I feel like it’s almost impossible to have a conversation about pornography and/or sex work in the US because the debate gets boiled down to free speech/personal choice versus Puritanism/won’t someone think of the children (this doesn’t even get into the whole mess of defining pornography). Liberal feminism tends to view the subject as a matter of individual choice, and if that’s not a choice you want to make, you don’t do it. End of conversation.
I think this is one of the major differences between liberal and socialist feminism, in that the latter sees liberation as a communal process borne out by struggle, whereas the former believes that one is liberated by the ability to make choices. However, if one’s options are severely limited by race and/or socioeconomics, “choice” doesn’t really mean much. The problem I’ve always had with liberal, individualistic feminism is that it doesn’t interrogate the societal factors that cause certain women to make some choices and not others or to interrogate how socio-economic status influences said choices. To me, a more interesting discussion about pornography would involve examining the entire political economy surrounding it and the total commodification of personal life under capitalism, but I’m not holding my breath that that’s going to occur.
I think that looking back to early twentieth century fascism to understand the current fascism 2.0 isn’t always helpful because the circumstances are so different. The fascism of the last century arose because of the massive upheavals caused by WWI, the rise of the Soviet Union, and the failures of capitalism. Of these three, only the last one is truly relevant now, although I would argue that we’re still feeling the lingering aftereffects of the other two. The hyper-patriarchal view as exemplified in the Mussolini quote doesn’t exist today, or at least not in the same context. One thing that happened after WWI was a reversal of gender roles from women working in factories. This led to resentment from veterans, who came back to find that women not only didn’t understand what they had gone through in the trenches, but many did not want to go back to how things had been beforehand. This resentment was even more pronounced with disabled veterans who had to rely on female family members just to survive. Mussolini saying that “chicks can’t be architects because reasons” would have been comforting, in that it suggested that he was going to put the social order back where it was supposed to be. The order Mussolini promised was to not just be male-led, but regimented, based on the military. Women would be mobilized as well, albeit in their “proper spheres” of home and church.
We don’t see anything like this today, in part because the military tends to be an “out of sight, out of mind” phenomenon in much of the West. If modern Italy got rid of all women in traditionally male fields, it would suffer from an acute labor shortage and they’d have to bring in even more immigrants to fill in the gap. Mussolini and Hitler were both ex-veterans who brawled with communists in the streets using guns and knives. When they told audiences that they didn’t mind getting down and dirty to fight communism, they weren’t kidding. There’s no equivalent to that nowadays, unless you want to count Giorgia Meloni when she does mock fighting for her Lord of the Rings cosplay. Most importantly, Meloni couldn’t launch the third Italo-Abyssinian War even if she wanted to, because Italy basically has no army to speak of, and it would be highly unpopular.
The fact that the banner carriers for this neo-fascism tend to be women is also interesting. Orban tends to get the attention because he gets messy in NATO, but if Alice Weidel in Germany or Marie Le Pen in France come to power, there’s going to be much greater consequences. The way our would-be girl-boss fascists behave can’t be explained by looking at the political situation of a hundred years ago or US-style far right politics. I define fascism as the tools and effects of colonialism and imperialism boomeranging back to the imperial core (see Aime Cesare) as well as capitalism in decline. I don’t see having women politicians or a less puritanical sexual ethic as being antithetical to fascism, because Israel shows how pinkwashing and homonationalism can be used to justify atrocities. As long as repressive measures primarily affect unpopular demographics, a lot of people will be more than happy to support them.
Thanks so much for engaging in such depth, Leah. I appreciate you taking the time to give your feedback.
You've given me a lot to consider. In brief, let me give just a few responses (I'll have to chew over much of what you've brought to the table here):
I agree that the conversation, such as it exists, around pornography is extraordinarily limited. Sexuality in general, at least in American culture, is taboo. Even within the marital relationship, where sex is permitted and its products celebrated, pornography is seen as a threat to a happy marriage. Some people consider a spouse's porn consumption to be a form of infidelity. This is very strange thinking to me! (But I recognize that I have far more libertine views about human sexuality than the average American, especially the average American woman, who is socialized into despising their own bodies and thus denigrating female sexuality in general.) So it's hard to talk about.
One of the reasons I wrote this essay (aside from the fact that Lee's anemic analysis really elicited in me a strong reaction) is that it's clear to me that repression of sexuality overall has become a cornerstone of the burgeoning fascist or neo-fascist movement in America. You see this with Sen. Josh Hawley imploring teenaged boys to forego porn consumption, or Speaker Mike Johnson relaying the fact that he and his son monitor each other's porn usage. Those are extreme positions that are being mainstreamed through these high-level political figures. Anti-pornography sentiment apparently has made it into Project 2025 (though at least one person has said this language is a way to crack down on the lives of transgender people via the imposition of hardline heteronormativity). It seems to me that all of the impetus in public discourse is toward the banishing or eradication of pornography, which symbolizes a rightward shift of the Overton window. So the conversation must be enlarged, somehow, to defend the Sexual Revolution, and that means celebrating sexuality for sexuality's sake.
Incidentally, I think this is the very best promontory for defending abortion rights. Liberals do themselves no favors by conceding so much ground to conservatives by saying that abortion should be preserved in the case of rape or incest. Of course it should, but it should also be preserved in all cases, even if that unplanned pregnancy occurred in the course of mutual and consensual sex. To retreat from that position is to give conservatives leave to brand sexual women as sluts, which brings back into vogue the Madonna/whore dichotomy (which lies at the heart of so much of the sex and gender double standards in Western society). That is another reason why I believe this topic needs to be broached.
What particularly struck me about Lee's take was that she seemed to advance the tacit argument that pornography just needed to be done away with, and that would enact a magical fix on young men's sexuality. I think that's a pipe dream. And what I was attempting to do here in my own analysis is draw attention to the fact that both fascism and radical Second-wave feminism want to outlaw pornography, and for very similar reasons. It's just that the outcome of fascists would obviate the ultimate aims of feminists, and the former could do so by co-opting the political agitation of the latter. So feminists who want to restrict such sex-related materials should be careful of the things for which they're advocating -- the blowback could be unimaginable.
I excerpted the portion about Mussolini to demonstrate that the relegation of females to one sector of society only can indeed be put into practice, even in a modern, industrialized (or post-industrialized) nation. This goes back to the nuclear family being the node of fascist organization, with the husband being the hierarchical head; concentric rings of power emanate from the family to local civic structures (church, schools, civic clubs), to local, then state, then finally federal government. This cannot be effected if females are not first confined to the home.
Now, why is it that current modes of fascism are deploying female faces to attract followers to their movements? Well, the cynical part of me might say that's the centerfold principle in action. Marine Le Pen is something of a living paradox, where such brutal, hardline policies issue from such a classically beautiful figure. The contradiction draws attention. Also, the outward form can superfically "soften" the message, attracting notice from audiences not normally inclined to strongman politics.
You bring up several issues that I didn't touch upon in the essay, and I will have to ponder your points a bit more before I feel I can do them justice. For example, you bring up Israeli pinkwashing. That, to me, seems more like a subversion of marketing and not anything inherently to do with sexuality. I don't see the championing of LGBTQIA+ rights in Israeli overtures to other Western countries as a celebration of LGBTQIA+ sexuality; more it's a promotion of Israel's purported tolerance. That's a very different focus. (The use of females as the heads of these organizations could also fall under this type of marketing subversion, as paralleling Virginia Slim's "You've come a long way, baby" in inverting the gains in women's rights as an endorsement of female cigarette consumption. There's a similar spirit at work.)
Thanks again for your willingness to delve into these topics. I will say that your response made it clear to me one drawback in my own writing, which is that I did not actually define 'fascism' from the outset. I should probably attend to that in upcoming essays, if only to set the table for discussion. As it is, fascism is a sprawling and unwieldy topic, without a universally set definition.
I feel like it’s almost impossible to have a conversation about pornography and/or sex work in the US because the debate gets boiled down to free speech/personal choice versus Puritanism/won’t someone think of the children (this doesn’t even get into the whole mess of defining pornography). Liberal feminism tends to view the subject as a matter of individual choice, and if that’s not a choice you want to make, you don’t do it. End of conversation.
I think this is one of the major differences between liberal and socialist feminism, in that the latter sees liberation as a communal process borne out by struggle, whereas the former believes that one is liberated by the ability to make choices. However, if one’s options are severely limited by race and/or socioeconomics, “choice” doesn’t really mean much. The problem I’ve always had with liberal, individualistic feminism is that it doesn’t interrogate the societal factors that cause certain women to make some choices and not others or to interrogate how socio-economic status influences said choices. To me, a more interesting discussion about pornography would involve examining the entire political economy surrounding it and the total commodification of personal life under capitalism, but I’m not holding my breath that that’s going to occur.
I think that looking back to early twentieth century fascism to understand the current fascism 2.0 isn’t always helpful because the circumstances are so different. The fascism of the last century arose because of the massive upheavals caused by WWI, the rise of the Soviet Union, and the failures of capitalism. Of these three, only the last one is truly relevant now, although I would argue that we’re still feeling the lingering aftereffects of the other two. The hyper-patriarchal view as exemplified in the Mussolini quote doesn’t exist today, or at least not in the same context. One thing that happened after WWI was a reversal of gender roles from women working in factories. This led to resentment from veterans, who came back to find that women not only didn’t understand what they had gone through in the trenches, but many did not want to go back to how things had been beforehand. This resentment was even more pronounced with disabled veterans who had to rely on female family members just to survive. Mussolini saying that “chicks can’t be architects because reasons” would have been comforting, in that it suggested that he was going to put the social order back where it was supposed to be. The order Mussolini promised was to not just be male-led, but regimented, based on the military. Women would be mobilized as well, albeit in their “proper spheres” of home and church.
We don’t see anything like this today, in part because the military tends to be an “out of sight, out of mind” phenomenon in much of the West. If modern Italy got rid of all women in traditionally male fields, it would suffer from an acute labor shortage and they’d have to bring in even more immigrants to fill in the gap. Mussolini and Hitler were both ex-veterans who brawled with communists in the streets using guns and knives. When they told audiences that they didn’t mind getting down and dirty to fight communism, they weren’t kidding. There’s no equivalent to that nowadays, unless you want to count Giorgia Meloni when she does mock fighting for her Lord of the Rings cosplay. Most importantly, Meloni couldn’t launch the third Italo-Abyssinian War even if she wanted to, because Italy basically has no army to speak of, and it would be highly unpopular.
The fact that the banner carriers for this neo-fascism tend to be women is also interesting. Orban tends to get the attention because he gets messy in NATO, but if Alice Weidel in Germany or Marie Le Pen in France come to power, there’s going to be much greater consequences. The way our would-be girl-boss fascists behave can’t be explained by looking at the political situation of a hundred years ago or US-style far right politics. I define fascism as the tools and effects of colonialism and imperialism boomeranging back to the imperial core (see Aime Cesare) as well as capitalism in decline. I don’t see having women politicians or a less puritanical sexual ethic as being antithetical to fascism, because Israel shows how pinkwashing and homonationalism can be used to justify atrocities. As long as repressive measures primarily affect unpopular demographics, a lot of people will be more than happy to support them.
Thanks so much for engaging in such depth, Leah. I appreciate you taking the time to give your feedback.
You've given me a lot to consider. In brief, let me give just a few responses (I'll have to chew over much of what you've brought to the table here):
I agree that the conversation, such as it exists, around pornography is extraordinarily limited. Sexuality in general, at least in American culture, is taboo. Even within the marital relationship, where sex is permitted and its products celebrated, pornography is seen as a threat to a happy marriage. Some people consider a spouse's porn consumption to be a form of infidelity. This is very strange thinking to me! (But I recognize that I have far more libertine views about human sexuality than the average American, especially the average American woman, who is socialized into despising their own bodies and thus denigrating female sexuality in general.) So it's hard to talk about.
One of the reasons I wrote this essay (aside from the fact that Lee's anemic analysis really elicited in me a strong reaction) is that it's clear to me that repression of sexuality overall has become a cornerstone of the burgeoning fascist or neo-fascist movement in America. You see this with Sen. Josh Hawley imploring teenaged boys to forego porn consumption, or Speaker Mike Johnson relaying the fact that he and his son monitor each other's porn usage. Those are extreme positions that are being mainstreamed through these high-level political figures. Anti-pornography sentiment apparently has made it into Project 2025 (though at least one person has said this language is a way to crack down on the lives of transgender people via the imposition of hardline heteronormativity). It seems to me that all of the impetus in public discourse is toward the banishing or eradication of pornography, which symbolizes a rightward shift of the Overton window. So the conversation must be enlarged, somehow, to defend the Sexual Revolution, and that means celebrating sexuality for sexuality's sake.
Incidentally, I think this is the very best promontory for defending abortion rights. Liberals do themselves no favors by conceding so much ground to conservatives by saying that abortion should be preserved in the case of rape or incest. Of course it should, but it should also be preserved in all cases, even if that unplanned pregnancy occurred in the course of mutual and consensual sex. To retreat from that position is to give conservatives leave to brand sexual women as sluts, which brings back into vogue the Madonna/whore dichotomy (which lies at the heart of so much of the sex and gender double standards in Western society). That is another reason why I believe this topic needs to be broached.
What particularly struck me about Lee's take was that she seemed to advance the tacit argument that pornography just needed to be done away with, and that would enact a magical fix on young men's sexuality. I think that's a pipe dream. And what I was attempting to do here in my own analysis is draw attention to the fact that both fascism and radical Second-wave feminism want to outlaw pornography, and for very similar reasons. It's just that the outcome of fascists would obviate the ultimate aims of feminists, and the former could do so by co-opting the political agitation of the latter. So feminists who want to restrict such sex-related materials should be careful of the things for which they're advocating -- the blowback could be unimaginable.
I excerpted the portion about Mussolini to demonstrate that the relegation of females to one sector of society only can indeed be put into practice, even in a modern, industrialized (or post-industrialized) nation. This goes back to the nuclear family being the node of fascist organization, with the husband being the hierarchical head; concentric rings of power emanate from the family to local civic structures (church, schools, civic clubs), to local, then state, then finally federal government. This cannot be effected if females are not first confined to the home.
Now, why is it that current modes of fascism are deploying female faces to attract followers to their movements? Well, the cynical part of me might say that's the centerfold principle in action. Marine Le Pen is something of a living paradox, where such brutal, hardline policies issue from such a classically beautiful figure. The contradiction draws attention. Also, the outward form can superfically "soften" the message, attracting notice from audiences not normally inclined to strongman politics.
You bring up several issues that I didn't touch upon in the essay, and I will have to ponder your points a bit more before I feel I can do them justice. For example, you bring up Israeli pinkwashing. That, to me, seems more like a subversion of marketing and not anything inherently to do with sexuality. I don't see the championing of LGBTQIA+ rights in Israeli overtures to other Western countries as a celebration of LGBTQIA+ sexuality; more it's a promotion of Israel's purported tolerance. That's a very different focus. (The use of females as the heads of these organizations could also fall under this type of marketing subversion, as paralleling Virginia Slim's "You've come a long way, baby" in inverting the gains in women's rights as an endorsement of female cigarette consumption. There's a similar spirit at work.)
Thanks again for your willingness to delve into these topics. I will say that your response made it clear to me one drawback in my own writing, which is that I did not actually define 'fascism' from the outset. I should probably attend to that in upcoming essays, if only to set the table for discussion. As it is, fascism is a sprawling and unwieldy topic, without a universally set definition.