A Reply to Weitzer

In a review essay entitled, “Pornography’s Effects: The Need for Solid Evidence: A Review Essay of Everyday Pornography, edited by Karen Boyle, and Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, by Gail Dines,” Ronald Weitzer (2011) criticizes recent feminist research on pornography, ultimately concluding that “these books present an extremely biased picture of pornography that stands in stark contrast to sound scholarly research” (p. 673). Here I want to identify and call out the unstated, underlying assumptions of Weitzer’s review to expose the flawed nature of his arguments. Weitzer may indeed substantively disagree with radical feminist antiporn scholarship, but his review fails to highlight the true nature of the disagreement. What is at stake here is not a disagreement over what the evidence per se shows, but a disagreement about what constitutes the nature of evidence itself. What is at stake here is not a disagreement regarding ideology over facts, but ideology against ideology (where the word ideology is understood as a philosophical world view, not as a simple pejorative as Weitzer employees it).

Weitzer begins his review with the claim that critics of pornography, reviewed here, are operating in an oppression paradigm—“a perspective that depicts all types of sex work as exploitative, violent and perpetuating gender inequality” (p. 666). He calls our attention to the fact that elsewhere he argues that “those who adopt the oppression paradigm substitute ideology for rigorous empirical analysis and that their one-dimensional arguments are contradicted by a wealth of social science data that shows sex work to be much more variegated structurally and experientially” (p. 666).

There is a lot packed into these few sentences and it is worth separating out the claims for clarity’s sake. The claims as separated are as follows:

Let’s start with the last claim. Nothing in the radical feminist analysis denies that women have varied experiences relative to participating in the various industries that function to provide sex or sexual services for sale. Nor does anything in the radical feminist analysis deny that there are degrees of exploitation. The work this claim seems to be doing for Weitzer’s argument rests on a further and unstated assumption that “if some women experience such ‘work’ as liberating, then it is so liberating.” But notions of freedom or liberation, of course, are inherently evaluative. And moreover, one needs a context to make such assessments of relative liberation or freedom. Consider that prisoners may experience some privileges as “freeing”: for example, access to exercise yards, or television. But, appealing to those experiences as experiences of freedom or of liberation per se with no analysis of prisons themselves, the prison system, and the way it functions within our overall society, including that certain types of persons (as members of groups) are more likely to find themselves imprisoned for reasons related their social location (e.g., race, class, gender), is to rely on an impoverished and relatively uninteresting conception of freedom. And so a statement such as, “some prisoners find the recreational yard liberating,” standing alone, is hardly informative. Hence, understanding what we mean when we say some activity is liberating or freeing always requires a depth of understanding about the context and relative comparisons being made. So, to say that some women experience “sex work” as liberating without any contextual analysis of the experience of those particular women’s lives or the opportunities available to them and to women more generally fails to provide any serious challenge to the kind of structural analysis Dines and others are offering. Does this particular woman find ‘working’ in the pornography industry better than her other relative and realistic possibilities?”, without critically evaluating the range of actual other possibilities available to her add the material impact of each choice on her life, ignores the structural context in which such “choices” are made. Radical feminists’ work on pornography specifically, and gender inequality more broadly, aims to expose the background features of our lives, including our beliefs about gender that create the structural facts that shape the kinds of choices we make, lives we lead, and freedoms available to some and not others.

To see that notions of freedom are inherently evaluative consider two popular definitions of freedom that routinely divide philosophers. Negative freedom is understood to be freedom from interference. Isaiah Berlin (1969), a philosopher noted for defending negative freedom, famously writes: “I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. . . . If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree” (p. 122). In contrast, a positive notion of freedom emphasizes self-rule and autonomy as central to freedom, where freedom entails “conceiving of goals and policies of my own and realizing them” (p. 131). What is important to note is in defending either notion of freedom comes down to an argument over whether it is better to understand freedom as simply a function of whether one is impeded in doing what one wants (negative freedom) or whether what one wants or how one came to want what one wants (positive freedom) matters in assessing individual freedom. And this debate is not a matter of ideology verses rigorous empirical analysis, as if one relies on controversial philosophical assumptions and the other is value free. Both positions rest on philosophical arguments that rely on substantive assumptions and premises that are evaluative.

Thus, Weitzer’s argument rests on a conceptual confusion. Weitzer sets up the argument as if there are two competing positions, one grounded in “ideology” and one that is ideology free, that would simply take on empirical data in a neutral and nonevaluative fashion. But no amount of empirical data alone will settle the question as to how best to define and understand pornography, as to whether it is constitutively unequal or liberating (as some would have it). This is an inherently normative question, for notions of exploitation, coercion, inequality, and even freedom are normative and evaluative concepts. If what Weitzer means by “ideology” is the act of making evaluative claims or relying on substantive philosophical arguments to defend one’s position, he is no less guilty as it were than the feminists he aims to discredit, yet at least the feminists he is critical of are aware that they are making philosophical arguments about the nature of freedom, exploitation, and harm.

To be more precise about the disagreement here and how exactly empirical data bear on the debate would be to focus on the claim that pornography is harmful, specifically to women. The feminists under consideration in this review argue that it is; Weitzer seems to deny that fact. Empirical data are relevant to assessing the scope and concrete forms such harm takes, but the prior question as to what constitutes a harm or the harm of sex inequality necessarily requires a normative framework. To dismiss the radical feminist analysis of pornography as harmful as mere ideology is nothing but an ad hominem attack, and a pretty tired strategy at that.

In this vein, Weitzer (2011) offers the following as a criticism: “Whether these acts are indeed perceived as degrading by viewers and actors does not figure into Dines’ argument. They are simply defined as perverted by fiat” (p. 670). Quickly note that nowhere in the book does the word “perverted” appear. The issue is not whether something is “deviant,” “prurient,” or “disgusting” in a moralistic sense. But more striking is the implicit assumption in this “criticism” that we would settle the question by a poll of the perceptions of those who have the most invested in the status quo, that is, the viewers and the actors. Two points here: The perceptions, as it were, as to whether some act or sets of acts are degrading of those who have a vital interest and stake in not seeing those acts as such is certainly not neutral “data.” Should we have asked slaveowners whether the buying and selling of persons is fair? Are their perceptions at all informative as to the justness or fairness of the practice?

Dines’s argument is not a mere sociological survey, asking the simple and naive question: “Hey, what do people think about pornography?” That is a purely empirical question, but surely not the most interesting one. Moreover, Weitzer completely sanitizes the acts described—“anal sex,” “ejaculation on a woman’s body”—and decontextualizes the way in which these acts are performed. Dines’s descriptions of the acts capture the power relationships at stake and accurately reveal the ways in which “ejaculation on the body of a woman”—in her eye, on her face, combined with the words “dirty whore,” “cunt,” “bitch”—serve as markers of the dominant and the subordinate in the scene, and it’s not happenstance that these roles are uniformly gendered. The gendered script of the pornography industry plays out the subordinate status of women through the use of their bodies for the pleasure of men; that these gendered roles are fairly rigid, and repeated memes is surely crucial to understanding them.

Hence, perhaps the most striking fact about Weitzer’s criticisms of antiporn feminism is that they completely overlook, ignore, and erase the radical feminist analysis of gender/sex that underpins their critique of pornography and, most astonishingly, do so by tarnishing it with the claims of bias that “stand in stark contrast to sound scholarly research.” This has to be the lowest form of academic criticism: Aim to discredit your opponent by asserting that her work simply isn’t “scholarly” work, but he view of an unlearned, unsophisticated, and perhaps hysterical woman.