Pornography and accommodation

ABSTRACT

In ‘Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game’, Rae Langton and Caroline West borrow ideas from David Lewis to attempt to explain how pornography might subordinate and silence women. Pornography is supposed to express certain misogynistic claims implicitly, through presupposition, and to convey them indirectly, through accommodation. I argue that the appeal to accommodation cannot do the sort of work Langton and West want it to do: Their case rests upon an overly simplified model of that phenomenon. I argue further that, once we are clear about why Langton and West's account fails, a different and more plausible account of pornography's influence emerges.

KEYWORDS:

• Pornography
• accommodation
• subordination
• silencing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Although MacKinnon uses the term ‘pornography’ in a ‘thick’ sense, Langton does not always seem to follow her in this regard (see e.g. Langton 1998, 92, esp. fn. 7). I myself prefer to use the term in a morally and politically neutral way, as seems more common in ordinary discourse: as applying, roughly, to sexually explicit media that, in some sense, and to some significant extent, is intended to facilitate sexual arousal in those who engage with it. (I doubt that any satisfying conceptual analysis is possible, but that only makes ‘pornography’ like most other words.) That said, I'll not be particularly careful in what follows about when I'm talking about pornography quite generally and when I'm talking just about what we might call ‘misogynistic pornography’. Context should make that clear enough.

2 Both Saul (2006b) and Antony (2011) raise serious questions about whether pornography is sufficiently like speech for tools borrowed from speech act theory usefully to be applied to it. I'm sympathetic, especially where photographic and cinematic pornography are concerned (cf. Bauer 2015, 85–86), but I'll here grant L&W this assumption.

3 Although L&W do tend to speak as if there were a ‘rule’ of accommodation, they do not, so far as I can see, actually rely upon that claim (Langton and West 1999, 309–310). But Mary Kate McGowan, whose work I will discuss in Section 4.2, does seem to do so. See note 27 and the text to which it is attached. (That said, it will be evident in what follows that I tend to agree with Stalnaker about this matter.)

4 One might wonder whether this is true, even if we set aside cases in which the presuppositions are consciously rejected. Couldn't someone look at ‘Dirty Pool’ (see below) and just be aroused by the photographs, without paying any attention at all to the story? If so, then its misogynistic presuppositions never get added to the common ground. But Langton needn't hold that those presuppositions are always added, only that, if someone is paying attention to the story, then they will get added. That would be enough for pornography to be able to silence women in some cases – though how many cases would be an open question.

5 Most philosophers who discuss pornography focus exclusively upon heterosexual pornography and its effect upon heterosexual relations. That is regrettable, for a variety of reasons, but L&W are no exception, so I'll focus on that case here. Miller (2012) is an exception. van Brabandt (2017) also discusses some queer pornography, though of a very artsy sort (see also van Brabandt and Prinz 2012). Outside philosophy, much more attention is paid to such material. See, for example, Patton (1991), Beirne (2012), Ryberg (2015), Young (2017), and especially the now-classic Dyer (1985), which might well be regarded as birthing serious academic engagement with cinematic pornography.

6 L&W's characterization of the pictorial is taken from a paper by Itzin (1992, 30), who, in turn, is simply quoting a presentation developed by the group Organizing Against Pornography. According to the Minnesota Historical Society (2019), this group, which was founded in 1984 as the Pornography Resource Center, ‘was actively involved in the passage by the Minneapolis City Council of an anti-pornography ordinance, which had been prepared by Catharine MacKinnon in 1983’.

7 My attention was drawn to Green Door by Linda Williams's discussion of it (Williams 1989, 156–160). As it happens, Williams does not get the announcement quite right. It is not easy to understand. I had to listen to it several times, and I'm still not sure I've got it right.

8 Kerr (2012) has argued for a more progressive reading of Green Door, but I'll not interrogate the more common reading here.

9 For what it's worth, I am far from sure that the notion of presupposition is very helpful in this context, but I'll not challenge that aspect of L&W's position here. I'll note, however, that the account given in Section 6 need not assume that pornography presupposes, say, that anal sex does not require special consent.

10 I have not seen this film but am prepared to accept Williams's description of it.

11 Accommodation is (and was originally introduced as) the exceptional case. Ordinarily, the presuppositions of one's utterances are antecedently in place. The mistake was to think that they always are.

12 There is apparently a very different notion of accommodation, used in sociology and related fields, on which it can take a very long time for something to be accommodated. To be sure, L&W clearly have Lewis's model in mind, and Lewis-style accommodation is supposed to be all but instantaneous. But it needs argument that they cannot be more flexible. (Thanks to Jason Stanley here.)

13 There's an interesting history to empirical work on this particular myth. Gavey (2005, esp. Ch. 2) discusses it at some length. I argue elsewhere that this work casts serious doubt upon the claim that pornography silences women, at least as Langton understands that claim (Heck 2020a, Section 2).

14 Jackson (1984) discusses the ubiquity of such myths in sex advice books, and sex research, in the early twentieth century. Going much further back, Eaton (2012a) discusses the eroticization of rape in renaissance painting.

15 Langton (2017, 25) claims that pornography ‘works in part by harnessing the power of sexual desire, arousal, and orgasm’, but she does not explain how. Gail Dines, a sociologist, frequently alludes to the special efficacy of sexually explicit media, for example, in this passage:

By the time they first encounter porn, most men have internalized the sexist ideology of our culture, and porn, rather than being an aberration, actually cements and consolidates their ideas about sexuality. And it does this in a way that gives them intense sexual pleasure. This framing of sexist ideology as sexy and hot gives porn a pass to deliver messages about women that in any other form would be seen as completely unacceptable. (Dines 2010, 87–88)

But Dines never really explains how or why pornography should be particularly good at instilling such messages. (Note also that Dines comes close to denying that pornography's presuppostions ever need accommodating.) Eaton (2007, 2017) is the only philosopher I know who does seriously address this question.

16 What may not survive it is the political significance of the claim. If, as I suggested above, there is not much pornography that makes the sorts of misogynistic presuppositions that L&W think are common, then eliminating misogynistic pornography (were that possible) might not have much of an effect on gender inequality.

17 And what I believe we all believe we all believe, etc, so that the structure of presupposition has a familiar iterative structure.

18 The notion of ‘acceptance’ is sometimes used this way in discussions of various forms of instrumentalism: So one might ‘accept’ some scientific theory without actually believing it and, in particular, without accepting the ontological claims it makes. The notion of ‘acceptance’ needed in linguistic theory is not that notion.

19 In one place, Langton (2012, 84) acknowledges this fact, but then dismisses its significance, writing: ‘ … [B]asically, on Stalnaker's approach the shared common ground is identified with certain belief-like propositional attitudes of the speakers … ’. But, while acceptance is belief-like as opposed to desire-like or intention-like, it is not belief-like in the way that matters here. In that sense, counterfactual supposition is also belief-like.

20 Wieland (2007, 443–445) raises a similar question, though in a very different context. She offers Langton the view that, in pornography, the meaning of the word ‘No’ has actually changed: ‘No’ literally means yes within pornography itself. There then arises the question how that change spreads to (some) real-life sexual contexts. Wieland does tell a story about this, on Langton's behalf, but, as Maitra and McGowan (2010, Section 3) argue in their reply, it has all kinds of problems.

21 One might regard Fred's willingness to accommodate such presuppositions as morally problematic. Whether it is will depend upon how exactly he is engaging with the film, an issue that is far too complex to discuss here. Related issues are discussed in aesthetics under the title ‘The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’ (see e.g. Gendler 2000). There are also very general issues in aesthetics about the relation between aesthetic value and ethical value – often discussed under the label ‘immoralism’ – that would also be worth considering in this connection (see e.g. Carroll 1996; Eaton 2012b).

22 The cultural invisibility of ‘ethical pornography’ is a problem in its own right, but not one I shall discuss further here – except to remark that one way to counteract the negative social effects of pornography as it currently exists is, at least arguably, to encourage and support queer and feminist pornography and the people making it (cf. Eaton 2017; French and Hamilton 2018).

23 A student once remarked to me that, although she knew of such alternatives, they seemed to be available only if one was willing to pay for them. To which I could only respond, borrowing from Lee (2015), that ‘ethical porn starts when we pay for it’.

24 Just as a reminder: I do not necessarily agree that women are silenced in this way. See note 14.

25 In a later paper, Langton (2012, 83–84) seems to endorse McGowan's approach.

26 This claim seems to depend upon there really being a rule of accommodation. It also seems to ignore the fact that presuppositions can always be challenged, something McGowan (2009, 396) elsewhere dismisses as a ‘complication’.

27 It really isn't clear what the problem is supposed to be if the woman has, indeed, ‘clearly communicat[ed] her sexual consent’. Consent need not be verbally expressed, and a verbal ‘No’, in the presence of a clear non-verbal ‘Yes’, might figure as part of a role-play and be experienced as erotic by both partners. But then there are all kinds of issues here about role-play, sexual fantasy, and the like, that we cannot consider here (but see Kukla 2018; Heck 2020b).

28 Most pornography, I would argue, traffics not so much in fiction as in fantasy. The difference between these two notions, which L&W conflate (Langton and West 1999, 306, 314), becomes crucial when the question is what pornography presupposes (cf. Liao and Protasi 2013; Heck 2020a), but we can set the matter aside here.

29 As Saul (2006a, 60, fn. 6) points out, pornography is not particularly effective, by itself, at producing orgasms. The point will not matter here, but it will matter a great deal when it comes time to think realistically about how people engage with pornography.

30 Stalnaker (1974, 201) already describes the abstract structure of such cases, though he does not give any specific examples. He wrongly supposes, however, that the speaker must be pretending that the presupposed material is already part of the common ground. It is part of what makes Lewis's discussion important that he avoids that trap.

31 This is sometimes called ‘derailing’, but that term has acquired a derogatory sense nowadays that would be completely inappropriate to the phenomenon we are discussing here.

32 Note how the special features of this case affect it. People do normally know whether they have cats, so challenging the presupposition directly would involve an accusation either of serious confusion or of lying.

33 This term seems to have been made popular by Potts (2015), who reports that it is originally due to William Ladusaw.

34 I have heard it suggested that at-issue content demands one's cognitive attention, so one might be less attentive to not-at-issue content and therefore be more inclined to accept it without reflection. The question is, presumably, emprical, and my understanding is that there is no very strong evidence for this sort of claim (to say the least). But, insofar as there is such a phenomenon, it is surely sensitive to how plausible the presupposed content antecedently is: The presuppostion that the earth is flat will not just be absorbed the way the presupposition that I have a cat is. That takes us back to the sorts of worries discussed in Section 3.

35 Langton (2012, 83) also describes McGowan's view as differing from the one she and West develop precisely because it does not require pornographers to have any special authority.

36 There is now a large literature on this issue. See e.g. Green (1998), Langton (1998), Wieland (2007), Maitra and McGowan (2010).

37 I stumbled upon this point myself shortly before Antony's paper was published. Bauer (2015, 79–80) comes close to making this same charge.

38 One of the greatest tennis players in history, McEnroe was famous for arguing with the officials.

39 Langton does not say what sorts of verdictive or exercitive speech acts doctors (qua doctors) can perform, but this one seems plausible. It certainly isn't the case that a doctor can, just by saying so, make it the case that someone has some disease or other (though they can make it the case that someone has a certain diagnosis, which might be important for insurance purposes).

40 Langton gives another example that has a different problem:

 … [E]pistemic and practical authority coincide when a speaker enacts a rule by credibly reporting that it is a rule (e.g. ‘In our house, lights out is at 10p.m.’) … : norms can be brought into existence by someone saying or presupposing that they are already in place. (Langton 2017, 33)

But, if I'm understanding the example correctly, no rule can be created by a mere report that there is such a rule. The audience may be led to believe that there is such a rule and so to behave as if there was. But that is a different matter: The speaker's epistemic authority gives them the power to shape others' behavior in this way. Do not be misled by the fact that the sentence ‘In our house, lights out is at 10p.m.’ can be used by someone with appropriate authority to establish such a norm. That use would not be a mere report. Compare Antony (2017, 70–71) on the difference between the constative (descriptive) and verdictive uses of ‘I find the defendant not guilty’.

41 Maitra (2012) has developed an interesting proposal about how ‘informal’ authority arises, applying it specifically to racist hate speech. Langton (2017, 33–34) expresses some enthusiasm for this suggestion, and Maitra's work may well make it easier for us to see how pornography could have some sort of authority. But the question at issue here is what kind of authority pornography might have, and that is left untouched by Maitra's work.

42 This formulation (which I owe to Rachel Leadon) avoids the question, emphasized by Saul (2006b, 242–243), who are the agents of the speech acts allegedly performed when pornography is viewed.

43 A recent Canadian study found that increased exposure to pornography is correlated with better knowledge of sexual anatomy and behavior (Hesse and Pedersen 2017), though it is not clear whether there is any causal relationship. (Nor is that clear in the UK report.) And, as the USA's experience with the report of the Meese Commission taught (see e.g. Vance 1992), it is worth being skeptical about reports on pornography commissioned by socially conservative governments, especially reports identifed as ‘rapid evidence assessments’ (cf. Barker 2014, 143–144).

44 Jones (2018) reports that, in an otherwise progressive class on sexual education, one teacher's attempt to talk about the function of the clitoris was cut off by another. She had ‘inched across a line in which anatomy rested on one side and female desire and pleasure on the other’.

45 There is now a significant literature on this topic. See, e.g. Gavey (2005), Peterson and Muehlenhard (2007), Beres, Senn, and McCaw (2014), Cahill (2014), Thomas, Stelzl, and Lafrance (2017). The issue burst onto the public scene in late 2017 with the publication of the short story ‘Cat Person’ in The New Yorker (Roupenian 2017) and then a much discussed article in babe just after the New Year (Way 2018).

46 Fahs (2014, 282) misunderstands the question asked in the title of this paper: ‘Should We Take Anodyspareunia Seriously?’ The question is not whether we should take seriously women's experience of pain during receptive anal intercourse (that being what anodyspareunia is). The question is whether anodyspareunia should be regarded as a form of sexual dysfunction comparable to dyspareunia (pain during vaginal intercourse). What makes that question important is its normative implications.

47 I take it that this does not undermine the claim that these women consented, in a legal sense, though it well illustrates why Fahs and Gonzalez worry about an over-reliance upon the notion of consent as a tool of ethical analysis.

48 What I have in mind here is related to, but probably not quite the same as, what are known in the sociological literature as ‘sexual scripts’ (see e.g. Simon and Gagnon 1986; Frith and Kitzinger 2001).

49 I'll leave it to the reader to continue the list. Suffice it to say that much contemporary pornography goes well beyond these limits (see e.g. Maddison 2009). The point is not that such activities are necessarily objectionable, but that ‘special consent’ is needed for them, and that mainstream pornography rarely portrays any such consent as having been given (see Blue 2005).

50 That is one of the ways in which feminist pornography strives to be different, and one of the reasons that feminist pornography may actually be supportive of gender equality (cf. Eaton 2017; Heck 2020b).

51 Some queer and feminist pornography eroticizes the preparation that is typically needed for anal sex. One example is Erika Lust's film ‘His Was First in My Ass’, from XConfessions 6 (Lust Productions, 2016). Shine Louise Houston's Crash Pad films also generally include the necessary preparation when anal penetration is involved.

52 Or, if it is documentary evidence of something, then of the extraordinary abilities of highly trained sexual athletes (an analogy that has become almost a cliché).

53 As Štulhofer and Ajduković (2011, 347) sensibly put it: ‘The findings that a substantial proportion of women reported pain at first and subsequent anoreceptive intercourse highlight a need for more information and education about anal eroticism’.

54 Lectures based upon this material were presented at The Ohio State University, the University of Texas, and the University of Rochester, and also to a meeting of the Philosophy Graduate Forum at Brown University. Thanks to all those who attended for their questions and comments, especially Paul Audi, Hayley Clatterbuck, Josh Dever, Dana Howard, Megan Hyska, Harvey Lederman, Eden Lin, Tristram McPherson, Anne Quaranto, and a couple other people whose names I was not able to determine. Thanks also to Philip Bold, Alicia Gauvin, Nancy Weil, and Kayla Wingert for conversations that did much to shape this paper. Members of seminars I taught in Fall 2016 and Spring 2019 at Brown University helped me think through these issues, too, especially Mark Benz, Yongming Han, Emily Hodges, and Margot Witte. Special thanks to Willa Tracy for her work both in the seminars and in an independent study in Fall 2017, the results of which have since been pubilshed (Tracy 2018); and to Rachel Leadon, for her all but co-teaching the mentioned seminars and for the many conversations we have had about sexual ethics. Thanks to Louise Antony, Amy Berg, and Robert May for comments on drafts of the paper. Thanks also to two anonymous referees whose comments did much to improve the formulation of the central claim of the paper. Finally, I owe a great debt to Anne Eaton, without whose support, encouragement, and constructive criticism this paper might never have been conceived, let alone born.