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sanctions and constraints—legal, social and ideological—that permeate every aspect of women’s sexuality, driven by the recognition that “men’s greater power in the world is manifested in, and often mediated through, sexual encounters” (Segal 72). Speaking for not only herself but for movement feminists more expansively, Lynne Segal comments that “our sexual conquests—for that is how we saw them—were most satisfying for the social status they conferred on us rather than the physical pleasure they provided” (78), a confession that is important for not only its declaration of the political intentions of active female sexuality, but also the recognition that this form of political subversion did little to reconfigure tactile experiences of female sexuality.
In her centralization of the politics rather than the pleasures of sexuality, Segal’s comments are perhaps emblematic of the cultural context of second-wave feminism, in which the discussion of sexuality became dominated by antipornography and procensorship campaigns. Spearheaded by Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, these arguments have been summarized as purporting the view that “pornography teaches men how to treat women like objects” and is “fundamentally about the degradation and subjugation of women” (Segal 251). In Andrea Dworkin’s words, “Pornography is the material means of sexualizing inequality; and that is why pornography is a central practice in the subordination of women” (264). In Dworkin’s analysis, as well as teaching women their place as whores, pornography also serves as ubiquitous propaganda, acting as a catalyst to acts of male violence against women. This is precisely why second-wave feminist research largely focused on experiences of sexual violence and established that “rape involves the sexualization of power” and the “fusing in men’s imaginations of sexual pleasure with domination and control” (Jensen 75). More recently, Gail Dines highlights the complexities of this argument: “How porn is implicated in rape is complex and multilayered. Clearly, not all men who use porn rape, but what porn does is create what some feminists call a ‘rape culture’ by normalizing, legitimizing, and condoning violence against women” (96). Dines argues that the presentation of