Why has the feminist critique of pornography been attacked so strenuously?
There are many points in the pornography debate on which reasonable people can disagree. Legal strategies raise important issues about freedom and responsibility, and definitive connections between media consumption and human behavior are always difficult to establish. More generally, sexuality is a complex phenomenon in which wide human variation makes universal claims suspect. But the feminist critique inspires an apoplectic reaction from pornography’s defenders that, to me, has always seemed over the top. The political debate that the critique set off, both within feminism and in the wider culture, seems unusually intense. From my experience of writing and speaking publicly, I can be fairly certain that what little I have written here so far will cause some readers to condemn me as a sexual fascist or a prude. One obvious reason for the strength of these denunciations is that pornographers make money, hence there is a profit motive in moving quickly with maximal force to marginalize
