
Violent porn denies women’s human rights
ArticleBeing Human
BY Caitlin Roper and The Ethics Centre 20 SEP 2021
In a piece published here earlier this month, ethics teacher Georgia Fagan argued that violent pornography was not incompatible with feminism – that it could even be a ‘feminist choice’ compatible with ‘gender equality’. Naturally those of us who have engaged in this field for many years did a double-take.
Fagan argues that feminist efforts to dismantle the pornography industry deny the rights of female performers to “use their naked bodies for profit”. She claims such content represents a “celebration” of “emancipated female sexuality”.
The notion that violent pornography can be ‘feminist’ is evidence of one of two assumptions; that filmed acts of male violence against women for men’s sexual gratification can be a feminist endeavour, or that the violence done to women in the production of pornography does not count as violence. As feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon noted, pornography is a record of men’s violence against women. It is not fantasy, not speech, but acted out on the bodies of real women who are directly used to produce it – “what pornography does, it does in the real world”.
Mainstream pornography is the graphic, sexualised depiction of male dominance and female subordination. It eroticises men’s violence, aggression, cruelty, degradation and humiliation of women. It is hate speech, anti-woman propaganda and sexual terrorism against women. It dehumanises women as sexual objects existing wholly for men’s sexual use and abuse, as whores who love to be fucked, a set of hands and holes, as “cumdumpsters”. As such, feminists have argued that pornography – particularly, violent pornography – is at odds with women’s dignity, humanity and human rights.
Research bears this out. A 2010 content analysis of popular porn videos found that 88.2% of scenes contained physical aggression, and that perpetrators were usually male and the targets of their aggression overwhelmingly female. Research has also found pornography consumption is statistically significantly correlated with physical abuse (both victimisation and perpetration), sexual abuse (both victimisation and perpetration), acceptance of rape myths and negative gender equitable attitudes.
The defence of pornography as “empowering” for women is rooted in liberal ‘choice’ feminism, which is centred around individual empowerment rather than challenging power structures that harm women collectively. There is no recognition of women as a sex-class, with a shared condition or experience of oppression, and no acknowledgement of the social constraints under which women make choices. Rather than a collective movement to liberate women as a whole from oppression, ‘choice’ feminism serves to justify women’s participation in harmful and misogynistic practices at the expense of women as a class.
But focusing on individual women and their consent to male violence and abuse invisibilises those who perpetrate, produce, profit from and take pleasure in viewing it – men.
The reality is many women are seriously harmed in the production of pornography. They report experiencing violence and rape (as Stoya, the porn star Fagan quotes, has), coercion, exploitation, drug and alcohol abuse, trauma and suicidality. Some leave the industry after just months with irreparable damage to their bodies.
The mainstreaming and proliferation of pornography has not emancipated women and girls outside the industry who are forced to engage with men and boys who are regular consumers of it. In addition to a climate of sexual harassment, including daily requests for nudes and sexual moaning in the classroom by male classmates, young women and girls report feeling pressured to participate in painful, degrading and unwanted sex acts their male partners have seen in pornography. They report being expected to want to be choked, hit, have anal sex (coerced anal sex is rising) and to have their faces ejaculated on – the signature acts of the porn industry.
Young women have “unlimited rape stories”, documented in the thousands of accounts from Sydney students compiled by Chanel Contos. Recently at the consent roundtable she organised, domestic violence workers described the link between porn and violence against women, describing the majority of porn which depicts “aggressive, non-consensual, violent, and degrading behaviour.”
Violent pornography influences consumers’ sexual appetites, attitudes and practices and women and girls are paying the price – some even with their lives. A 2019 study from Indiana School of Public Health found that nearly a quarter of women in the US have felt scared during sex, having been choked without warning by their male sexual partners. UK-based campaign We Can’t Consent To This has documented at least 60 cases so far where women have been killed by men who have claimed it was due to “rough sex” or a “sex game gone wrong”.
While we support sexual consent education as a possible solution, better education around consent will have limited success when boys are being raised on and regularly masturbating to violent and misogynist pornography depicting women enjoying being degraded and brutalised.
“Either it is ethical and honourable to ‘play with’ and promote the dynamics of humiliation and violence that terrorise, maim and kill women daily, or it is not.”
As feminist researcher Rebecca Whisnant wrote of so-called feminist pornography, “Either it is ethical and honourable to ‘play with’ and promote the dynamics of humiliation and violence that terrorise, maim and kill women daily, or it is not.”
Violent pornography is the filmed abuse of women, and as such, both the production and consumption of it are fundamentally at odds with women’s human rights. It can only be defended if we accept that men’s sexual gratification is more valuable than women’s humanity.
Ethics in your inbox.
Get the latest inspiration, intelligence, events & more.
By signing up you agree to our privacy policy
MOST POPULAR
ArticleLifestyle + Health
Vaccines: compulsory or conditional?
ArticleBeing Human
Free speech has failed us
ArticleLaw + Human Rights
He said, she said: Investigating the Christian Porter Case
ArticleBig Thinkers + Explainers
Ethics Explainer: Ethics, morality & law
BY Caitlin Roper
Caitlin Roper is a PhD candidate and Campaigns Manager for Collective Shout.

BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
4 Comments
100% it is incompatible!! Thank you Caitlin for writing this, Georgia Fagan’s arguments absolutely needed to be refuted and challenged! This way of thinking, that porn is actually compatible with feminism and almost a ‘celebration’ of feminism has seeped and infiltrated into our culture and is causing so much harm and damage to women, men, boys and girls alike. That the sexualised depiction of male dominance and female subordination is somehow viewed as ‘feminism’ and ’empowering’ for women is unfathomable!
ReplyCaitlin Roper is 100% right! I was shocked to see the Ethics Centre defense of pornography as ‘feminist’.
Reply“Various philosophers and feminist theorists, such as Mackinnon, argue in favour of some form of criminal action being taken against certain types of pornography due to its capacity to harm women.”
The idea that pornography is just another industry that needs some guidelines is farcical. Also the idea that women are the only ones harmed by it is false. Pornography harms, women, men, children. Pornography is first of all ubiquitous (at least in the west). Any person with a smart device can access it in minutes. Pornography is available in every medium. Sound, video, cartoons, cgi, virtual reality, extended reality, books both audio and real, on the stage, in the theatre and so on.
Pornography occupies at least 30% of the traffic on the internet. 70% of children in Australia over 12 have watched pornography. So we need to ask what does the prolonged , societal level exposure or use of pornography do to humans as individuals, as children , as adults. Secondly what does it do to the cultural norms and values in use in our society.
Any dialogue about pornography and ethics also has to answer the question what does the product do to the consumers relationships with others and themselves.
But what even is pornography?
“”Pornography” (or “porn”) usually refers to representations designed to arouse and give sexual pleasure to those who read, see, hear, or handle them.” I got this definition off the web.
If this is all the consumer got from using the porn that is presented today we would not be concerned. In fact one might say it was very ethical. However a little bit like a cigarette, the rush we get from the nicotine is not all we get when when smoke a cigarette.
Why is pornography then so problematic? Simply because it does not just give sexual pleasure. Pornography as presented today has a direct impact on:
1. Shaping sexual attitudes and behaviours
2. Poor mental health – including, self-objectification and body image concerns, sexual conditioning
3. Sexism and objectification – such as reinforcing gender roles that women are ‘sex objects’, and men should be dominant
4. Sexual aggression and violence – consistently, there is a demonstrated association between regular viewing of online pornography and the perpetration of sexual harassment, sexual coercion and sexual abuse by boys;
5. Child-on-child sexual abuse
On going use of Pornography directly impacts the psychology of the consumer in ways that are unhealthy for them and those around them.
Violent pornography has a special place in this space. But it does not have to be violent to objectify, and build sexism.
We could argue that we should not ban cigarettes because all those poor cigarettes workers will lose their jobs. We know the product we make is not ethical. We know it is unhealthy for the consumer yet for personal freedoms (scare politics) we will undermine the the health of our society and future generations.
Reply
Join the conversation
Is pornography incompatible with feminism?