I didn't understand this when MacKinnon said it and I don't understand it from you. Maybe this is because I'm a boring old time liberal card-carrying ACLU member and First Amendment fundamentalist, fan of the Voltairian idea (no doubt the proper attribution of this quote will be provided) that I may not approve of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it -- although, actually, I _do_ approve of some porn, not all of it.
Violence is transitive, normally. At least the sort of violence under discussion. I can do harm to myself, but you aren't talking about whatever harm to herself, say, Paris Hilton or Pamela Anderson does if she has herself filmed having sex.
Supposedly, the idea is that men commit actual violence against women if they consume or make porn, that is different from any physical coercion that might be deployed, as Linda Lovelace alleged, against a porn actor in order to make them perform. Somehow the very act of using or making representations of women having sex or being sexual, so represented in order to titillate men, we'll leave gay and lesbian porn out of it for the moment, is equivalent to doing something like beating or threatening a women with physical harm. And this is so even if, as is probably generally the case, the representations are used in private by a man with no women or anyone else around.
So somehow one can commit metaphysical "violence," not against a particular woman, but against women in general, at a distance and without their even knowing about it. Well, that's too many for me. I can understand that most women probably don't want to have to deal with men imposing unwanted sexual representations on them, for example, at work, although even then most women would probably find that different from a beating or threat of one. But what sort of violence this is, I don't get.
Back when Only Words came out, Carlin Romano (an old college acquaintance), Philly Inquirer book reviewer, made himself notorious by putting the sort of doubts I'm, raising here in a needlessly provocative form in a review in The Nation. I couldn't find the review on line, maybe Doug could give us a link, but here's an article about the broughaha that the review occasioned.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,979960-1,00.html
Romano is really smart, Columbia JD, Yale (I think) philosophy PhD, Tigertown BA, that's when I knew him a lifetime ago, and the whole article would be worth reading.
I also don't get the comparison of porn per se to racist representations. Some porn is degrading and insulting to women, of course, but all racist speech ("speech" is American lawyer talk, including pictures, drawings, films, sculptures, moans, sighs, cries, and slurps, not just speech) is inherently obviously degrading to the target race. I don't see how representing women as sexual beings, or as having sex, even if it's mainly for the purpose of getting men off, is inherently degrading. And no, don't say that it's because pornographic speech represents women as mere sexual beings who exists for men's pleasure, because that begs the question. Some does, not all, at least not obviously in the way that all racist representations insult and degrade African Americans or whoever.
Finally I'll make the same point regarding racist representations and violence that I made about porn and violence. If you ask blacks or other targets of racism whether they can discern a difference between personally being lynched, beaten, or even threatened with physical harm because of their race and some no-brow snickering over a KKK leaflet alone in his room or ranting about ***** with his idiot white friends, they'd probably consider the question odd. There's nothing defensible about racist speech, but it's not violence in any sense I can grasp.
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