The Impact of Internet Pornography on Married Women: A Psychodyna ...

Analytic Feminist Theory

Analytic feminists (Benjamin, 1986, 1988, 1995; Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1988) approach the problem of pornography from an alternative perspective than the position articulated by the social feminists. These theorists are keenly interested in feminine developmental issues, object relationships, and the role of pornography. Many of these theorists believe the development of women’s sexuality and the specific problems that women experience in relationships are neither entirely biologically nor socially determined. Their arguments put forward the idea that sexual development is highly complex and cannot be reduced to either biology or culture.

Benjamin (1986, 1995) takes exception to Dworkin’s (1989) discussion on the subject of pornography because if Dworkin believes that all men derive sexual pleasure from dominating and destroying, then men are by nature the dominators. Thus, women’s participation in this sexual domination means that women’s nature is as pornography depicts it, submissive. Benjamin concludes, “If men inevitably are what they are, then how can women not be what they are?” (1995, p. 177). She wonders if the social feminists really want to see women as inherently victims.

According to Benjamin (1995), pornography is not simply a social, political construct that perpetuates the oppression of women. Nor are pornographic representations expressions of concrete contents of desire; instead, they express a relation between sexual excitement and the realm of fantasy. Pornography can be felt as a confrontation with some dangerous and exciting otherness. This fantasy or reality has the power to create internal excitement, which can be either repulsive or pleasurable to women.

Benjamin’s difficulty with MacKinnon (1987) is that her discussion of the gender domination is too simplistic. MacKinnon “flattens the most difficult problem into the proposition that ‘violence is sex’” (Benjamin, 1995, p. 177).