Hate Speech and Pornography

¶ … large, pornography is not harmful. Pornography has been stigmatized as have many expressions of sexuality, but for the most part the performers are adults performing of their own volition, and the consumers of pornography are finding an outlet for their sexuality. That there is stigma and judgment associated with pornography to the point where expression of human sexuality is considered to be harmful by some is unfortunate. This essay will construct the case that pornography is not harmful.

For much of the 20th century, pornography was considered to be harmful, and there were many perspectives put forward to support that idea. Some perspectives were rooted in the vestiges of Victorian-era prudishness, that considered nudity and the human form to be vulgar, and those perspectives are fairly easy to dismiss as either cultural or religious oddities. Believing something harmful and it being so are really not the same argument at all.

Through the 1980s and early 90s, studies were produced that promoted the idea that pornography was harmful. The views seemed to be rooted in entirely different ideals. The prudish ideal of the time -- this was also a time of warning labels on music cassettes -- seemed a conservative rebellion against the free-spirited 60s and 70s. But feminists were also launching their own crusades against pornography. The view of the time was that pornography was produced by the dominant group (males) for its own consumption. It conformed, therefore, to the most basest forms of female subjugation (Delgado & Stefancic, 1992). Pornography was, in essence, viewed through the lens of female depiction in media in general -- a natural extension of a dominant group controlling the way other groups are portrayed. Further, there was typically a conflation of pornography is the generic sense and pornography that was specifically violent and degrading, a subset that certainly exists but does not define all pornography by any means. Court cases at the time supported this belief that viewing pornography was inherently harmful because of its depictions of acts that were considered degrading (Brannigan & Goldenberg, 1986).

Principles of Harm

The legal and social environment of the 1980s and 1990s surrounding pornography highlight some of the key arguments that are made that pornography is harmful. First is the argument that pornography is violent and degrading. Such pornography exists, but is not the sum total of all pornography; at best, such media is a small percentage of total output. Second is the idea that pornography is harmful to those who view it, because they internalize this view of degradation, and it leads to worse behaviors towards women than would otherwise occur. The third idea is that pornography is harmful to the performers, or specifically the female performers, on the principle that they have limited power and are essentially selling themselves for money, itself considered degrading by many.

Harm to Society

Brannigan and Goldenberg (1986) wrote what is essentially a rebuttal to the conclusions of the judge in their case study. They found that there were flaws either in the studies in the case, or in the judge's application of those studies. That in each instance, there was little serious evidence to support the idea that pornography was harmful or that exposure to pornography causes men to be more aggressive or more tolerant of negative actions towards women. The authors essentially tabled a neutral argument, that there was insufficient evidence to make conclusions about pornography's effect on society. The feminist view is better elaborated by Dyzenhaus (1992) who points out that the view is not an opposition to the depiction of sexually explicit acts but rather to the depiction of female subjugation to males, as objects of sexual desire with little else to offer.

McKee (2010) presents a set of findings that contradicts the idea of pornography as harmful. Key findings include that exposure to pornography does not correlate with negative attitudes towards women, and that one of the more negative elements of the way society treats pornography is that teenagers have to pretend to be ignorant in order to satisfy adults' expectations of them, rather than engaging in free and open dialogue about sexual matters. Indeed, this is one of the major issues with the suppression of pornography and sexuality in general -- that suppression leads more to unhealthy behaviors than the embrace of sexuality and the pursuit of healthy sexual expression.

There is a further argument to be made here. It is that whatever issues exist with pornography, there are many other areas in which women face discrimination, and where women lack control over how they are depicted, including how they are sexualized in non-pornographic media. This is tangential to whether or not pornography is harmful, but worth stating that to some extent the question of whether pornography is harmful should probably be taken in context of how women are depicted in non-pornographic media as well, because any harm that could come from pornography is not independent of other depictions. Strossen's take, as outlined in Gelber and Stone (2016) is that suppression of pornography would do little to help the advancement of women, but would suppress a range of sexual expression, and further any action to drive pornography underground would be antithetical to granting stronger rights, equality and dignity to women working in the industry.

A broader thread is that "women are silenced by pornography" and that "women are unable to stop unwanted acts of sex or violence through the utterance of words like 'no' or 'stop'" because of pornography (Gelber and Stone, 2016). There is no reasonable evidence provided to support such claims -- pornography is not necessarily produced only by men, and it is a depiction of acts, not something that can block speech. Pornography may not be the product of a woman's voice, but that is not the same thing as silencing women, and it is a logical fallacy to deem it so. Indeed, there is a notable absence in this particular discourse of queer views (Thompson, 2015),noting that the feminist perspective views pornography as the product of patriarchal heterosexuality, a view that is inherently limiting, and excludes a significant portion of pornography that is produced.

According to Gelber and Stone, the apparent logic of such arguments has its roots in arguments against hate speech. Again, there is logical fallacy at work here, because hate speech is direct speech against an other. Pornography is not hate speech, and there is no incitation to hate. Even at its worst, it depicts degradation, but that is not incitement to hate either. There is a leap being made here for which there is no basis in rational thought. Pornography may in general be produced by men, in accordance with whatever vision they have of sexuality, but there is a) nothing to prevent women from producing their own pornography and b) an incorrect assumption that material produced by one group is by definition harmful to other groups. Again, the assumption that all pornography is inherently violent and degrading seems to be the underlying view here, despite no hard evidence on offer to support such an underlying assumption.

Harm to Performers

A more specific form of harm that has been studied in harm to the female performers, that the pornographic industry has a poor track record of violence towards women, coercion and exploitation in general (Gelber and Stone, 2016). That harm comes to people in many professions, and women in particular face disproportionate discrimination in the workforce. Pornography as a source of harm is certainly plausible but how much of that harm is the result of the usual issues women face in the workplace and how much relates specifically to pornography is another matter altogether. If women performing in pornography are assumed powerless -- a spurious assumption to begin with -- then even at that there is the question of what distinguishes the performance of sex acts from other on-the-job performance that might do harm? Such a view speaks to treating sexual acts as distinct in nature from other acts. Doubtless there are a variety of opinions on that matter, but one of the biggest issues with respect to the alleged harm of pornography relates to whether expression of sexuality is even to be considered harmful.