Pornography, Hate Speech, and the Inconsistencies of the Left
Description
I am delighted to host another guest post by my dear friend, Bob Jensen.
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Nearly four decades ago, when I stumbled into graduate school after an early midlife crisis, I was introduced to radical feminism, critical race theory, and left critiques of wealth and power at the same time. The three approaches seemed politically necessary and intellectually compatible. Naïvely, I assumed others saw the same connections.
I learned quickly that my new brethren on the left were mostly opposed to radical feminism, and eventually embracing radical feminism got me shunned by liberal and postmodern feminists. To be a leftist in good standing, I was supposed to abandon radical feminism. To be part of academic feminism, I was supposed to do the same. My problem? Radical feminist analyses continued to be compelling.
These political and intellectual lessons came first in my support for the feminist critique of pornography and other sexual-exploitation industries and later in the critique of the ideology of the transgender movement.
When I sat down to write about transgenderism in my latest book, It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics, I started by reflecting on this unfortunate state of affairs. Unfortunately, if you look for that chapter in the printed book, you won’t find it—at the last minute, the publisher demanded that I drop it. Fortunately, I struck an agreement to put that “missing” chapter on my website for free, where you can also read why the chapter went missing.
Here is the introduction to that chapter:
Chapter 5: Defining Sex/Gender: Beyond Trans Ideology
Feminist analyses of how the law reflects and supports a patriarchal system emerged in the 1970s and ’80s, around the same time that critical race theory (CRT) scholars were developing analyses of the role of the law in supporting white supremacy. Some of those feminist critics focused on pornography (defined as graphic sexually explicit material that eroticizes male dominance and other hierarchies) and its role in the subordination of women, a kind of sexist hate speech. At the same time, a number of prominent CRT scholars made a case for regulating racist hate speech, while cultural critics were documenting the negative racial stereotypes in mass media. These analyses of sex and race were, and remain, similar in moral and theoretical dimensions—so much so that a 1993 conference at the University of Chicago Law School on “Speech, Equality, and Harm: Feminist Legal Perspectives on Pornography and Hate Propaganda” included major figures in both movements.
By the time I retired from teaching in 2018, a respectful internal debate continued within the left about how best to deal with racist hate speech, with disagreements about public policy but a consensus that racist hate speech was a bad thing. At the same time, a pro-pornography argument had prevailed in most academic and political circles that lean left. The most common left position today views pornography as just a form of sexual expression and women’s participation in pornography as one of many forms of “sex work.” Radical feminists who continue to critique the sexual-exploitation industries (pornography, prostitution, strip bars, massage parlors) have been marginalized in many academic and activist spaces. Many leftists and feminists who share concerns about men’s buying and selling of objectified female bodies stay quiet because it has become a mark of left/feminist politics to ignore or denigrate the critique of pornography.
Why did the two debates go in such different directions? Both issues raise complex questions about the connection between various forms of expression (everyday speech and mass media) and potential negative effects (on individuals and societies). Reasonable people with shared values can disagree about public policy in both arenas. But why did liberal/progressive/left people continue to critique racist expression and media depictions but ignore or embrace sexist media that is sexually explicit? And why did this happen even as the evidence accumulated of pornography’s negative effects, including the psychological and physical harms to women used in the production of pornography?
This is what I have called the paradox of pornography. In my adult life, two trends are uncontroversial. First, pornography has become more widely available and accepted, for various social, economic, and technological reasons. Second, the pornography industry has produced images that are more overtly cruel and degrading to women, as well as more overtly racist, than ever before. As the amount of pornography produced has increased and become more normalized, the degradation it portrays has intensified. How can a media genre become more mainstream at the same time that it becomes more misogynist and racist? Why would liberals/progressives/leftists who routinely critique sexism and racism give pornography a pass?
I’ll return to this question later in the chapter but for now want to point out that a radical feminist critique of institutionalized male dominance, especially when it challenges the ways we have learned to be sexual beings, often faces deep resistance not only on the right but also on the left. When it comes to feminist challenges to one of patriarchy’s central demands—that men have a right to sexual pleasure without concern for the well-being and social status of women—the left has proved it isn’t a reliable ally.
I have found the same disjuncture between what I understand to be left principles about challenging oppressive power and the left’s rejection of the radical feminist critique of transgender ideology. The left typically argues for a radical, structural, politicized response to oppression. But in this case, the left embraces the transgender movement’s liberal, individualist, medicalized response to the problem of patriarchy’s rigid, repressive, and reactionary gender norms. In this chapter I will argue that trans activists are pursuing a politics that is intellectually incoherent, anti-feminist, and at odds with an ecological worldview. A left critique of patriarchy should embrace the radical feminist critique.
Keep reading at https://robertwjensen.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Chapter-5-Defining-Sex-Gender-Beyond-Trans-Ideology-v2.pdf.
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Robert Jensen is Emeritus Professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics, published in 2024 by Olive Branch Press, and coauthor with Wes Jackson of An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the F
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