Why are men so obsessed with pornography?
Andrea Dworkin was right
By Robert Jensen
A young Andrea Dworkin, 1965
With a sense of both joy and grief, I offer as my text for today Andrea Dworkin’s “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape,” a speech she gave to the National Organization for Changing Men in 1983 in St. Paul, MN. The joy comes from remembering how her words helped me understand feminism, the first step in understanding myself. The grief comes from how relevant her analysis remains in today’s broken world.
So, let’s start with a story to remind us of the state of contemporary sexual politics.
In my last five years at the University of Texas at Austin, I taught a course that I designed called “Freedom: Philosophy, History, Law.” We reviewed philosophers’ conceptions of freedom and then studied how the term has been defined and deployed politically throughout U.S. history. The course concluded with the radical feminist critique of the contemporary pornography industry, set in the context of the feminist critique of men’s violence, as a case study in the complexity of conflicting claims about freedom.
In the fall of 2016, I delivered that lecture on men’s violence right after the election of Donald Trump. Despite the tense political environment, I thought it would have been irresponsible to avoid the obvious. Without commentary, I summed up the uncontested facts. The president-elect had bragged about being sexually aggressive and treating women like sexual objects, and several women had testified about behavior that—depending on one’s evaluation of the evidence—could constitute sexual assault. Does it seem fair, I asked the class, to describe him as a sexual predator? No one disagreed.
Trump sometimes responded by contending that Bill Clinton was even worse. Citing someone else’s bad behavior to avoid accountability is a weak defense, and of course Trump wasn’t running against Bill, but I suggested that we take that claim seriously. As president, Clinton took advantage of his powerful position by having sex with a much younger woman who was first an intern and then a junior employee. He settled a sexual harassment lawsuit out of court, and he had been accused of rape. Does it seem fair to describe him as a sexual predator? No one disagreed.
I asked students to reflect. A former president, a Democrat, had been outed as a sexual predator but continued to be treated as a respected statesman and philanthropist. The incoming president, a Republican, was elected with the widespread understanding that he was an unapologetic sexual predator.
That day has been on my mind since Clinton endorsed Andrew Cuomo, who was running for mayor of New York City after having resigned the governor’s office on the heels of multiple complaints of sexual harassment. More women have given accounts of Trump’s sexual misconduct, and a year before his reelection a jury had found that he had sexually assaulted a woman.
Between 2016 and today, the #MeToo movement emerged, forcing a cultural reckoning of sorts about men’s sexual exploitation of women. For a while. That movement can claim some gains, just as the decades of feminist work against rape, harassment, and violence changed the culture in many ways—rape shield and marital rape laws, sexual harassment lawsuits, domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers.
But Donald Trump is president again, and Bill Clinton is still applauded in public. I am not suggesting that the two men and their political projects present the same threat—to women, democracy, or the larger living world. I am suggesting that we be honest about the sexual politics of the United States.
Andrea Dworkin died in 2005. I don’t know what she would say if she were alive today, but I know what she wrote in her first book, published in 1974:
The commitment to ending male dominance as the fundamental psychological, political, and cultural reality of earth-lived life is the fundamental revolutionary commitment. It is a commitment to transformation of the self and transformation of the social reality on every level. [Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974), p. 17].
In my lifetime, the United States has never been a revolutionary society, even during the fabled 1960s. Change has come much slower. Three steps forward, four steps back? Or maybe three steps forward, a step to the side, then back a couple of steps? Only in hindsight can we see how much permanent progress was made. But whatever that future assessment may be, we can both be grateful to feminists for their work and recognize that attempts to make revolutionary change have failed. Sometimes, even attempts to make minor reforms have failed. And sometimes even holding the ground to protect small changes is difficult.
My topic today is the one project on which we clearly have lost ground since the initial feminist critique—the harms of pornography.
That brings me back to “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape.” My thesis can be stated simply: Andrea Dworkin was right, specifically about pornography and more generally about patriarchy, feminism, and men. And more than ever, we need that analysis.
But first, a bit more autobiography. In 1983, when Andrea delivered that speech, I was living about an hour north of the Twin Cities, working at a small Catholic college, where I got my first lessons in the sex/gender system and power. But as a professor of mine said when he realized he was sliding into a digression, “That’s another story for another course.”
