Did Pornography Kill Feminism and Lead to Rape Culture?

Were anti-pornography feminists right about pornography being a root cause of sexual violence?

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bell hooks. Photo: NYT

I do not use trigger warnings. As shame is and was used in conservative cultures, today we silence with trigger warnings, with the request to take care not to traumatize people by sharing their stories.

Ask yourself: why has talking about a difficult topic in the abstract become “traumatizing” or “exhausting”¹? If we as a society tell a survivor that it is too emotionally difficult to bear witness to their story, consider the message it sends to the survivor.

Research shows that trigger warnings are largely ineffective. There are people, like me, who believe that they are harmful to society as a whole. Trigger warnings are the softening a society that refuses to see what it happening under our own noses. A way to refuse to engage in discourse about difficult topics, to avoid them, to write off the sufferings of other people.

If we refuse to discuss, or even even listen to and read about difficulty, we’re allowing people to hide from reality, to pretend that topics such as racism, misogyny, and most of all, physical and sexual violence aren’t as systemic as they are. That allows people to not see how endemic it is, what an epidemic of it we’re living through.

The Realities of Survivor Advocacy and Sexual Violence

Globally, about one in three women and one out of six men (with risk being significantly higher before the age of 18) have experienced some form of sexual violence. The numbers are educated guesses, because underreporting from all genders is also endemic. When asked why people choose not to report, most people don’t answer, or say they were afraid of not being believed, or retaliation. People are not believed and experience retaliation because society doesn’t understand the dynamics of violence — including that only 2 - 4% of accusations are false². We can better discern which of that small percentage is false when we understand the characteristics of people who make false accusations, eg, Crystal Magnum of the famous false accusations against the Duke Lacrosse team.

I started advocating for survivors at the end of 2016 or beginning of 2017. I can’t remember exactly when, because I started after I was raped in October of 2017. I found other women who had survived assault by the same person, and so, I started speaking up about it. The months following, the reaction of friends and family were the worse experiences of my life, by a long shot. Survivors started approaching me for help after. I carry each and every story with me, each name, all the tears, heartbreak, and confusion about why their friends and possibly family were reacting with such cruelty. And I began to help even as I was still traumatized by my own story because I didn’t want other women to go through my experience. Nor did I want to become one of the survivors that had been the most cruel to me³. At this point in my advocacy, I can fill in the rest of a survivor’s story after the first few minutes of speaking to a survivor. The patterns and dynamics have become that obvious to me. Which also means I have the tools to not only help survivors, but to discern truths and realities about sexual violence.

Andrea Dworkin is one of my favorite feminist writers. Writer because there’s no one I’ve read yet that has her skill with words and her rhetorical styling. Andrea, also, was a survivor. She has been sexually molested by a stranger when she was only nine years old, sexually assaulted through an invasive genital examination following arrest after a protest, and had a youthful marriage with an horrendously abusive man while living in Europe. In Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Andrea described how, following the 1974 publication of her book, Woman Hating, women approached her with stories.

The women are real to me. I know what they look like standing tall; I’ve seen the fear; I’ve watched them remember; I’ve talked with them about other things, all sorts of things, intellectual issues, the weather, politics, school, children, cooking. I have some idea of their aspirations as individuals, the ones they lost during the course of sexual abuse, the ones they cherish now. I know them. Each one, for me, has a face, a voice, a whole life behind her face and her voice. Each is more eloquent and more hurt than I know how to convey.⁴

I loved her perspective on listening to the stories of survivors. In hearing their strength, complexity, and humanity. In acknowledging that a survivor is more than just the abuse they suffered. And how Andrea conveys — subtly — that it is an honor to receive their story. An honor because it meant that the survivor trusted you with their vulnerable heart. There’s something deeply spiritual in it; things that are both beautiful (surviving) and ugly (the abuse).

Andrea’s belief was that these stories were of women “hurt by pornography”. My belief is that is but a small part of it. The full answer to the question of why do people rape is much more complex. In short, the answers to the questions this title asked: did pornography kill feminism? No. The “sex wars”, the anti-pornographers versus the sexual liberation element contributed to the end of second wave feminism and the rise of third wave, but the realities are more complex — with a lack of intersectionality also contributing more heavily but quietly. When a movement failed at taking into account so many women, as bell hooks wrote, over and over, failed to account for the considerations and lives of working class and poor women, immigrant, Black, indigenous, of color, it cannot be adequately supported by those groups.

Does pornography lead to the rape culture? No. Rape culture created pornography, then pornography, especially with the internet, spread rape culture farther and wider than ever. They’re bed fellows, so to speak.

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Are Pornography and Sexual Violence Connected?

Some have said that pornography is a superficial target; but, truly, this is wrong. Pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual exploitation, is encoded in it. It’s what men want us to be, think we are, make us into; how men use us; not because biologically they are men but because this is how their social power is organized. From the perspective of the political activist, pornography is the blueprint of male supremacy; it shows how male supremacy is both. The political activist need to know the blueprint⁵.

Andrea offered up the example of the Marquis de Sade, the abuser whose name gave the modern world the S in BDSM. She also gives us story after story of children and women who were abused by their fathers, then their boyfriends and husbands. Men who watched porn, who expected the children and women they were abusing to react and act like the actors in the pornography. She dedicates several pages to describing the plot lines of erotica as evidence (both in Pornography: Men Possessing Women and Woman Hating).

Andrea wrote a few books with feminist legal Catharine A. Mackinnon about the harm that porn does. Their argument for outlawing it altogether went something like: pornography was a violation of civil rights, a form of sex discrimination, an abuse of human rights, and pervasively so.

Pornography, in the feminist view, is a form of forced sex, a practice of sexual politics, an institution of gender inequality.⁶

Mackinnon argued against both obscenity laws and the first amendment protection argument that eventually won over the anti-pornography movement. However, there was a disconnect in their argument.

They’ve established correlation, but there’s a disconnect in cause and effect. Which came first: sexual violence and abuse, or porn? The answer is obviously that sexual violence did. Porn grew out of it, and spreads the ideas of violence and objectification to other people.

Studies show that porn is detrimental to sexuality. It desensitizes viewers over time, that there’s a link between frequency of viewing porn and compulsive sexual behavior⁷. Sixty-seven percent of women report being choked during sex, and I’ve both read and heard many people say that their choking wasn’t consensual or agreed upon in advance (which, you know, makes it non-consensual)⁸. Because of the internet, children are being exposed to porn at younger ages. They’re asking about sexual choking as young as eight.

Amia Srinivasan’s book, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century included an essay titled Talking to My Students About Porn. In the essay, she more accurately lays out the modern dynamics of porn usage. Thirty-two percent of Pornhub users are (supposedly) women.⁹ One study of sorority members showed that women who watch porn are less likely to intervene if they saw another women being sexually assaulted.¹⁰ Both men and women are more likely to have performance anxiety during sex because of porn’s impact on our culture, and expectations of sex have been changed through it. Pornography isn’t per se a feminist issue, it’s a societal issue that affects children (ugh, this should not be) and adults of all gender.

As well, a lot of how porn is made isn’t consensual. A story that’s stayed with me although I read it years ago: the BBC reported on Rose Kalbalma, who was kidnapped and raped for about twelve hours before being released. When she was fourteen years old. The video of her rapes were uploaded online by the rapists. Despite her repeated efforts to have the videos taken down, the videos reappear.

Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Men told several stories that were as tragic as Rose Kalbalma’s, of women who were raped and forced into sex work by fathers and boyfriends. Forty-some-odd years earlier. These stories, of young girls and women forced into pornography — repeated raped — this is so egregious that we as a decent society cannot possibly allow it.

The issues I outlined in the above three paragraphs undoubtedly play into sexual violence. Some of it is sexual violence. But would ending it end rape? When I hear survivor stories, they do lead me to believe the survivor was objectified, and their abuser acted compulsively, that some of their thinking might be influenced by porn. That it primarily is too easy.

The realities of sexual assault are much more complex. Often, abusers push and test boundaries prior to acting with violence. They select targets thus, and this is why vulnerable women are more likely to be assaulted, eg., women who not sober, are alone, are going through a difficult period in their life, new in town, had a history of prior abuse…Research also shows that assaulters and the abused both grow up in homes with higher rates of divorce/single parents, and with substance abuse¹¹.

When I’ve spoken to men accused of harassment and worse, I’m left with the impression that they so often present themselves as the victims of a witchhunt and unfair society (when they were the oppressors) because they genuinely see themselves as that. That there’s a sort of fear and insecurity that underlies their terrible use of their power to overpower women. I wrote this not out of an abundance of sympathy for the perspective in — it is the delusion of insecurity and fear — but we must acknowledge it to get to the complex, entangled roots of sexual violence.

The key factor that always underlies sexual violence is power and domination. During war, the oppressor/attacker often will rape the losing side regardless of gender. Of course — the culture that leads to war (a form of or in response to domination) is also the culture that rapes. With the rape stories I’ve heard: it’s powerless young women, too often Asian-American, being assaulted by a boss or coworker or colleague who has more power professionally but through systemic racism also. Women of color, even us who are Asian-American, with our relative privilege, are also less likely to be believed, more likely to be fetishized, and less likely to be supported, to believed to be worthy of communal support. This is why I write so frequently of the intersection of race and feminism

It’s power, domination, and oppression that underlies physical and sexual violence. Pornography might be one way that’s displayed, but it’s far from the cause. These have deeper roots, in our fears and hopes and our insecurities.

I don’t agree that the answer is to outlaw porn, as Dworkin, Mackinnon, and other feminist thinkers of their era argued. Look at the outlawing of schedule I drugs: it drove a group of people underground, into addiction and into death from overdose of unregulated yet deeply desired substances. Look at what outlawing sex work has done: put women (and others) who work in that industry at greater risk for violence and given their clients outsized power over them. And look at how ineffective outlawing child porn has been: it’s increasing year by year. As with all of the above, making porn illegal mean it would still be around but more illicitly and potentially more harmfully.

As with drugs and sex work, the porn industry (and the internet) need more effective regulation, programs, funding to go after people — porn production that involves underaged actors, is coerced, and is non-consensual or overly violent to be taken down if it exists, and more action in stopping it from being produced. More action to hold the hosting websites accountable for not expending their billions in solving issues like Rose Kabalma.

The law can only do so much. As with trigger warnings and silencing of discourse around sexual violence, we also cannot shy away from talking about the harm pornography does, or keep it the way it is: in the shadows, something people view with shame. We have to educate and shift our culture. Away from a culture where so many people, including children as young as eight, are exposed to and can so easily access porn. Away from a culture that views unrestricted access to the internet for underaged children as being cool and desirable.¹² Away from a culture that glorifies the objectification of and violence towards others. Away from a culture in which there are people getting off sexually on watching the kidnapping and rape of a fourteen year old. Away from consuming too much of it and further falling into addiction, and in general…getting offline, turning off our devices¹³.

We as a society need to engage more with people in real life instead of getting ideas of sexuality through pornography. Part of that is also shedding some shame around sexuality, becoming more willing to talk about sex when appropriate and in appropriate ways (eg., teens should not be getting answers about sex through porn, or through adults who might be interesting in grooming/abuse).

What the Anti-Pornography Movement Missed

As much as I love Andrea Dworkin’s rhetoric and writing, I find her thinking is very limited on sexuality. She wrote frequently of the oppression of women through sex and porn. Not of the emotional connectivity, joy, and creative power that can be found in consensual, loving sexuality for people of all genders. Sex is not abuse. Sex and love are in many ways the antidote and opposite of abuse.

Because she didn’t balance her views thus, she made herself an easy target of the type of ridicule she was subjected to when alive¹⁴. It also weakened her argument: many of us find sex wonderful. If someone wrote only of its terrible abuses and only about sex being a tool of patriarchy, we’re not likely to listen when our lived experience tells us otherwise.

But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revolution, nor succumbs to the belief that sensation is enough….The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony.¹⁵

In her essay, Ending Female Sexual Oppression, bell hooks wrote about the shortcomings of the sexual liberation movement. “Ironically, some feminists have tended to dismiss issues of sexual pleasure, well-being, and contendedness as irrelevant.”

Feminist thinkers like Greer [TERF Germaine Greer, in her The Female Eunuch] believed that assertion of the primacy of sexuality would be a liberatory gesture. They urged women to initiate sexual advances, to enjoy sex, to experiment with new relationships, to be sexually “free”. Yet most women did not have the leisure, the mobility, the contacts, or the even the desire to indulge in this so-called “sexual liberation”. Young heterosexual women, single and childless; teenagers and college students; and political progressives were the groups most eager and able to pattern their sexual behavior after what was essentially an inversion of the male notion of sexual liberation.

and

The focus on “sexual liberation” has always carried with it the assumption that the goal of such effort is to make it possible for individuals to engage in more and/or better sexual activity. Yet one aspect of sexual norms that many people find oppressive is the assumption that one “should” be engaged in sexual activity. The “should” is one expression of sexual coercion.

bell hooks is the feminist thinker whose views have influenced mine the most, the writer who has inspired me like no other. The above is why: that her views are insightful, concise, inclusive — seeing the people that so many feminists missed — and nuanced. She saw both the joy possible in sexuality, and how that joy could become oppression, which could become abuse.

Sex should be liberated from shame, and from violence and abuse. Throughout this essay, you, dear reader, many have notice a theme drawing together what might seem like disparate points: that what I’ve advocated for is more talking about difficult, awkward, and potentially traumatizing subjects. In that vein, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes, learned when I was in law school, by Justice Louis Brandeis in a 1913 Harper’s Magazine article:

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Thank you for reading unknown canon. This newsletter is dedicated to intersectional feminist♀️and lesbian ⚢ literature, history, and analysis.

If you would like to support this project, please like, share, comment, and if you have the means, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

1. I also want to add: this is distinct from not being the mood/headspace to hear about someone’s personal trauma in that moment, or to give emotional support. It’s understandable that someone might be going through their own trauma and unable to give emotional support at points in their life.

That has little to do with my argument here: that the increased use of trigger warnings for writing such as mine, that more broadly and intellectually brings up difficult topics is making society less resilient, and therefore, less willing to take action on addressing the topics I bring up in this essay.

2. Studies at U.S. universities, including conservative red-state universities, such as the University of Utah, and through Britain’s NIH, show that only 2 - 4% of accusations are false. This means that 96 - 98% of accusations are true.

3. This is another pattern that most advocates and people who dedicate their lives to ending sexual violence will tell you: that women broadly, and survivors too often, are especially cruel to victims in the aftermath of assault. My mentors — who had/have decades of advocacy experience have found this, it’s something that we in the “movement” universally agree on. The theory is that (1) a lot of survivors learned to side with their abuser as a coping mechanism, and (2) victim-blaming to “reassure” yourself that you wouldn’t do something that a survivor did, and pretend to yourself you’re safe from sexual violence because of that.

4. Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. (New York: Putnam, Inc., 1981. Republished New York: Picador, 2025.) Introduction, xxiii.

5. Ibid.

6. Mackinnon, Catharine A. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. 1989). p 197.

7. Stark, R., Klucken, T., Potenza, M.N. et al. A Current Understanding of the Behavioral Neuroscience of Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder and Problematic Pornography Use. Curr Behav Neurosci Rep 5, 218–231 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40473-018-0162-9

That article cites several other sources.

8. Herbenick D, Fu TC, Patterson Perry C, Guerra-Reyes L, Eastman-Mueller H, Svetina Valdivia D. Sexual choking/strangulation and its association with condom and contraceptive use: Findings from a survey of students at a university in the Midwestern United States. Perspect Sex Reprod Health. 2024 Dec;56(4):358-367. doi: 10.1111/psrh.12285. Epub 2024 Sep 26. PMID: 39327226; PMCID: PMC11646831.

9. Srinivasan, Amia. The Right to Sex. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2021). p. 43.

10. Ibid.

11. This I learned from an in-person talk at a conference, given by a psychologist who worked on rehabilitation programs with inmates.

Rehabilitation is thought to reduce recidivism by 11%. That, of course, doesn’t account for the possibility that rehabilitation might give offenders better tools to cover their abuse.

12. I am aware that not all parents have the means / ability to provide supervision for their children. However, even a parent that, say, works two jobs and cannot afford childcare can set controls on household devices and internet usage, not allow their children to access social media (many platforms cannot be accessed without an account anyway), etc.

I’ve volunteered at two programs for underprivileged children (including one for homeless families). The lack of privilege is compounded by culture — eg., in the program for homeless families, we tutor/volunteers were often fighting parents who wanted to pull their children out of tutoring to care for younger siblings and to hang out and do more “fun” things.

13. I’ve had people ask me how I read so much. The answer is: for hours before bed, I shut off my laptop, leave the phone in another room, and read books printed on paper. Also, I read faster than average because I’ve done so much of it over my lifetime.

14. Though, of course, many feminist thinkers are ridiculed for their part in “the struggle to end sexist oppression” alone.

15. Lorde, Audre. Uses of the Erotic