Pornography, Feminism, and the Individual

Arguing that efforts to ban pornography are ultimately doomed to failure, radical philosopher Alison Assiter takes issue with recent feminist analyses of pornography by Dworkin, Griffin and Kappeler. She demonstrates how close are the parallels between the radical feminist analysis and more conventional liberal perspectives, in their common stress on the primacy of the individual. By limiting the terms of the argument to those of patriarchy - as contemporary analysts have tended to do - we fail, she says, to grasp the true nature of oppression. Any proposed solutions to the problem of pornography will only be partial and unattainable, until such time as we come to terms with the fact that banning pornography cannot obliterate the ills that pornography exemplifies. Only when those wider ills have been more fully identified and understood can we begin to eliminate oppression, exploitation and inequality in all their forms.