Pornography: Men Possessing Women

Andrea Dworkin’s 1981 critique of pornography is an important and urgent document about how the culture consumes and manipulates images of women. Essential and discomfiting reading in a social media era, where women’s bodies are being commodified and displayed more than ever.

Andrea Dworkin’s seminal 1981 work on the issue of pornography argues that the industry serves only to harm and oppress women. Her discussion of pornography as an outgrowth of the power that men exert over women—the power of owning, the power of money, and the power of sex, among others—still blazes with its clarity and immediacy, and illustrates how these inequities, while displayed in raw form in pornography, are endemic in all media.

With a lively and deeply compelling voice, Andrea Dworkin succinctly outlines her anti-pornography stance. Though the media environment may have changed, this passionately and powerfully argued classic remains a relevant and crucial contribution to the area of feminist studies.