The Porn War, a Lesbian-Feminist Perspective

A defense of anti-porn feminist & lesbian-feminists activists of then and today.

Caravaggio - Judith beheading Holofernes (rediscovered recently-ish)

“As a woman, I think is porn is a disgrace. And I used to watch a lot of porn. I started watching porn when I was like 11. . . . I didn’t understand why it was a bad thing. I thought that was how you learn how to have sex….

“I was watching abusive porn. . . . I think it really destroyed my brain. And [now] I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn. I think that I have sleep paralysis and night terrors/nightmares because of it.

“It got to a point where I couldn’t watch anything else . . . unless it was violent, I didn’t think it was attractive. And I was a virgin; I hadn’t done anything, and so it led to problems.

“The first few times I had sex I was not saying no to things that were not good . . . because I thought that that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to.

“I’m so angry that porn is so loved…And I’m so angry at myself for thinking that it was okay.”

Those quotes are from a 2021 interview of 19-year-old Billie Eilish on the Howard Stern show.

Second-Wave Feminism & The Original Porn War

The porn war — that some people are against porn, some for it — is heating up again. In the last two weeks, I’ve read at least five think pieces writing against porn. Even the New York Times has an op-ed about it, the anti-porn movement has gone mainstream. In the last week, I’ve stumbled on two posts/think pieces that advocate for pornography.

If you’re unfamiliar with the original porn wars, they’re this: in the early 1980s, a group of second-wave feminists believed that pornography should be illegal, and another group that for sexual liberation, kink, BDSM, and porn, argued for unrestricted sexuality. Because there’s so much porn on the internet, the issue has become more pressing again.

I’m never going to argue that the second-wave feminists that I love got everything right. For one, their arguments against porn weren’t very well-argued; too often, their arguments jump from point A to C without a thorough explanation of how they got there.

Who were the anti-porn second-wave feminists? Catharine A. Mackinnon successfully argued that sexual harassment was sex-based discrimination. She then stretched her earlier thought to pornography, that it was also discrimination against women. She wrote books with Andrea Dworkin, who was thoroughly pilloried by pro-porn people for being anti-porn. In Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Dworkin shared that she’d heard hundreds of stories of rape, incest, ongoing sexual and physical abuse, and forced sex work. She wrote about how the abusers engaged with porn, and expected their victims to respond in the way that women in the porn do.

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.¹

I have a lot sneaking sympathy for Mackinnon, Dworkin, and Billie Eilish. To hear the hundreds of stories, or to have Eilish’s lived experience of gaslighting yourself into saying yes to things that you didn’t want…you want something to do done, you want action to be taken so that no more women are hurt. I’ve personally also heard hundreds of first-hand stories of rape.

When I hear a story, I think we don’t have time, we need to do something to stop this NOW. Now, before yet another woman (man, child…) is raped. Now, I know what it’s like to feel that anger and helpless, that sense of desperation to make sure it never happens again. So I understand why each of them had reached for pornography as the evil behind the greater evils of sexual assault and nightmarish sex — it’s a solution that feels tangible and immediate.

So is pornography the cause of the problem of rape? In a word: no. In many words: it’s reductive to give very, very complex problems a simple answer like, get rid of pornography and get rid of rape. Rape is rooted in oppression. Pornography eroticizes and glorifies that oppression.

Dworkin et al were arguing that pornography was a net negative for society, and that it contributed to rape and discrimination against women. They’re not stupid — their arguments are still more persuasive that the net-citizens screaming about their right to porn here on Substack — they realized that women, men, and children had been raped and sexually abused long before any sexually charged imagery existed. Another anti-porn feminist, Susan Brownmiller, wrote an entire book on the history of rape, going all the way back to rape in biblical times, and rape as the spoils of war, unrelated to porn too. Dworkin herself details the abuse of women over centuries and across continents, too, in her first published book, Woman Hating.

They didn’t ignore the existence of rape before porn, but they used the existence of rape to argue against porn.

Porn Today, Via the Internet

As I wrote in an earlier essay: 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.

Spread the ideas to children like Billie Eilish, watching porn since she was eleven, having nightmares about it when she was fourteen, bravely speaking out against pornography when she was nineteen. Because of the ubiquity of porn on the internet, children are being exposed to porn at younger ages. They’re asking about sexual choking as young as eight. Common Sense Media found that children now first see porn on the internet at an average of twelve years old. What are the repercussions? A few Australian studies found that fastest growing — this is an fucking awful sentence — type of child abuse is child-on-chid abuse.

Is unfettered access to porn worth this cost? We as a society bemoan how romantic relationships have become more difficult, how the shallow fleetness of casual encounters have taken the place of romance. Is having 24/7 access to humans to swipe on, then getting bored and being able to find something increasing more violent, more depraved, more degrading, something that reduces flesh-and-blood humans, messy, wet, smelly, to nothing more than distant pixelated body parts on a screen and fake moans…is having that freedom to that so important to adults that should know better that they’re a-okay with twelve year olds doing the same? Is that sexual liberation? Is that freedom? Is the freedom to be addicted to porn — an addiction that reveals similar brain activity to addiction to alcohol and harder drugs — the freedom we want for ourselves?

Research that porn desensitizes viewers over time. We also know that increased porn use is correlated with decreased sexual satisfaction. That there’s a link between frequency of viewing porn and compulsive sexual behavior². We know that increased porn use contributes to sexual risk-taking (eg., not using condoms), and to more casual relationships.³ One study of sorority members showed that women who watch porn are less likely to intervene if they saw another women being sexually assaulted.⁴

And today, 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 advance⁵. Which, you know, makes it non-consensual, which makes it assault. Do you honestly think that two out of three people had been literally choked during sex in the 1960s? Hell, do you think they were in the 1990s, before increasingly aggressive internet porn desensitized watchers to the beauty of sex?

Practitioners of BDSM/kink will argue that choking and “breath play” are wonderful, especially thrilling because it’s considered by many to be the most risky BDSM activity, they’ll tell you people should be free to do they’d like in private, they’ll also tell you that these practices are perfectly safe if done correctly and they’ll explain how much work the BDSM community has put into educating people, then they’ll add that all sex entails risk. Correct, all sex does entail some risk. We don’t need to aggressively increase that risk. I keep hearing BDSM people saying no one ever died from BDSM. An estimated 0.5 in a million people in the Western countries die from autoerotic asphyxiation⁶. Less than a week ago, a news story broke about a man who was fined 219,565 kronor in damages after he choked a woman in 2024 and she went into cardiac arrest. She’s in her mid-twenties.

Is Being Against Pornography Akin to Homophobia?

Both of the arguments for porn that I read over the last two weeks focus on one argument: that being anti pornography goes against queerness. This argument is framed as the anti-porn movement is a pretext to puritanism and sexuality that isn’t standard, within the confines of heterosexual marriage, and for the purposes of childbirth — which means that kink, BDSM, queerness, gay and lesbian sex, sex with a transgender person — all of it could go if porn does. The position that they’re arguing from is to link all anti-pornography people to a specific sort of conservatism, to religion-based arguments that porn is morally bankrupt and obscene because sex itself is, and sexuality outside of heterosexual marriage and for the purposes of procreation should be strongly discouraged. That the sinister subtext for being against porn is homophobia and transphobia. It’s a slippery slope argument — and in law school, we learned not to use it. The slippery slope an argument that says allowing one thing will open the door, start the slide down a slope and lead to broad, unforeseen consequences. It stretches from one thing to another without adequately explaining all the in-between steps. Like the conservatives they abhor, their lack of nuance and differentiation weakens their argument.

I hope as rational adults, we can separate out porn: sexual images, videos, and sexualized nudity, from LGBTQI+ people. LGBTQI+ people are ordinary people whose existence itself isn’t inherently sexual. Our differences in who we chose to love and how we express and live gender. The problem is in sexualizing our mere existence.

That position also ignores that the lead person who was most pilloried for being against porn, Andrea Dworkin, was herself a lesbian, and had done sex work. Billie Eilish, modern day celebrity speaking out against porn, is openly queer; she’s bisexual.

Going back to the earlier porn war, there was another group of people that were part of the sexual liberation movement that opposed Andrea Dworkin and the other anti-porn feminists. They included men and women, LGBTQI+ and heterosexual, and they argued for sexual liberation — that predecessor of today’s sex positivity movement — for sex parties, kink, and BDSM.

The most prominent sexual liberation feminist was Gayle Rubin. I keep hearing from people who respect her more than they Andrea Dworkin. Rubin argued for “boylovers”. No, I’m not joking. Yup, she argued on the side of grown-ass men having the right to rape boys. Though, of course, she didn’t call it rape. In 2011, she claimed her defense was taken out of context but never repudiated it. But hey, today, too many people think that’s a-okay because as long as it’s gay and “sex positive”. Dworkin made herself a figure of ridicule because she wanted to stop abuse. Rubin made herself a person who’s admired even as she glorified it.

As a lesbian, hell no, it’s not cool. Being LGBTQI+ doesn’t excuse abusive takes, and our community needs to care more about abuse within it.

Or they ignore that part of Gayle’s argument altogether. Just as so much of the LGBTQI+ community overlooks Harvey Milk dating a boy of 16-17 when he was thirty-three, and that the boy was suicidal. Just as they overlook that parts of the LGBTQI+ movement of that era, the 1970s through the early 1980s, that linked the oppression of gays and lesbians to the restrictions on children’s sexuality and access of adults to children sexually.

Look, I don’t agree with the conservatives who believe that our public existence is “grooming” and we’re “pedophiles”, but in part our predecessors did that to us. And within the community — why are we condoning arguments like Gayle’s, holding her up as a figure to inspire us? Doing the same with Harvey Milk while ignoring his history isn’t doing the current LGBTQI+ any favors in fighting against those accusations. I get the impulse for marginalized people to protect our own from outsiders, it’s going to do more harm than good in the long run.

Ten days ago, a news story broke about Pornhub leaving the French market. The reason they left was that Pornhub refused to do age verifications, that is, check the ages of people accessing their site. One argument that LGBTQI+ folks have used is that checking IDs is a way to restrict trans folks from accessing the sites, further curtailing rights. A person argued this to me, that the anti-pornographers don’t care about children but are using this simply to go after “queer and trans” people. That’s a stretch. I care about children. If you told me that I was going to lose the right to access a specific type of content to keep children more safe, I’m for it. I’m childless, I believe that it’s a social good to care for children, and I don’t believe “what about the children” is always disingenuous. I get that it’s a restriction if the name you use and your appearance and stated gender don’t match up to your ID, I really do get it. But I think we can have a process to deal with that (an appeals process, with real humans involved, for example). We can come up with solutions that are inclusive but also protect children.

Besides, if we’re linking porn to abuse, trans and non-binary people are statistically at higher risk for rape and abuse, at higher risk than cis-women.

Where Do We Go From Here?

In The Free Press⁷, Isobel Hogben wrote about first accessing porn when she was ten. She explained that her mother was a “helicopter mom”. Regardless, the pornography she found included “simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism, and unthinkable physical violence.” In her essay, Isobel Hogben wrote that older generations don’t quite comprehend how porn and society have changed as we and it went online. Reading through some of my comments here, I’ve seen that pattern, too. There is AI, including AI websites that allow users to simulate rape and incest with 13 and 15 years olds and sex robots that have rape modes built in. This isn’t nudity mags at a gas station stop, this is far more extreme, and it’s far easier to access and become reliant upon.

In a talk somewhere during the late 1980s, Andrea Dworkin said that rape happens “once every three minutes” in the U.S.. Today, rape happens once sixty-eight seconds. These are of course estimates, and maybe they’re more accurate now. But what that indicates is despite all the waves of feminism, despite the anti-rape movement, despite all the activists, advocate, nonprofits, despite #metoo, despite Harvey Weinstein getting re-convicted on one count of criminal sexual abuse this week, despite our increased education and understanding of the dynamics of rape, the problem of rape has only grown and only become worse during our lifetimes.

What inspired this piece was an essay by a popular (white, of course) Substacker tearing down Andrea Dworkin and defending pornography and Gayle Rubin, writing that the anti-pornographers needed to take queerness into account. She wrote that the pro pornographers do “anti racist” work, but didn’t bother to describe how it’s antiracist or cite any evidence, nor did she take the casual racism of porn, the sexual liberation, and sex positivity movements into account.

I’m a lesbian. I write about lesbianism. I’m also a person of color born and raised in the West — with lived experiences of racism — who writes about intersectionality.

Take a look at state-by-state maps of porn search terms, and you’ll find that people in the Southern U.S. love interracial porn, people in conservative West Virginia love trans porn, and people in California love Asian women in their porn. Yes, porn includes women of color and non-conventionally attractive bodies, but it doesn’t include them in ways that are inclusive, include them in non-prejudiced, non-stereotyped ways, doesn’t humanize them. Porn instead exacerbates (not causes) existing stereotypes, which porn users carry with them into the real world. In my work as survivor advocate — in California — I’ve found that Asian-American women are raped at far higher rates. When hearing their stories, I hear how the submissive stereotype of Asian women comes into play. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of the story that a woman told me, when her would-be rapist said: “I thought you people were supposed to be submissive.” She’s Indian-American, like me.

And I believe the sexual liberation movement all but ignores intersectionality, paying lip service without doing the work to be anti-racist and the harder work of being inclusive. They all but ignore that they’re broadly inaccessible to anyone who’s not upper middle class and higher. I wrote about my own experiences of that here, but c’mon, these communities skew very white. In Ending Female Sexual Oppression, bell hooks gets into why: that to be sexually liberated and have the time to pursue and learn about BDSM, to have access multiple sex partners, to have access to abortion if need be or that you can afford to get pregnant outside of marriage…all of that means you also have to have some privilege. I didn’t have those privileges growing up. I was a working class girl of color determined to get out. Like other girls in my position, I knew that meant I had to wait to begin exploring my sexuality. I still have to be restrained, because I know that I’m at higher risk of abuse than some white girl who grew up middle class and with a loving, supportive family. As bell hooks put it, these folks push endless sexual freedom so hard that it bleeds into coercion (hook’s word) and abuse — my word, based on the stories I’ve heard from women abused and gaslighted in such communities, and the data that shows that women of color and working class women are more vulnerable to abuse and rape.

I am against advocating for porn. At best, porn is tawdry entertainment. At worst, it traumatizes children, women, contributes to abuse and other social ills. Over time, I’m also finding myself growing increasingly opposed to the frequent use of porn, the way it’s everywhere, that’s been saturated into modern society, how accessible it is for kids. In her essay, The Mass Trauma of Porn, Freya India wrote about how young women feel gaslit into thinking porn is okay, not only okay but as essential as food and water.

That gaslighting goes deeper. There are so many girlhood essays about the self-gaslighting, the constant pressure to the pick-me, the cool girl, the girl who has few boundaries and is totally down for anything. The term cool girl came from a monologue in Gillian Flynn’s 2012 Gone Girl:

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

It’s unrealistic, and it’s counterintuitive that women are encouraged to go against our interests in the name of coolness. I’ve read so many girlhood think pieces about how young women feel pressured to be sexy and open-minded. When I was younger, in the 2000s and 2010s, I felt that pressure too. I think part of the reason that girls are so cool with being degraded and watching women being degraded on-screen is that it allows them to be the coolest of cool girls, allows them to feel superior to women who they think are less cool.

People are so proud of watching and using porn these days, so proud of defending it on the internet. So ready to tear down people like me, who would point out that it’s not doing us much good. So ready to label us anti-sex, to mock us for not being as sexually open-minded as they are, so ready to say we’re trying to restrict their freedom, so ready to argue for that freedom while not seeing how porn is destroying their mind, so ready to say that we’re a problem, that we’re homophobic or racist or whatever other social ill they want to appropriate and inappropriately use, without evidence and without the data, ignoring and offering half-arguments that leave out information that would invalidate what they’re saying — but of course, using data and reading up on the feminists I mention is nerdy, definitely not as cool as half-truths and whole lies, like writing about lesbian Andrea Dworkin not taking into account queerness.

Here’s a truth: I’ve gotten over the fear of being called or presumed a prude or anti-sex. I’m not anti-sex; ask anyone who’s been lucky enough to have sex with me. Sex is wonderful, and I want to keep sex wonderful for the next generation. We’re conflated being against the use of porn with being anti-sex, which isn’t accurate.

Though the reality is: I do not I care if you think I’m a prude. If being labelled a prude is the cost of saying I care, that I am against abuse, against rape, against the way that children and adults access and use porn on the internet, then so be it. Maybe more of us should be prudes.

More of us are getting more comfortable speaking out about something that we’re against, and more of us are refusing to allow ourselves to be silenced. I hope we keep speaking out, and speaking up.

unknown canon is a subscriber supported platform that advocates for women. If you can, please consider upgrading to keep this newsletter independent. Every paid subscriber allows me to continue to invest more time into feminist research and writing, and into survivor advocacy. Thank you so much for the time you’ve spent reading my essay(s). ♥️

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

2. 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

3. Carroll, Jason S.; Busby, Dean M.; Willoughby, Brian J.; Brown, Cameron C. (2017-04-03). "The Porn Gap: Differences in Men's and Women's Pornography Patterns in Couple Relationships". Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy. 16 (2): 146–163. doi:10.1080/15332691.2016.1238796. ISSN 1533-2691. S2CID 151873457.

and

Wright, Paul J.; Sun, Chyng; Steffen, Nicola (2018-11-17). "Pornography Consumption, Perceptions of Pornography as Sexual Information, and Condom Use". Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy. 44 (8): 800–805. doi:10.1080/0092623X.2018.1462278. ISSN 0092-623X. PMID 29634458. S2CID 4794350.

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

5. 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.

6. Sauvageau, A. (2014). "Current Reports on Autoerotic Deaths—Five Persistent Myths". Current Psychiatry Reports. 16 (1): 1–4. doi:10.1007/s11920-013-0430-z. PMID 24293152. S2CID 10570450.

7. I don’t read The Free Press normally; I found this article through Freya India’s The Mass Trauma of Porn, and used it here because it fit. If you haven’t read the Freya India piece, I highly recommend it.