As Catharine A. MacKinnon (2002) explains, in “Pleasure Under Patriarchy,” which is an edited and revised version of her chapter “Sexuality” in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), pornography, by definition, practise, and product, is a not a smorgasbord of “individuality,” “sexuality of many stripes,” or “empowerment” but of absolute degradation,  sexual objectification, and abuse of women. She is a major theoriser of anti-pornography radical feminism, drawing on and collaborating primarily with Andrea Dworkin (eg her extensive inclusion of the latter’s analysis from Pornography: Men Possessing Women). I will admit my bias: I love Andrea Dworkin: her politics, writings, spirit, conviction, brilliance. MacKinnon draws also on Simone de Beauvoir’s (1989) woman as other; man as the original and arbiter of “knowledge” and “truth” to explain men’s objectification of women. Sandra Bartky (1990) is also useful in further illustrating MacKinnon’s theory in the ramifications to women in their self-policing. Patricia Hill Collins (1990) brings a specifically black feminist critique of pornography, rape, and sexual politics. Mazis (1993) is also illustrative of men’s motivations for confusing sex and rape, using pornography, etc. Moira Gatens (1996) could also be drawn in, in MacKinnon’s discussion of how sex/gender/sexuality cannot be analysed separately—indeed they very much interlock and create each other.

            To refute major arguments against her position: pornography is not a job like any other. That's similar reasoning to those who consider rape to be similar to a punch in the face. It is not “just sex,” unless sex is abusive by definition. It is not “natural,” unless complex learned behaviours are somehow natural. What job has pregnancy and STIs as an “occupational hazard”? What job has the vast majority of its employees sexually abused as children, with most entering before the age of 16? In what job are the vast majority of employees female or transwomen with almost all the customers and employers male? What job demands sexual availability in order to get paid?  How is rape, pimps, beatings, post-traumatic stress disorder, and dissociation “what sex is”? In what sex does up to 96% of the participants want to escape? What kind of sex describes itself as “non-stop terror for their tight little holes?” What kind of sex consists of “splitting her apart?” How is it natural to be defined by one’s sexual availability to touch, photographing, penetration of body orifices? How is having to fake sexual arousal and orgasm natural? (e.g. Dworkin, 1997; Farley, 2003; Farley, 2007; Jeffreys, 1997; Jeffreys, 2003; Kendall, 2004; Lords, 2004; Lubben, 2008; MacKinnon and Dworkin, 1998; Mazis, 1993; One Angry Girl, 2008; Stark and Whisnant, 2004). For jobs, the degree to which these yield a yes answer is the degree to which the job is sexualised or ghettoised as work for women, migrant labourers and other people of colour, such as stripping and the rape of women in farm work and sweatshops. For sex, it is yes is the degree to which sex is defined as a man using and abusing another to ejaculate. For naturalness, it is yes is the degree to which one thinks white, heterosexual, adult male supremacy is biologically, evolutionarily or divinely ordained.

A huge problem with getting people, especially consumers, to realise what is done to women in pornography is rape, sexual abuse, harassment, etc is the fact that that is what sex is under male supremacy, as MacKinnon explains. Anything that results in penile erection is sex. Rape is theorised as having nothing to do with sex, sex is divorced from power relations, and “sex” means whatever women are forced to do sexually by men. And this force and coercion is not recognised, even by the rapists, as such—it is “just sex” to them. (See also, e.g. all of Dworkin; Hite, 1981; Hite, 1994; Jackson, 1984; Jeffreys, 1990; Jeffreys, 1997.) This allows those who are critical of the ejaculation industry, sadopatriarchy (“bdsm”), intercourse, “double penetration,” and so forth to be regarded as anti-sex; these things are what sex is under patriarchy (eg Jeffreys, 1997). As MacKinnon explained in an earlier manifestation, Feminism Unmodified (1987, p. 6): “What is sex except that which is felt as sexual? When acts of dominance and submission, up to and including acts of violence, are experienced as sexually arousing, as sex itself, that is what they are…Violence is sex when it is practiced as sex.”

Many ex-pornography “stars” want the sex-as-violence materials that were made of them taken off the market, such as Shelley Lubben (2008), who now runs The Pink Cross to help women exit the ejaculation industry, Jersey Jaxin (2008), Sierra Sinn (2007; 2008), and Carol Smith (Stark and Whisnant, 2004). Notorious “porn star” Traci Lords’ films were outlawed, but only because she was fifteen to seventeen at the time they were made. The film in which she was eighteen is completely legal to buy and sell (Lords, 2004). Men have set up the ejaculation industry to allow them to deny the women in it any agency where it very much matters—in removing the products of their violation from the market. As MacKinnon repeatedly stated (e.g. 2005), Linda Marchiano couldn’t even get Deep Throat, the product of her battery, rape, and prostitution off the market. In fact, it is the highest grossing porn film ever. After all, if she is object to men’s subject, what does her actual will matter (Beauvoir, 1989), especially when they can phantasise her will as fulfilled in throat rape? Deep Throat portrayed Marchiano as having her clitoris in her throat, which MacKinnon (2002, p. 40) brilliantly explains as “a surely delusional structure [in men] deserving of serious psychological study.”

Other women in both amateur and industry pornography have their outright rape bought and sold. Men and boys have gang raped women and girls, filming themselves tying up, urinating on, penetrating with pool cues, burning with cigarettes, setting hair on fire, slicing with knives, among other horrifying acts, women who in some cases are clearly unconscious, often selling the rapes over DVD and internet. Serial killers make pornography of the women they torture and kill. Fathers take photos of their topless daughters. Husbands, johns, cops, teenage boys and others record the rape of wives, prostituted women, and friends, which does not to prove his violence, but her desire. Are victims less believed when their rapes are filmed? It seems so (eg. Caputi, 1987; Fielder, 2003; MacKinnon, 1993; MacKinnon and Dworkin, 1998; Paul, 2005).

Belladonna (2007), real name Michelle, is an industry “porn star.” The eighteen year old’s first two films were of her rapes. One was through a director lying to her about the expected scene, then pouncing the actual act—anal intercourse—on her when the camera was rolling. She “consented,” not knowing that she could refuse. The subsequent film clearly shows her in pain, and even features her being choked by the man raping her. She reports feeling “shattered” afterwards. In a second instance, another director, who also lied about the nature of the scene, pushed her into fellatio, vaginal intercourse, and anal intercourse, along with physical abuse such as a man forcing his hand in her mouth and pulling hard. Watching it, one is left wondering how he didn’t rip it open. She endured this being done to her by twelve men.

            The above is business as usual. Evidence for this comes from an unlikely source: Jenna Jameson, a woman who is constantly portrayed as a liberated, rich, successful woman of the porn industry. In her autobiography (2007), she states: “Most girls get their first experience in gonzo films - in which they’re…penetrated in every hole possible by some abusive asshole who thinks her name is Bitch. And these girls…go home afterward and pledge never to do it again because it was such a terrible experience.”

This attests to what MacKinnon speaks of: the women in pornography are not freely there, let alone have the much claimed control that the pornographers speak of. The latter point is also unwittingly admitted by the porn-connoisseur Violet Blue (2008), in an article on the so-called Feminist Porn Awards:  “as a consumer and porn critic I can say with authority that women who don't really want to be in porn get out fast, quickly replaced by the next ambitious starlet in line…”

If they are utterly replacable, how are they the ones with the power? If most of them suffer from eating disorders, drug addiction, plastic surgeries, and so forth (eg Farley, 2003; Jameson, 2007; Jaxin, 2007; Jeffreys, 2005; Lubben, 2008), how are they the ones with the control? After all, their degree of success is the degree to which they sexually arouse men according to men’s standards. The women often engage in self-surveillance, monitoring their weight, tweezing and shaving body hair, using cosmetics, enduring plastic surgeries, trying to remember when and how to moan in faked pleasure, etc (Jeffreys, 2005). Here I would add to Bartky (1990), as MacKinnon (2002) explains: women not only fear male withdrawal of affection, sex, and so forth—women have a very real fear of male violence, which results from failing to meet men’s standards. No woman is ever good enough—no matter what she is, she should be something different.

Not only is lack of power a part of the reprsentation and reality of women in pornography; racism is too. Native women are grossly overrepresented in prostitution as a whole, in spite of the erasure of them in pornography. In fact, when they do appear they are usually labelled “mixed race” or Latina. However, inclusion can be far worse. Black, Asian, and Latina women are the most commonly represented races—represented as, to use film titles: Bang that Black Bitch White Boy, Filthy Asian Whores, Slant Eyed Sluts, Interracial Hole Stretchers 6 (Rogers On Demand, 2008). The last film also refers to the massive genre of black men “fucking” white women; the black men are depicted as essentially rapist, with even more ability than white men to destroy women with their “huge pricks” (e.g. Dines, 2006). Collins (1990) argues that the historical treatment of black women is the model for treatment of all women within pornography, which certainly holds credence. But Asian women and men are also uniquely configured in pornography—Asian women and men both are always portrayed as submissive to white men (Kendall, 2004; Kendall and Martino, 2006).

In pornography women are described as fucked, plowed, reamed, spread, destroyed, rammed, throat gagged, face fucked, pounded, gang banged, double penetrated, ripped apart by pornographers who call them sluts, skants, whores, cunts, bitches, ballbreakers, lesbos, masochists, nymphos, cum buckets, playthings, milfs, cocksuckers, cocksockets, daddy’s little girls, school girls, Thai whores, trannie hookers, sex slaves, man-meat loving slaves, teen jizz junkies. They are penetrated, by above all else penises, but also dildos, fists, feet, bottles, animals. The degree to which women are active is the degree to which they “love cock,” “slurp up man chowder,” or “take on any man who pays” (eg Craft, 2008; The Stag Shop, 2008; Rogers On Demand, 2008; YouPorn, 2008). Everything that men have considered women and anything that women try to claim as their own is turned into pornography. In short, in any way a woman can be hurt sexually, she is (MacKinnon, 2002).

            Considering that same women who now speak out against pornography, sadopatriarchy, etc are often the same ones who used to claim they loved it, and given what we know about trauma (Herman, 1994; MacKinnon, 1989; Strong, 1998), it should give all pause in believing that being used as an ejaculate receptacle is “those women’s” true fulfillment in life. Even pushing that aside, hierarchy is the air we breathe, constraint from true freedom and justice our water. If one is doing exactly what one’s oppressor does, for example gay male pornography that eroticizes gay bashing, child sexual abuse, battery, and rape, how does that change anything? How is self-hatred and/or hatred of others suddenly revolutionary when sexualized (e.g. Amananta, 2006; Farley, 2007; Kendall, 2004; Kendall and Martino, 2006; Jeffreys, 1990; Jeffreys, 1997; Jeffreys, 2003; Jones, 1994; Linden, et al., 1982; MacKinnon, 2002; Stoltenberg, 1989; Stoltenberg, 1994)?

People who do or who have consumed pornography—including myself—have the proliferation of misogyny, racism, and sexual abuse on their conscience. But Mackinnon (2005) was right to revise her opinion: pornography is supply driven, prostitution is demand driven.  An eleven year old has no means to dictate the industry; his sexuality is shaped by it. These are inextricably linked industries: pornography is a form of prostitution, part of a massive ejaculation industry. This industry is irredeemably misogynist, racist, classist, homophobic, and rapist. The sexuality it provides is one devoid of any consideration for others (Mazis, 1993), let alone a politics of sexual justice (Stoltenberg, 1989; 1994). To paraphrase Gail Dines (2007), while a male usually does not approach pornography hating women, he can certainly leave it one of the converted.