by Kathy Scarbrough and Carol Hanisch
A shortened version of the following piece was submitted to the New York Times in response to a Guest Essay on its Opinion Page.
Christine Emba’s New York Times opinion piece, “The Delusion of Porn’s Harmlessness” (5/19/25), takes a courageous public stand in these times when pornography is everywhere. It is a good thing that more people are seeing the cracks in the wall of pro-porn sentiment, but they also need to be aware that those cracks started a long time ago and feminists have worked continuously to widen those crevices and collapse the wall.
For example, both Feminists in Struggle (FIST) and Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) have as one of their organizational principles that the groups work “for the abolition of prostitution and pornography.” Women’s Declaration International (including its branch in the U.S.) is also anti-porn. Redstockings of the Women’s Liberation Movement and other forerunners of FIST, WoLF and WDI have had pro-woman positions on pornography continuously since the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Gail Dines, the feminist author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (2010) and Robert Jensen author of the pro-feminist book Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (2007) both lecture nationally and internationally. In 2021 Carol Hanisch called out the hypocrisy of Jacobin — a publication that claims to be a leading voice of the Left — for publishing a plea from a producer on the social media site OnlyFans not to ban porn because it would hurt business. Hanisch lampooned Jacobin’s “concern” for the involved “sex workers” and “producers” by asking questions like “When you run articles about cutting the military budget, do you ever run a plea by a soldier or bomb-maker on keeping the military machine going because it would otherwise send 720,000 civilians and 2.2 military personnel to the unemployment lines?“
Though Ms. Emba mentions the religious Right also has positions against pornography, she doesn’t distinguish their stance from the feminist one. The Right and feminists come to opposition to porn from different concerns (though women on the Right may well also oppose it for the same feminist reasons we do). Many on the Right have religious views against any non-marital sex and masturbation, and have no qualms about putting women “in their place”. Anti-porn feminists, like those discussed here, are in favor of consensual sex between equal partners and argue that porn degrades women and encourages men to treat us as nothing more than objects for their own pleasure. Ms. Emba also neglects to mention that when people on the Left criticize porn from a feminist position it often means being shunned and smeared as Right-wingers.
Perhaps Ms. Elba is not aware of much of this because those who still struggle for women’s liberation have been mostly ignored and denied a public megaphone, but we are still here and we are still opposing pornography with no delusions about its many harms.
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