Pornography and Objectification

"A concern with the power of images, already established in contemporary Western cultures and newly significant in the feminist cultural politics of the 1980s, has also underscored pornography’s apparent importance for an understanding of the connections between representation and reality. Pornography has become “overburdened with significance” (Segal 1992, p. 65), as a culturally established way for speaking about sex, power, and regulation, as a kind of shorthand for women’s discontents, as an emblem of misogyny and as a symbol of the power of the image. It is partly for these reasons that the anti-pornography feminist position still retains its power for many feminists, and indeed for many women who do not otherwiseassociate themselves with feminism. For them, developments within the pornography debate may not provide a satisfactory or persuasive resolution to the claim that pornography harms and humiliates women, either by providing a template for male sexual behaviour, or as a representative cultural statement of woman’s purpose as a ‘thing’ for men. "

FEONA ATTWOOD