Pornography And Objectification.pdf

PORNOGRAPHY AND OBJECTIFICATION

Re-reading “the picture that divided Britain”

Feona Attwood

Feminism, Objectiﬁcation, and Pornography

In this article, I want to examine the signiﬁcance of the terms “objectiﬁcation” and

“pornography” and to ask how useful these are for analyses of contemporary sexual

representations. I will begin by tracing some key approaches to objectiﬁcation and

pornography and by highlighting some of the differences in these approaches. While

theoretical work from a range of ﬁelds—media and cultural studies, linguistics, queer

theory and so on—has been productive in the analysis of sexual representation, it is work

which focuses most explicitly on the realm of the pornographic or on the “effect” of

sexually explicit material which has been most visible in this area of study, and which

comprises an identiﬁable set of key approaches. Most visible among these have been a

feminist anti-pornography position organized around the claim that sexually explicit

representation is a form of sexual violence that depends on the objectiﬁcation of women

for its charge; an historical approach, which examines the regulatory signiﬁcance of

pornography for modern cultures; and an attempt to pinpoint the characteristic aesthetic

features of pornography in a way that relates the pornographic to other forms of cultural

production, most particularly in terms of its transgression of dominant cultural norms. In

turn, while these general approaches have been drawn on by a variety of theorists

working within this area, they are most closely associated with particular writers, and it

is to the work of these writers that I will refer. In particular, the feminist anti-pornography

work of Andrea Dworkin ([1979] 1999), the historical account of pornographic regulation

given by Walter Kendrick ([1987] 1996), and the discussion of pornography’s transgres-

siveness put forward by Laura Kipnis (1996) will be the major points of reference.

I will argue that while all three accounts offer productive ways of framing the

analysis of sexual representations, a tendency towards essentialism in all of them serves

to limit their application. The prominence of these approaches, with their privileging of

the key terms “pornography” and “objectiﬁcation,” is highly problematic for the develop-

ment of work in this area. I will attempt to demonstrate the strengths and limitations of

these approaches by focusing on the public controversy around an advert for Opium

perfume in 2000, and I will argue that a greater attentiveness to the context of particular

images and to the reactions they provoke, an attentiveness which has perhaps been more

successfully developed elsewhere in cultural studies, may provide a more helpful way of

developing the analysis of contemporary sexual representations.

The term “objectiﬁcation” has been central to feminist critiques of sexual represen-

tation that examine how woman functions as a sign for patriarchy as its other, its

spectacle and its subordinate thing .Ithas also been important in establishing feminist

Feminist Media Studies Vol. 4, No. 1, 2004

ISSN 1468-0777 print/ISSN 1471-5902 online/04/010007-13

2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/14680770410001674617

FEONA ATTWOOD

critiques of pornography which focus not on “the sexual explicitness in pornography,” but

on pornography’s “sexism,” its “characteristic reduction of women to passive, perpetually

desiring bodies—or bits of bodies—eternally available for servicing men” (Lynne Segal

1992, p. 2). That pornography reduces “woman” to “object,” and that, in addition,

objectiﬁcation is a form of violence against women, is made particularly explicit in the

well-known claims that, “The word pornography… means the graphic depiction of

women as vile whores …Whores exist only within a framework of male sexual domi-

nation” (Dworkin [1979] 1999, p. 200), and that, “Pornography is the theory, and rape the

practice” (Robin Morgan 1980, p. 139).

These claims, which work to link pornography, objectiﬁcation, and violence so

closely, exist within a fairly wide range of feminist accounts of pornography. However,

their prominence has generally served to mask the variety of feminist discourse on sexual

representation; indeed, they have frequently been perceived as representative of feminist

views on sexuality per se . The idea that the objectiﬁcation of women in pornography

works to effect sexual violence in society, is a form of sexual violence against women, and

typically involves the depiction of violence—“women … tied up, stretched, hanged,

fucked, gang-banged, whipped, beaten and begging for more” (Dworkin [1979] 1999,

p. 201)—has become well-established as a commonsense understanding of what por-

nography is, largely through repetition rather than veriﬁcation. It has been particularly

inﬂuential in academic, institutional, and public understandings of sexual representation,

working to frame and structure most discussions about this type of representation since

the 1980s. For example, ongoing legal and ethical debates about emerging forms of

pornography on the Internet are still quite strongly inﬂuenced by this view, while most

analytical accounts of sexual representation take it as the starting point for discussion, the

point that enables a clear position to be taken and elaborated. Despite its inability to

deﬁne “objectiﬁcation” or “pornography” very clearly, or to substantiate the impact and

signiﬁcance of sexual representation, the feminist anti-pornography approach remains

important for the way it highlights the need to investigate imagery which constructs sex

and gender in ways that may be hostile to women. However, its tendency to close down

other ways of making sense of sexual representation remains deeply problematic.

Re-reading Pornography and Objectiﬁcation

The real existence of any thing ought to be thrown in doubt by the failure of several

generations’ efforts to deﬁne it. (Kendrick [1987] 1996, p. xiii)

The difﬁculty of deﬁning either objectiﬁcation or pornography has led to two

important developments in research on pornography. The ﬁrst is an historical examin-

ation of the ways in which “pornography” functions as a regulatory category that is

underpinned by particular social concerns. Walter Kendrick argues that the struggle over

pornographic deﬁnition masks a struggle over “power …access to the world around

us… control over our own bodies and our own minds” (Kendrick [1987] 1996, p. 236).

Middle-class white men have generally exercised this power over more powerless

groups—women, children, the working classes—and the creation of a “Secret Museum”

of pornographic texts has been justiﬁed in terms of a concern with the harmful effects of

these texts on such groups. This concern with pornography’s “effects” reveals a deep-

PORNOGRAPHY AND OBJECTIFICATION

rooted fear about the power of representation, not to mention a fear of those who are

imagined to be susceptible to this power. According to Kendrick, it is the processes of

deﬁnition, classiﬁcation, and concealment that create “pornography,” and it is these

processes that are of interest to the historian. It is therefore the “perennial little

melodrama” played out around pornography (Kendrick [1987] 1996, p. xiii), in which

pornographic things function as “a symbol for anarchy” (Kendrick [1987] 1996, p.219),

and their concealment works “to regulate the behaviour of those who seem to threaten

the social order” (Kendrick [1987] 1996, p. 235), which becomes the focus of investigation

in this approach.

A second development in research on pornography involves the textual re-examin-

ation of the aesthetic, generic, and cultural characteristics of pornographic things .As

Linda Williams (1989, p.29) argues, “how can we adequately discuss the pornograph ic

without making some stab at a description of speciﬁc pornogra phy ?” While at odds with

Kendrick’s approach in its focus—Kendrick is profoundly uninterested in the “things”

which are labelled as pornography—this line of inquiry has covered some of the same

ground. The work of Laura Kipnis (1996, p.166) in particular has put forward the

argument that the pornographic genre is “a realm of transgression that is, in effect, a

counter-aesthetics to dominant norms for bodies, sexualities, and desire itself.” While it is

the struggle over pornographic deﬁnition that is crucial for Kendrick’s argument, it is the

characteristics of transgression which are of greater signiﬁcance for Kipnis. Nonetheless,

both accounts produce a model in which pornographic deﬁnition is key to understanding

regulation as a power struggle over forms of representation and consumption and

between dominant norms and transgression.

These developments in the study of pornography have enabled a reconsideration

of pornography as a cultural and social category. They suggest that the regulation of

pornography involves the regulation of any representation which contradicts dominant

norms of sexuality, and an exercise of power over the lower classes, women, and children.

However, neither of these developments directly addresses the question of women’s

objectiﬁcation in pornography and other representations of sexuality, and in this sense,

they are limited for the understanding of this issue which has been of such overwhelming

importance for feminist discussions of sexual politics.

As Segal (1992, p. 11) has argued, sexual politics and pornography have been

conﬂated in contemporary Western cultures, while political disputes over sexual power,

knowledge, and representation have often taken the form of “debates over pornography.”

The centrality of sexuality for feminist theory and activism during the 1980s tended

towards a privileging of pornography as “ the feminist issue of the 1980s” (Segal 1992,

p.3), as emblematic of women’s oppression under patriarchy at a moment when sexual

abuse, harassment, and violence appeared as the most urgent political issues for many

Western second-wave feminists. A concern with the power of images, already established

in contemporary Western cultures and newly signiﬁcant in the feminist cultural politics of

the 1980s, has also underscored pornography’s apparent importance for an understand-

ing of the connections between representation and reality. Pornography has become

“overburdened with signiﬁcance” (Segal 1992, p.65), as a culturally established way for

speaking about sex, power, and regulation, as a kind of shorthand for women’s discon-

tents, as an emblem of misogyny and as a symbol of the power of the image.

It is partly for these reasons that the anti-pornography feminist position still retains

its power for many feminists, and indeed for many women who do not otherwise

FEONA ATTWOOD

associate themselves with feminism. For them, developments within the pornography

debate may not provide a satisfactory or persuasive resolution to the claim that pornogra-

phy harms and humiliates women, either by providing a template for male sexual

behaviour, or as a representative cultural statement of woman’s purpose as a ‘thing’ for

men. As Laura Kipnis (1996, p.199) writes, for many women, this account may feel

“fundamentally irrational, but at the same time, correct.”

While there are clear historical reasons for the continuing importance of the term

“objectiﬁcation” for feminist analysis—which make the shortcomings of historical and

textual accounts of pornography all the more frustrating—there are further problems

with all of the approaches I have described. These hinge on the question of how

pornography is deﬁned in each account. While historical and textual approaches use the

term pornography quite precisely to describe texts which are produced as transgressive

through processes of regulation and restriction, or those which are restricted and

regulated because of their perceived transgressive characteristics, the claim that por-

nography objectiﬁes women does not make use of the term in the same way, and it does

not put it to work to explore the historical and textual signiﬁcance of pornography as a

category. Whereas pornography means “the representation of transgressive forms of

sexuality” for Kipnis, and “the processes used to regulate forms of sexual representation”

for Kendrick, it means “the depiction of women as sexual objects” in the anti-pornography

feminist position.

The very different starting points of writers such as Dworkin, Kendrick, and Kipnis,

and the different ways in which they use the term pornography, should, in theory, be a

productive difference which enables a multi-dimensional analysis of sexual texts and their

signiﬁcance, but in practice it has tended to produce a rather difﬁcult area of study where

the analysis of pornography and the analysis of the representation of women’s sexuality

has become somewhat unclear and entangled. It is perhaps the tendency towards

essentialism in all three accounts which has limited the development of this area of study.

While the work produced by these writers is often rich and detailed, the conclusions

which are drawn are rigid and circular. For Dworkin, all pornography objectiﬁes women

and everything that objectiﬁes women is pornography. According to Kendrick, all sexual

representations which are subject to regulation become pornography, and all attempts to

regulate pornography are an exercise of power over powerless groups, including women.

For Kipnis, pornography always transgresses dominant norms of sexuality and gender,

and whatever is sexual and transgressive is pornography. Little attention is given to the

range of texts or practices, which may constitute the representation of sexuality at any

given point, or to the contexts in which sexual representations are produced, circulated,

consumed, debated, or regulated. Because of this, the positions taken by these theorists

appear to cancel each other out in terms of their usefulness for discussing the political

signiﬁcance of sexual representations, and they are limited in terms of their application

to a wide range of examples.

Reading “Opium”

Despite their limitations, all three approaches to pornography that I have described

provide useful starting points for the analysis of sexual representation, and I want to

consider how they can be applied and developed in relation to one particular example.

My choice of example is the Yves Saint Laurent advert for Opium perfume featuring the

PORNOGRAPHY AND OBJECTIFICATION

model Sophie Dahl. This image, though not clearly “pornographic” in terms of its

positioning in the market, became the focus of some controversy and of renewed debate

about pornography and objectiﬁcation in 2000. The subject of complaint, discussion, and

at least two parodies (the image became the basis of the cover of novelist, Jeanette

Winterson’s The Power Book , and of an advertising campaign for Newcastle Brown Ale the

following year), the Opium advert was described as “the picture that’s divided Britain”

( The Sun 2000, p. 17).

The concerns of all three approaches—regulation, sexual objectiﬁcation, and aes-

thetics and transgression—were clearly visible in the controversy around the display and

eventual banning of this image from billboards after the Advertising Standards Authority

received over 900 complaints about it. The question of pornography as a regulatory

category received some attention in media coverage which focused on the issue of

acceptable contexts for the display of the advert and on the rights and wrongs of

censorship. Complaints from some members of the public and discussions in the press

suggested some disagreement about whether the advert presented woman as a sexual

object, but the advert was ﬁnally condemned by the Advertising Standards Authority as

offensive and degrading to women. Finally, the generic characteristics of the image were

claimed variously as artistic, erotic, and pornographic, and this level of uncertainty about

the generic status of the image is a particularly interesting feature of the Opium

controversy.

Yves Saint Laurent, whose company commissioned the advert, argued that its

image was “a tasteful nude in the tradition of high art” (in The Age 2000). The model, Dahl,

is conventionally beautiful, supine, gleaming, displayed, contorted, and depilated for

maximum visibility, a series of features which are used in the representation of women’s

bodies in the tradition of high art as well as in some forms of mainstream, soft-core

pornography. Indeed, the image was also read in terms of pornographic style. While some

commentators argued that the image was erotic, its power was also commented on as

evidence of a pornographic sensibility. Dyer’s claim that pornography is often identiﬁed

by its ability to move the body (Richard Dyer 1992, p.121) may be borne out by these

comments, though this and the use of the term “erotic” as a mark of approval are difﬁcult

to locate in relation to any particular textual elements. More speciﬁcally, Dahl’s body may

be read as a “porn body;” her splayed legs, closed eyes and open mouth are characteristic

of soft-core imagery, while her relative ﬂeshiness locates her within pornographic rather

than contemporary fashion codes of beauty, as a signiﬁer of sexual appetite and of the

body’s materiality. In fact, the image appears to draw on codes associated with art,

pornography, and fashion through its combination of high art aesthetics, its display of a

“porn body,” the use of a well-known fashion model, and the evident purpose of the

image as an advert for designer perfume. The term “porn chic” (in Libby Brooks 2000, p.6)

usefully indicates the blurring of codes in the advert.

The different codes which are drawn on in the image and the readings made in

relation to them reveal how pornography is often characterized through a location within

aesthetic hierarchies used to differentiate a body which signiﬁes reason, cleanliness, and

order (Lynda Nead 1992, p.7) from one which is “insistently material, deﬁantly vulgar,

corporeal” (Kipnis 1996, p.132), and visual pleasures of “contemplation, discrimination

and transcendent value” from those involving “motivation, promiscuity and com-

modiﬁcation” (Nead 1992, p. 89). However, the blurring of codes in the Opium advert

meant that it was possible to locate it within these hierarchies in different ways. It seems

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