"Michel Foucault and Pornography"

Wendy McElroy

"Feminist scholars, many drawing on the insights
offered by Michel Foucault, have urged us to develop
new ways of thinking and speaking."(1) So write the
editors of the book Analyzing Gender. In their
scholarly work Knowing Women: Feminism and Knowledge,
two different feminist editors explain why the French
philosopher Michel Foucault is quoted extensively
therein: "Foucault's discourse theory and the
'post-structuralist' methods of analysis which depend
on it have become very influential within feminist
studies."(2) Since I have an antipathy to fully
one-third of the words in the preceding sentence, I
tend to screen out such scholarly discussions of
Foucault for the sake of my digestion.In truth, I screen the man out even when he is quoted
in more popular feminist works, such the writing of
the feminist Foucault-fan Judith Butler, or Sharon
Welsh's Communities of Resistance and Solidarity (3),
in which Welsh uses Foucaldian methodology to
construct a feminist liberation theology. I even
ignore rather intriguing works such as Valerie
Walkerdine's SchoolGirl Fictions in which she
declares: "How is this truth constituted...Such
questions, derived from the methodology of genealogy
utilized by Foucault, can help us begin to take apart
this truth about girls."(4)

Since his death in 1984, there has been something of a
backlash against Foucault within the feminist
movement.(5) This is exemplified by the scholarly work
After Foucault which contains two chapters
"Disciplining Women: Michel Foucault and the Power of
Feminist Discourse" and "Feminism and the Power of
Foucaldian Discourse". The two chapters take opposing
views on the question "Is Foucaldian feminism a
contradiction in terms?"(6)

In the popular press, the
backlash has been expressed by the iconoclastic
Camille Paglia whose book Sex, Art, and American
Culture devotes a large part of a large chapter to
Foucault-bashing.(7)

With the controversy drawing me, I began to wonder
'why?'. Why and how did Foucault influence feminism?
And why are some feminists now finding fault with him?
I knew that his area of influence was in the
interpretation and meaning of language, and that his
intellectual style was akin to that of the deconstruc-
tionist Jacques Derrida. As I explored Foucault's
work, the answer became no clearer. He argued
vehemently against Freudian theory, which would endear
him to feminists who traditionally view Freud as an
ideological arch-enemy.(8) But this must be balanced
against Foucault's full-frontal attack on Marx. The
touchstone gender feminism, Catherine Mackinnon openly
refers to her position as 'post-Marxist feminism'. And
many of the defining aspects of contemporary
feminism -- for example, the male/female class
analysis and the use of terminology such as
'exploitation' -- derives directly from Marxist
theory. Foucault's anti-Marxist onslaught must bridle
some feminist theorists.

Added to this blurred picture is the fact that
contemporary feminists have a great bias against
quoting or crediting males when charting the
development of 'the movement'. Why, then, is Foucault
quoted and credited with some regularity? The answer
began to fascinate me, as I came to realize that it
held the key to making sense of another issue within
feminism by which I had been utterly baffled for
years. That is: why is there so much stress placed
upon the language as a source of the oppression of
women? Indeed, sometimes language is considered to be
the source. Thus, women fly into rages at being called
'Madam Chairman' and insist upon the wholesale
replacement of the generic 'he' with the ungainly
'he/she'.

For me, the issue of language led to a dramatic
encounter on a practical matter about a year ago. I
was sitting in the lobby of a Toronto radio station
that wanted to hold an on-air debate on pornography
between me and the prominent Canadian gender-feminist
Susan Cole, who is an editor at Toronto's largest
magazine.

At this point I should pause to provide necessary
background. I view pornography as words and images
depicting the graphic sex of consenting adults.
Gender-feminists, such as Susan, consider pornography
to be in-and-of-itself an act of violence against
women that is instrumental in perpetuating male
oppression.

To Susan, pornography is political and personal
oppression. To me, pornography is a personal choice
and the anti-porn drive is political oppression. In
Canada, this debate is more than academic. Through its
decision in the Butler vs. Her Majesty case, the
Supreme Court of Canada adopted Catherine MacKinnon's
definition of obscenity nearly word for word into
Canadian law. This 1992 court decision -- which was
vigorously championed by most feminists in Canada and
the US -- allows Canadian customs to seize what it
judges to be pornography at the border as the material
is being imported. In reaching the Butler decision,
the Supreme Court acknowledged that it was violating
freedom of speech, but it deemed the possible harm
that pornography could inflict on women to be of
greater legal significance.

The spring 1993 issue of Feminist Bookstore News
described the impact of this measure during its first
year: "The Butler decision has been used...only to
seize lesbian, gay and feminist material." The two
primary targets have been feminist-lesbian bookstores
-- the Glad Day Bookstore in Toronto and Little
Sisters in Vancouver. Customs Canadahas blocked
shipments to these bookstores of even innocuous
material -- of mainstream science fiction writers, for
example -- that any other Canadian bookstore is able
to import freely.

When I drove into Toronto for the radio program, I
resolved to ask Susan, with whom I'd debated before,
how she reacted to lesbian bookstores being persecuted
by legislation that she had championed. Susan is an
open activist for lesbian rights, and lives the
lesbian lifestyle. She has fought for decades to have
lesbian literature published, plays produced, voices
heard. It is not possible to doubt her commitment to
lesbianism, both as a sexual choice and as an aspect
of feminist ideology. Indeed, she is a personal friend
of the owner of one customs-afflicted bookstore.

I asked my question. Susan expressed regret although
her expression showed absolutely no emotion. I had the
impression that this was a question she had answered
many times, and her response was polished to a gleam.
"I stand firmly behind the Butler decision", she said
to me without hesitation, "and I would campaign for it
again, if necessary." Lesbian bookstores were
acceptable casualties in the war against pornography.

Susan's reaction reminded me of another I'd read
about. One of the books seized temporarily by Customs
Canada was a gender feminist work by Andrea Dworkin --
also a lesbian activist who applauded the Butler
decision. Dworkin declared that having her work seized
was a price she was willing to pay to stop
pornography. It is important to understand the
megomanical nature of Dworkin to appreciate the depth
of sacrifice represented by her declaration. This is
the woman who recently demanded that a feminist
petitioning her for an interview first write a lengthy
letter demonstrating 'familiarity with my work'. Now
Dworkin was willing to have that work suppressed.

Again, the same word arose that has haunted most of my
life: why?

To me, pornography is words and images toward which my
political position can be reduced to the childhood
chant "sticks and stones may break my bones..."
Needless to say, there is what could be called
'cognitive dissonance' between my position on
pornography and that of Susan Cole, Catharine
MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin.

How far apart are we? Consider a statement MacKinnon
made about pornography -- specially referring to
Playboy and Penthouse. The statement was made during a
speech she delivered to a gay lawyers association.
There MacKinnon asked what would have happened if
pictures had been taken at Auschwitz "and then
marketed?" She went on to ask why such markerting is
different from pornography. The former, she declared,
is recognized as an atrocity; in the latter, the
people are not considered real, "because they are
women."

Declarations like these are the rhetorical equivalent
of thermo-nuclear war, and there is a natural tendency
for reasonable people to dismiss them. But it is
important not to do so, because it is precisely such
statements that allowed the 1992 Butler decision. In
that same year, it almost led to the passage of the
Victims of Pornography Compensation Act in the states.
The Act was blocked by the efforts of an organization
called Feminist for Free Expression, a group of
largely liberal feminists who banded together
specifically to address that particular piece of
legislation.

The question repeats itself: Why? Why is it that --
when intelligent women look at words and images that
depict consenting adults having sex, they see a sexual
violence so profound that they draw parallels to the
Holocaust? Indeed, Dworkin doesn't even draw a
parallel: she outright calls pornography 'genocide
against women'.

The key to understanding 'why?' lies in the
fundamentals of gender feminist theory. It lies in the
idea of 'gender', which is strongly linked to Marx,
and in the interpretation of culture, which is
strongly linked to Foucault.

Perhaps the pivotal book in the development of gender
feminism was Kate Millett's Sexual Politics [1970],
which argued that women throughout history had been
"confined to the cultural level of animal life" by men
who used them as sexual objects and breeding stock.
According to gender feminists, only a profound
political difference between the two sexes can explain
why women are and have been the constant victims of
men. There must be an unbreachable schism between the
interests of men -- as a class -- and the interests of
women -- as a class.

This class analysis is derived from Marxism,
especially from the work of Friedrich Engels, who
traced the institutional oppression of women back to
the Industrial Revolution. Yet there is no place
within Marxist ideology for gender. In Marxism, your
political class interests are defined by your
relationship to the means of production: are you a
capitalist or a worker? It makes no reference to
whether you are a man or a woman.

Gender feminism diverges from Marxism by redefining
the class structure. It claims that there are two
different classes of people with entirely separate and
antagonistic interests: Men and women. Through male
power -- called patriarchy -- men oppress women. They
have throughout history, they will do so in the
future. Why? Because they are men and that is their
class nature. Consider the words of MacKinnon in
Toward a Feminist Theory of the State:
"Heterosexuality...institutionalizes male sexual
dominance and female sexual submission."(9)

The oppression lies within male biology itself.

In this process of oppression, many feminists point to
pornography as the main mechanism that explains the
incredible staying power of the male power structure.
As Page Mellish of the group Feminists Fighting
Pornography declared, "There's no feminist issue that
isn't rooted in the porn problem." Pornography is seen
to be the crucial thread in the tapestry of male
oppression -- a thread that, if you pull it loose will
cause the tapestry to unravel.

To understand 'why' pornography is so crucial, it is
necessary to appreciate the legacy of Foucault and
those of his philosophical ilk. Only then does it
become clear why pornography is considered to be
genocide and why almost no sacrifice in the war
against it is too high. The key idea of the legacy is
that sex is a social construct. This concept is
basically derived from Foucault, whose landmark book
Les mots et les choses appeared in 1966.

Although the book is not primarily about sexuality, in
the body of his work, Foucault argues that history and
culture are indispensable in understanding sexuality.
This hypothesis is not a controversial one. But then
Foucault introduces the idea of an "episteme" which
means "knowledge" in Greek. An episteme of a culture
is its single and self-enclosed totality that includes
its language, attitudes, ideas, science: it is all the
paradigms of that society. It is the way that a
specific culture or era approaches the world.

As history progresses, one episteme replaces another.
That of the Middle Ages is replaced by that of the
Renaissance and, then, a new era is said to dawn. The
destiny of words and things -- the literal translation
of his title Les Mots and Les Choses -- is
intertwined. The episteme determines how the people
within that era think. It determines who they are and
what they will do.

Take, as an all-important example for feminism, the
human body. Most philosophers assume that there is a
pre-cultural human body. In other words, they assume
that history and culture do not alter the permanence
of mankind's biology. But for Foucault, the human body
lives in the episteme -- it lives in a culturally
constituted world. By this he means that the human
body is constructed by society: the body is a 'social
construct.' Even its physiological "givens" have been
produced by the medical science of our time.

Foucault devotes an entire treatise entitled The Birth
of the Clinic to the study of what he calls the
"medical gaze," which he says determines the human
body. It is through the medical gaze that the body is
objectified and converted into a well-ordered thing
that medicine then seeks to control through surgery,
diet, drugs, and so forth. But the medical gaze of the
eighteenth century was different from that of the
twentieth century. The episteme was different.
Therefore, the eighteenth century human body was
different from the twentieth century one. The body
itself is redefined by each society that examines it.

The most important factor in defining the human body
and sexuality are the texts that are written and
spoken about them. As a way understanding this point,
consider the Victorian epoch of repressed sexuality in
the late nineteenth century. A common approach is to
look at its plays and literature, the songs and
newspapers -- in other words the texts of Victorian
society -- and to conclude that the texts reflect a
repressed, sexually- horrified culture. Foucault sees
exactly the opposite. He be- lieves that the society
reflects the texts. The text cause the society, and
not vice versa. The texts cause the repression.

In her essay "Foucault, feminism and questions of
identity," Susan Bordo explores a contemporary example
of this phenomenon. She argues that our beauty
culture, "with its 'tyranny of slenderness' produces
pathological forms of subjectivity that might also be
understood as a crystallization of the cultural
production of 'normal' feminity."(10)

It is important to stress: Foucault (and Bordo) is not
saying that society is influenced by the words and
images that flow through it: he is saying that the
texts create the episteme of the society, which
creates the society itself. He claims that speaking
and writing about a repressed sexuality caused the
repression of sexuality that characterized the
Victorian era. In her essay "Feminism, Criticism and
Foucault", Biddy Martin explains of the philosopher:
"His 'History of Sexuality' states very clearly that
discourses on sexuality, not sexual acts and their
histories, are the essential place to grasp the
working of power in modern society."(11)

Words and texts -- not acts -- are the keys to how
power works. Remember this the next time you are
puzzled by the gemder feminist insistence on using
politically correct language -- for example, in using
the word 'herstory' instead of 'history', -- or the
demand that lesbian and gay characters be included in
children's literature and schoolbooks -- or on their
penchance for re-writing events to include the voices
of women, even when those voices were insignificant to
the actual events. Gender feminists are trying to
correct the texts and the language that they believe
define women.

Back track a moment to Foucault's denial that the idea
of a human body, of "man" objectively exists. Indeed,
for him, "man...is probably no more than a kind of
rift in the order of things..." The concept of "man"
is up for grabs in Foucault's rampant historical
relativism.

Now, gender-feminists come along and add the twist "if
there is no objective man, there is no objective woman
either." In doing so, gender feminists reject what
they call 'sexual essentialism', which is the notion
that sex is a natural force that exists prior to
women's exposure to society or to social/political
institutions. Sexual essentialism says that there is
something natural rather than cultural about deeply
held urges such as motherhood or a disposition toward
heterosexuality. There is something natural about the
general relationship between men and women which spans
centuries, cultures and religions.

Gender-feminists reject such sexual essentialism, the
idea that sex is based on biology. After all,
according to Foucaldian-type analysis, biology itself
is shifting sand with no lasting definition.
Gender-feminists deny that women have natural
tendencies, such as motherhood. Even deeply felt
sexual preferences, such as heterosexuality or
homosexuality, are not seen as matters of biology but
of society's ideology...which is largely detemined by
the texts of society.

[This explains a common phenomenon in feminism about
15 years ago. This was when lesbian feminists urged
heterosexual feminists to stop sleeping with the
enemy, aka men. Our sexual orientation was seen to be
a political choice, not a biological tendency.]

Gender-feminists argue that those who consider women's
sexuality to be biological are taking sides with the
conservative anti-feminists who maintain that biology
determines women. Biology makes women inevitably
weaker than men, or less intelligence or slated for
domesticity, or... In short, anyone who claims women's
sexuality comes from biology is blaming the victim for
her own oppression.

The idea that sex is a social construct is good news
to gender-feminists. After all, if sex has been
constructed, then it can be deconstructed and put back
together correctly. How?

In gender feminist theory, you have two classes of
people with inherently antagonistic interests: men and
women. You have a definition of sexuality -- of the
woman's body itself -- which is up for
political/cultural grabs through the episteme of
society. And the single most important factor in the
definition are the texts of society. First and
foremost among those texts is pornography. The
question now becomes: which class controls the texts
through which a woman's body is defined?

This is what feminists refer to when they say
'pornography defines women, or 'pornography causes
rape', 'pornography IS rape', or that every problem
women have can be traced back to pornography. It is
why lesbian-activists are willing to promote
legislation that suppresses 'words and images' even
though they know will be used to persecute lesbian
bookstores.

With this new perspective, read a passage from Susan
Brownmiller's in Against Our Will, which is typical of
gender-feminist literature:

"Pornography, like rape, is a male invention, designed
to dehumanize women, to reduce the female to an object
of sexual access, not to free sensuality from
moralistic or parental inhibition. The staple of porn
will always be the naked body, breasts and genitals
exposed, because as man devised it, her naked body is
the female's 'shame', her private parts the private
property of man, while his are the ancient, holy,
universal, patriarchal instrument of his power, his
rule by force over her. Pornography is the undiluted
essence of anti-female propaganda."

Let me act as a guide to Brownmiller's words:
pornography -- graphic sex -- is an invention of man;
as an invention, it is designed to dehumanize women;
the naked female body as men devised it is the
female's shame; his private parts are "his rule of
force over her"; pornography is anti-female
propaganda. In other words, pornography is the text
which expresses man's hatred of woman and which
socially constructs her oppression.

[Please note that I am not saying Brownmiller or any
other particular feminist is a Foucaldian. I am merely
stating that his sort of linguistic interpretation has
so permeated the gender-feminist approach that
Brownmiller and similar writers use his methodology,
whether or not they are conscious of doing so.]

It took me a long time to understand that -- in
discussions with gender-feminists -- I was speaking
gibberish to them. I talked about choice, "a woman's
body, a woman's right". By their analysis, however,
women have been socially determined by men: we have
been sexually constructed by the enemy class. I can no
more say that I choose my sexuality than a
concentration camp prisoner can claim to choose the
menu of her evening meal. I take what gets served up,
and sometimes a prisoner, such as me, is so
brainwashed as to believe she is choosing. Indeed,
Foucault is arguably best remembered for his analysis
of suppressed groups, such as prisoners and mental
patients. Phyllis Chesler, a key figure in feminist
psychiatric work, refers to Foucault's Madness and
Civilization as "a brilliant essay" which shows how
the prestige of patriarchy is linked with the
"dialectic of the Family", especially the father.(12)

To gender-feminists, "a woman's body, a woman's right"
is just another patriarchial prison sentence. It is
just another line of text through which men
politically define who I -- as a woman --am.

Silly me.

(1) Analyzing Gender, eds. Beth B. Hess and Myra Marx
Ferree, NewburyPark: Sage Publications, 1989, p.519.

(2) Knowing Women: Feminism and Knowledge, eds. Helen
Crowley and Susan Himmelweit, Cambridge: Polity Press,
1992, p.65.

(3) Sharon Welsh, Communities of Resistance and
Solidarity: A Feminist Theory of Liberation,
Maryknoll: Orbis, 1985.

(4) Valerie Walkerdine, SchoolGirl Fictions, London:
Verso, p.136.

(5) After Foucault, ed. Jonathan Arac, New Brunswick:
Rugers University Press, 1988.

(6) Ibid, p.161.

(7) Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture,
"Junk bond and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour
of the Wolf", New York: Vintage Books, 1992,
pp.170-248.

(8) There have been recent attempts to reinterpret
Freud, which I applaud, although -- as Freud himself
said upon stepping off the boat onto American soil --
'I am not a Freudian'.

(9) Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of
the State Cambridge: Harvard, 1989.

(10) The Cambridge Companion to Foucault "Foucault,
feminism, and questions of identity", by Jana Sawicki,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p.291.

(11) Biddy Martin, "Feminism, Criticism and Foucault"
in Knowing Women p.276.

(12) Phyllis Chesler, "Patient and Patriarch: Women in
the Psychotherapeutic Relationship" in Woman in Sexist
Society eds. Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, New
York: Basic Books, 1971, p.272.