2026-10-26
Agenda
In 1984, Indianapolis passes an ordinance, drafted by Catherine MacKinnon, that defines pornography as a civil rights violation against women, allowing women to sue pornographers for civil damages.
In 1985, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals (the one in Chicago), throws out the Indianapolis Ordinance. (The opinion was written by Judge Frank Easterbrook.)
Pornography should be banned because it violates the civil rights of women: (1) it violates their right to equal status; (2) it violates their right to free speech (by silencing them).
Agenda
“I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it.” (Justice Stewart in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 US 184 (1964).
In what way is pornography morally bad?
Traditional answer: it is obscene and morally corrupting.
We define pornography as the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and words that also includes (i) women are presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities; or (ii) women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy humiliation or pain; or (iii) women are presented as sexual objects experiencing sexual pleasure in rape, incest or other sexual assault; or (iv) women are presented as sexual objects tied up, cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or (v) women are presented in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility, or display; or (vi) women’s body parts — including but not limited to vaginas, breasts, or buttocks — are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or (vii) women are presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or (viii) women are presented in scenarios of degradation, humiliation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.
Agenda
Easterbrook agrees with MacKinnon that pornography is an act that depicts subordination and tends to perpetuate subordination. But he throws out the ordinance on free speech grounds:
“The First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message [or] its ideas.”
But this involves a limited view about the uses of language.
Pornography is not always done with words. Yet Easterbrook’s description exemplifies the tendency of which Austin complained. Pornography depicts subordination and causes it. That—in Austin’s terms—is to describe its locutionary and perlocutionary dimensions. What is missing is a description of the actions constituted by pornographic utterances: in Austin’s terms, pornography’s illocutionary force. MacKinnon supplies such a description when she says that pornography is an act of subordination. (Langton, 296)
Langton argues that this is the illocutionary act performed by the pornographer.
Langton argues that this is the perlocutionary act performed by the pornographer.
Is subordinating one of the things I can do in saying something?
Blacks are not permitted to vote. (as uttered by a legislator in South Africa enacting apartheid.)
Whites only. (as posted on the door of a restaurant)
To subordinate a group is to:
Questions:
If you are powerful, you sometimes have the ability to silence the speech of the powerless. One way might be to stop the powerless from speaking at all. Gag them, threaten them, condemn them to solitary confinement. But there is another, less dramatic but equally effective, way. Let them speak. Let them say whatever they like to whomever they like, but stop that speech from […] counting as the action it was intended to be. Some speech acts are unspeakable for women in some contexts: although the appropriate words can be uttered, those utterances fail to count as the actions they were intended to be.
Three kinds of silencing:
Example (i): Warning. This example is from Donald Davidson. Imagine this: the actor is acting a scene in which there is supposed to be a fire…. It is his role to imitate as persuasively as he can a man who is trying to warn others of a fire. “Fire!” he screams. And perhaps he adds, at the behest of the author, “I mean it! Look at the smoke !” etc. And now a real fire breaks out, and the actor tries vainly to warn the real audience. “Fire!” he screams. “I mean it! Look at the smoke!” etc.