come to assume that whenever a feminist speaks, what comes out is politics, not morals, no matter what she is saying. The distinction between politics and morality has absolved us of the need to be rigorous about moral issues, because morality was seen as a diversion and merely a question on the reactionaries’ agenda” (1992, 187). However, Smart points out, moral claims are constantly smuggled back into the pornography debate, as the latter remains set up as a

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