Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification * By RAE LANGTON

Abstract

Since the 1980s radical feminists like Catharine MacKinnon have conducted a pro-censorship campaign under the slogan, ‘Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice’. The essays in Sexual Solipsism may be viewed as providing rigorous philosophical backing for this campaign. Rae Langton’s principal contention is that pornography, understood in MacKinnon’s way as ‘the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women’ (4), is ‘an authoritative speech act that ranks women as inferior, legitimates discrimination against women and deprives women of powers and rights’ (5) in virtue of its verdictive and exercitive force. Since among the powers of which women are deprived is the power of effective speech, pornography also silences women, so that refusal of consent to sex is not recognized as such and rape results. Yet it is not just because of such effects that pornography should be censored but because of the sort of illocutionary act it is in subordinating and silencing women, thereby violating their rights to equality and free speech.