Comments Elsewhere

Ghertner:

Actually, I should reword my response to Brian, for it sounds too much like Long and Johnson are crediting these economic factors as both necessary and sufficient, whereas what they are really saying is that these factors, while perhaps necessary, are not alone sufficient. Cultural changes are needed as well.

Well, the quotes from Spencer are mainly to demonstrate the feminist bona fides of 19th century radical libertarians, and to call attention to Spencer’s analysis of the relationship between patriarchy at home and militarism abroad; it’s not meant to endorse Spencer’s broader sociological (or archaeological) views. I can’t speak for Roderick, but speaking for myself, I think that Spencer’s points about militarism and patriarchy are solid, but that his claims about the economic history of patriarchy are vulnerable to roughly the same objections that MacKinnon raises (in TOWARD A FEMINIST THEORY OF THE STATE) against a similar account by Friedrich Engels. Essentially, the account ends up explaining male dominance only by assuming that the social relations that obtain under male dominance (for example, the mother of a child serving as its primary caregiver) also obtained in the primitive state of society before (on Engels’ or Spencer’s account) patriarchy arose in it. Maybe those relations did obtain, but if so you haven’t accounted for patriarchy in history; you’ve just shown that one sort of patriarchal society developed into another. I don’t think that historical political economy is either sufficient or necessary to explain sexual politics (although of course historical trends, such as the economic and political dominance of intensely patriarchal societies in Europe and the Muslim world for hundreds of years, have no small influence on the matter). Of course, it’s also questionable how far any desire to tie the rise and solidification of patriarchy to some over-arching world-historical principle—be it Spencer’s Evolution or Engels’ Dialectic—is supposed to help us in understanding the institutional structure of patriarchy today or the ethical questions concerning it.

Frank:

The easy simple answer is that the revealed preferences of those particular females is that particular “misogyny” is ok by them. The more tenuous and contorted answer involves some sort of claim of false consciousness inculcated by patriarchy. The problem is that, although the latter is an article of faith among anti-porn feminists,

Actually, it isn’t. Certainly there are some anti-pornography feminists who have made use of the notion of “false consciousness,” but Catharine MacKinnon isn’t among them; she has explicitly attacked the notion in her published writings.

Of course, MacKinnon and Dworkin and nearly all other radical feminists do think that patriarchy distorts the incentives and therefore the preferences that women have, often in ways that make most of the choices that women face in some respect destructive to deeper interests that they have. But why shouldn’t they think that? All cultural systems alter the incentives and therefore the preferences that people living under them have; that’s what cultural systems do. And it would be frankly batty to hold that there couldn’t be any such thing as a cultural system that, in at least some cases, prompts people to make choices that are destructive of some of their deep interests. Of course, that only militates against ruling out the theory on apriori grounds; it leaves open the empirical question of whether pornographic sexuality really is destructive of women’s deep interests. But that’s fine; that’s a question better addressed by the foundational works from the feminist pornography debate than I could hope to address it in the space of a comment box.

(You might say that any theory on which someone can be said to have deeper preferences that are somehow or another betrayed by their actions from revealed preferences is a theory of “false consciousness.” O.K., but then you are not using the phrase as Marxists or as radical feminists use it. You’re also not using the phrase to mean anything that anyone in their right mind would find particularly objectionable.)

Frank again:

“You say you are happy to perform in porn/consume it or you do perform/consume porn but these aren’t your real preferences but the result of patriarchal brainwashing”. This is the path towards totalitarianism. Surely you can see the extension of this line of thinking to areas other beyond porn?

I think this is a misrepresentation of the argument that most antipornography feminists give (as I mention above; the notion that women are “brainwashed” by patriarchy is fundamentally alien to feminists like MacKinnon and Dworkin). But suppose that it were an accurate representation. Would it follow that it’s the path towards totalitarianism? Only if you think that once “you may choose A under present circumstances but it is actually destructive to your deeper interests” is established, “there ought to be a law against choosing A” follows. But why should you think that? You can think that some people act in self-destructive ways without thinking that there ought to be a law to stop them from doing so; the whole institution of giving and taking advice rests on that assumption.

Dworkin and MacKinnon, for their part, don’t think that either—there are many reasons to object to some of the legal measures that they’ve endorsed, but those measures were never aimed at coercing women into making more “liberated” choices and did not rest on any particular theory about women’s real or illusory preferences. (Their antipornography ordinance, for example, had no provisions for ex ante bans on pornography, and the parts of it that are objectionable from a libertarian standpoint don’t rest on some theory about women’s “real” interests; they rest on imputing responsibility for violations of rights to pornographers in a broader way than libertarians ought to allow.)

Ghertner:

Now, unless you think that women form a different sort of category than blacks and Jews, I don’t understand the objection. As I said, all porn is not necessarily misogynistic, just as all performances with black actors are not necessarily racist. But a minstrel show is racist, and a Max Hardcore video (NOT SAFE FOR WORK OR ANYWHERE, REALLY) is misogynist, to take an extreme example of both. I don’t see how a person can defend either of these things as not extremely harmful to blacks and women, even if all of the participants claim that they enjoy this sort of thing.

Part of the problem that I have in pornography debates is that a substantial number (tho’ certainly not all) of the people on the pro side seem to be arguing, at some point or another, in bad faith. They’ll say things like “Oh, well, of course Hustler is misogynist; I’m just saying that there is good pornography out there” or “Yeah, I know that Max Hardcore videos are pretty vicious; I just don’t think you should treat everything as if it were like those.” But when push comes to shove these end up just sounding like feints. If everyone who said something like that backed it up by lending their support to protests of the transparent misogyny in Hustler (or, say, the farrago of lies in a film like “The People vs. Larry Flynt”), then anti-Hustler campaigns (say) would be a hell of a lot stronger than they actually are, whether or not the antipornography movement itself had much steam to it. But they don’t, mostly; the talk amounts to little more than the talk from anti-abortion demagogues who object that a woman with an unwanted pregnancy should’ve been more careful about contraception—and then doing nothing to make contraception more accessible (say, by lobbying the FDA to make EC available over the counter). All too often this kind of tactic amounts not to an analytic distinction amongst kinds of pornography, but rather as a way of begging off any kind of criticism towards any kind of pornography.