Porno-Symbolism: A Response to Professor McConahay

Abstract

Any treatment of the symbolic politics of pornography must acknowledge the work done by feminists on this subject. Professor McConahay seems to recognize this fact, but in describing the feminist contribution, he marginalizes its significance and misses its critical insights. This comment sets forth these insights and how they bear on McConahay's analysis. Feminists show considerable unity in their analyses of the symbolic politics of pornography. McConahay obscures, indeed denies, this unity by distinguishing four different feminist views on pornography (pp. 41-42).1 In fact, among the three positions McConahay is able to label feminist, the differences are primarily tactical, relating more to what we should do about pornography than to our analysis of what it has done to us. The essence of the feminist critique is that pornography states the terms upon which men relate to women, terms of domination by subject (male) to object (female). Not all pornography is necessarily offensive on this ground,2