Paper Summary:

The paper proposes that pornography, although thousands of years old, has evolved in the past decades as a reaction to the rise of feminism and racial equality. The paper uses the Marxian concept of "ideology", which it defines as beliefs used to justify social stratification, to define pornography within the context of white, male wielders of power. The paper cites feminist Andrea Dworkin's view of sex as a form of victimization of the socially inferior. It presents Naomi Wolf's view of the sex industry as an economic exploitation of women, and makes use of her view of the beauty industry as another source of exploitation to expand its definition of pornography, and cites numerous examples from mainstream women's magazines to support that claim. The paper reviews the history of the women's movement's struggle against pornography, and includes examples of feminist campaign literature targeting pornography. The paper presents the claim that pornography leads to racism, as well as violence against women. It views as sexist the laws which deem all phallic imagery illegal, but classify depictions of female erogenous zones as legal, comparing them to Nazi tactics to dehumanize Jews. In conclusion, the writer feels that Karl Marx, had he not focused solely on economics, would also have seen pornography as a form of subjugation of women by white men, and that women will never be able to express their true sexuality and nature of femininity until negative images in pornography are eradicated. NOTE: This paper includes graphic pornographic images as examples in two appendices and on the title page.

From the Paper:

"Pornography is a Greek word that now means, "writings, pictures, etc. intended primarily to arouse sexual desire." (6) However, it was derived from the Greek stem, porne, meaning a harlot who was to serve as a man's sexual slave. The inequalities of patriarchy have obviously changed from ancient Greek times; however, the image of a woman serving a man sexually is still very ubiquitous in pornographic literature. Is this detrimental to the status of women in society? Most feminist thinkers say yes."

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