SEXUAL IMAGES AND SELLING SEX

The Pornography Debates:
Free Speech and Censorship
• The religious-conservative opposition to
pornography is based on a belief that people have
an inherent human desire to sin and that
pornography reinforces that tendency and so
undermines the family, traditional authority, and
the moral fabric of society.
• The issue of pornography has been divisive among
feminist scholars, splitting them into two general
schools.
• The antipornography feminists, led by Catharine
MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, see pornography as an
assault on women that silences them, reinforces male
dominance, and indirectly encourages sexual and
physical abuse against women.
• The other perspective includes group such as the
Feminist Anticensorship Taskforce and argues that
censorship of sexual materials will eventually be used to
censor such things as feminist writing and gay erotica
and would endanger women’s rights and freedoms of
expression.