Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification
Rae Langton
Language: English
Pages: 432
ISBN: 0199551456
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Rae Langton here draws together her ground-breaking work on pornography and objectification. On pornography she argues from uncontroversial liberal premises to the controversial feminist conclusions that pornography subordinates and silences women, and that women have rights against pornography. On objectification she begins with the traditional idea that objectification involves treating a person as a thing, but then shows that it is through a kind of self-fulfilling projection of beliefs and perceptions of women as subordinate that women are made subordinate and treated as things. These controversial essays in feminist philosophy will be stimulating reading for anyone interested in the status of women in society.
Performing Sex: The Making and Unmaking of Women's Erotic Lives
Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution
Fortunes of Feminism: From Women's Liberation to Identity Politics to Anti-Capitalism
Shaping the World: Women Writers on Themselves
functions: they may rank women as sex objects, and legitimate discriminatory behavior towards them. Whether pornography subordinates depends on whether it is authoritative. In the second section we addressed the second feminist claim, that pornography silences; and in order to do so, we had first to ask how speech acts can be silenced, and whether speech can silence. The answer was that speech can indeed silence, and in a number of ways. The speech acts of pornography may silence if they prevent
is—it aims to fit the world. ‘Guilty’, said by a jury, is verdictive. An important contrast would be with an illocution that is ‘exercitive’, which says how the world is to be—it aims for the world to fit it. ‘Sentence: twenty years’ would be exercitive. Exercitives are often self-fulfilling, in an illocutionary way: the judge saying ‘Sentence: twenty years’ instantly makes it true that the sentence is twenty years. By contrast, verdictives are not obviously selffulfilling in an illocutionary way.
edifying parables—manage to make good use of fictions to alter both descriptive and normative beliefs.¹⁶ Among Butler’s reasons for doubting that pornography has authority is the thought that pornographic speech can be refigured, turned against itself, denied authority through rebellious acts of parody by those who would otherwise be injured by it. She thinks, in short, that pornography can itself be silenced. Pornography thus silenced is deprived of authority, and prevented from subordinating. To
rights argument which works on an analogy with Sweatt, and that the assumptions about burdens of proof that applied in Sweatt apply in this context as well. a. The Utilitarian Argument. In the two essays mentioned above, Dworkin’s starting point was an apparent utilitarian argument in favor of a position that most liberals would eschew. In the case of Sweatt, the balance of preferences apparently comes out in favor of segregation; in the case of pornography, the balance of preferences apparently
and insulted by it; and it is probable that the existence of such pornography reinforces and perpetuates attitudes and beliefs that undermine the wellbeing of women and undermine sexual equality; it probably contributes, for example, to an environment in which sexual abuse is more likely to occur. Given that women have cause to be concerned about the permissive policy, one can ask whether it violates their rights. Since it is likely that a utilitarian permissive policy would rely on the
