I was first introduced to Professor of Law Catharine A. Mackinnon last semester in reading “Sex and Violence,” wherein she articulates much of the same ideas in terms of sex and sexuality existing as a violation (Lorber).Sexuality is centered on male dominance: “[It] is the dynamic of control by which male dominance…eroticizes and thus defines man and woman, gender identity and sexual pleasure…maintains and defines male supremacy as a political system” (165).
Mackinnon uses pornography to emphasize how sexuality and pornography are especially constructed by men to feed their needs. She claims that “Pornography permits men to have whatever they want sexually…it shows how men see the world, how in seeing it they access and possess it” (166). This includes how they desire “women bound, women battered, women tortured, women humiliated, women degraded and defiled, women killed” (166). With soft porn, the women need to be easily and “sexually accessible, have-able, there for them” (166). This reinforces de Beauvoir’s concept of “otherness,” wherein we are eroticized versions of the kind of women that turn men on. In specific reference to pornography, “what men find beautiful is what degrades women” (Lorber 125). According to Mackinnon, if we truly enjoyed pornography, we would buy it, but we don’t. Men do. The fact that it is a billion dollar industry that continues to thrive because there is such a demand for it, shows their dominance and the prevailing attitude men have towards women, sexuality, and how both feed their desires.
To feed their needs, not as prostitutes or porn stars, regular women submit to eroticizing their selves, objectifying their bodies and faces so that men will find them as sexy as the goddesses the media projects upon us daily. We are not Angelina Jolies or Rihannas, but we can be like them if we buy the right accessories – diet plans and pills, breast implants, lingerie, fake lashes, push-up bras, and make-up. We dominate the cosmetics industry because, as she states in “Sex and Violence,” “We spend our money to set ourselves up as the objects that emulate those images sold as erotic to men” (Lorber 125).
When women are idealized as objects subject to definitions outside of their own perspective, they are more malleable. They can be altered from active agents to submissive recipients. In heterosexual intercourse, women are the passive recipients of “pleasure,” while men are the active ones. When reduced to objects, women can be subdued and controlled, and this is dangerous because it allows for violence and domination. It maintains the status quo for womanhood as inferior and subordinate. It is an imprisonment, an infantilization and eroticization of women that keeps them on the bottom and in the slave mentality of the hierarchy that already exists between men and women.
Pornography is ever more dangerous because it “constructs women as things for sexual use and constructs its consumers to desperately want women, to desperately want possession and cruelty and dehumanization” (167). This idea that sex is actually a violent act, an act of domination no matter how receptive women are to it, is a shock to the system. It changes the way we think about sex, our sexuality, and the relationships we forge with men.
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