A Feminist Response to "Defending Pornography"

This week at Fairer Disputations, Featured Author Holly Lawford-Smith takes on the new third edition of Defending Pornography, by Nadine Strossen. Strossen, former president of the ACLU and an extremely influential advocate for free speech, helped reverse the mainstream feminist position on pornography. The conflict between the anti-censorship Strossen and the anti-porn radical feminists of the 80s and 90s has some surprising—and rather uncomfortable—parallels with today's feminist battles over gender.

A Feminist Response to “Defending Pornography”

Holly Lawford-Smith

Defending Pornography is a postcard from a moment in time, the moment before the liberal feminists won the sex wars. The dissident position Strossen occupied in 1995 is now the orthodox position. “Pornography” is no longer plausibly described as an “epithet” or a “pejorative.” Almost everyone watches porn, and almost everything is pornified. It’s time not just for a new cover and a new preface of Strossen’s book, but a renewed version of the book—the Animal Liberation Now (2023) to Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975). It’s time for Strossen to reassess her argument, taking seriously the pervasiveness of pornography and the contribution it is plausibly making—along with other things—to the persistence of women’s inequality. We can agree that censorship and suppression are strategies likely to backfire, and yet still think that pornography is not something whose existence a feminist can defend.

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This Week: Gender Theory’s Parents, Listening to Women, and IVF

This week: Sarah Ditum on who to blame for gender theory, Natalie Dodson and Grace Emily Stark on birth control’s side effects, and Margaret Brady on regulating IVF. Plus: tradwives and feminists, backstreet botox, the Gen Z sex war, what managing editor Melody Grubaugh is reading—and more!

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From the Archives:

ICYMI: Nadya Williams compares classical (mis)understandings of women’s role as mothers with the contemporary trends which devalue pregnancy and motherhood.

Erasing Motherhood: Scientific Misogyny, Ancient and Modern

Pregnancy is much more than a utilitarian biological process for generating new life. When it comes to pregnancy and childbirth, the journey matters.

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