The Politics of Legal Challenges to Pornography: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

Pornography production exploits social disadvantages, often while using prostituted people who have endured poverty, childhood sexual abuse, race and/or sex discrimination. Over time, consumers become more sexually aggressive, adopt more attitudes supporting gender-based violence, and buy more sex than non-consumers. This study finds that challenges to pornography’s harms will be more successful in democracies that better recognize substantive equality, and where the harmed groups’ perspectives and interests are centered in law. Civil rights appear more responsive and remedial than state-implemented criminal laws, with similar implications for other problems disproportionately affecting disadvantaged populations.

Keywords: pornography, civil rights, prostitution, gender-based violence, freedom of speech, MacKinnon, sex purchase law, intersectionality