| Chapter 2: | Background |
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The theories will include analytic feminist, relationalist, object relations, Freudian, and literature on affairs. This literature review will offer some possible explanations as to how wives manage their lives.
Current Research on Pornography
Social Feminist Theory
Prior to the 1980s, discourse in the public domain focused on issues of morality in relation to pornography. The radical feminists removed the discussion from moral grounds and placed it in the context of abuse and oppression of women. This view was a reaction to the proliferation and availability of the pornographic material. Although the Social Feminist view is a limited lens through which to examine this phenomenon, it is important in terms of its historical significance and expansion of the discussion beyond morality.
Social feminists (Dines et al., 1998; Lederer, 1980) are not the only feminists to examine the meaning of heterosexual pornography from the context of the system of power, some radical feminists (Dworkin, 1989; MacKinnon, 1987) also do. The radical feminists argue that sexuality is not innate, but a social construct (Dworkin, 1989; MacKinnon, 1987). Gender is a hierarchy based on power in which men dominate and women submit. Pornography is a “core constitutive practice of gender inequality” (MacKinnon, 1987, p. 149). Steinman argues that pornography is “about power and sex-as-weapon” (Stoller, 1991, p. 1088). According to MacKinnon’s theory, the contents of pornography “speak to the male compulsion to dominate and destroy that is the source of sexual pleasure for men” (1987, p. 149). Many of these radical feminists believe that men are sexual predators by nature, desiring their sexual lives to be like the fantasy lives depicted in pornography.
MacKinnon (1987) proposes that pornography has a large role in a system that subordinates and oppresses women. According to MacKinnon, pornography objectifies all women, making them into “cunts” (p. 223). Men treat women as pornography depicts women to be. These feminists maintain that women do not participate in this objectification, but are coerced.