Sexuality

Radical and Marxist Feminism

It would be impossible to provide a well-informed overview of sexuality in the media without granting substantial attention to the influence of second wave feminism. Beginning in the late 1960s, feminists have provided incisive critiques of representations of sexuality in a variety of media, including literature, the visual arts, television, film, romance novels, and a variety of other popular-culture texts. Radical feminists, who believed that women needed to be “liberated” from the constraints of patriarchy and capitalism, demanded many changes in the mass media's depiction of gender and sexuality. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, second wave feminists inaugurated a new era of media critique with sit-ins at women's fashion magazines and guerrilla theater at beauty pageants, where in one case they crowned a live sheep the contest's “queen.” Feminists challenged television, magazine, film, and advertisements' depiction of women as passive, irrational, and innately domestic, calling for more realistic and diverse representations. They rejected the dualistic portrayal of women as sex objects or demure housewives, which reinforced a virgin/whore dichotomy with classist and racist overtones. The prevalence of simplistic and denigrating representations of women and female sexuality helped fuel second wave feminists' suspicions of sexualized representations generally. This wariness, combined with a long-standing American suspicion of sex generally, paved the way for a stance that was hostile not only to “negative” depictions of sex but to all other forms of erotic representation as well.

The period from the late 1970s through the 1980s was a time of growing fragmentation and polarization within feminism and the larger American culture; theories that emerged during this [Page 334]era necessarily reflected prevailing tensions and concerns. Catharine MacKinnon, a lawyer and scholar who pioneered the field of sex discrimination law, turned her attention to what she perceived to be the inherently discriminatory nature of pornography. MacKinnon identified herself as a Marxist feminist, and her commitment to Marxism is demonstrated in her understanding of sexual representation. Marxism argues that members of the working class accept an unfair social order because they are brainwashed into supporting capitalism. Analogously, women who defend or enjoy pornography are dupes complicit with patriarchy. Although other feminists had decried the objectification of women in pornography, MacKinnon went further than those before her. She argued that pornography did not simply represent the objectification of women; it was an act of violence against them. MacKinnon and her supporters believed that pornography caused damages to women that should be actionable under the law; in other words, women should be able to receive restitution for the psychological damages of pornography as well as the discrimination they inevitably faced from men conditioned by the “dehumanizing” effects of porn.

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