In the system of male sexual domination explicated in pornography, there is no way out, no redemption: not through desire, not through reproduction.

The woman’s sex is appropriated, her body is possessed, she is used and she is despised: the pornography does it and the pornography proves it.

The power of men in pornography is imperial power, the power of sovereigns who are cruel and arrogant, who keep taking and conquering for the pleasure of power and the power of pleasure.

--Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

The word pornography, derived from the ancient Greek porne and graphos, means “writing about whores.” Porne means “whore,” specifically and exclusively the lowest class of whore, which in ancient Greece was the brothel slut available to all male citizens….Woman as whore exists within the objective and real system of male sexual domination. The pornography itself is objective and real and central to the male sexual system….Pornography does not, as some claim, refute the idea that female sexuality is dirty: instead, pornography embodies and exploits this idea; pornography sells and promotes it.

--Andrea Dworkin, Pornography:

Men Possessing Women

Protecting pornography means protecting sexual abuse as speech, at the same time that pornography and its protection have deprived women of speech, especially speech against sexual abuse. There is a connection between the silence enforced on women, in which we are seen to love and choose our chains because they have been sexualized, and the noise of pornography that surrounds us, passing for discourse (ours, even) and parading under constitutional protection. The operative definition of censorship accordingly shifts from government silencing what powerless people say, to powerful people violating powerless people into silence and hiding behind state power to do it.

--Catherine MacKinnon, Only Words

Along with other mere words like “not guilty” and “I do,” such words are uniformly treated as the institutions and practices they constitute, rather than as expressions of ideas they embody or further….Words unproblematically treated as acts in the inequality context include “you’re fired,” “help wanted—male,” “sleep with me and I’ll give you an A,” “fuck me or you’re fired,”…These statements are discriminatory acts and are legally seen as such.

Pornography makes the world a pornographic place through its making and use, establishing what women are said to exist as, are seen as, are treated as, constructing the social reality of what a woman is and can be in terms of what can be done to her, and what a man is in terms of doing it.

--Catherine MacKinnon, Only Words

…Andrea Dworkin and I have proposed a law against pornography that defines it as graphic sexually explicit materials that subordinate women through pictures or words. This definition describers what is there, that is, what must be there for the materials to work as sex and to promote sexual abuse across a broad spectrum of consumers. This definition includes the harm of what pornography says,…its role as subordination, as sex discrimination, including what it does through what it says. This definition is coterminous with the industry, from Playboy, in which women are objectified and presented dehumanized as sexual objects or things for use; through the torture of women and the sexualization of racism and the fetishization of women’s body parts; to snuff films, in which actual murder is the ultimate sexual act, the reduction to the thing form of a human being and the silence of women literal and complete.

--Catherine MacKinnon, Only Words

The fact is (and here I agree with the procensorship feminists), the sexual is political. The Court’s bright-line distinction between political and sexual speech, for First Amendment purposes, ignores the significant overlap between those categories made clear by the many major recent political controversies…

--Nadine Strossen, Defending Pornography

Ironically, the procensorship feminists’ revisionist definition of prohibited sexually oriented expression as speech that conveys a misogynistic message reveals the constitutional Achilles’ heel of their antipornography law: its focus on the political dimension of sexual expression.

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The ordinance discriminates on the ground of the content of the speech. Speech treating women in the approved way—in sexual encounters “premised on equality”—is lawful no matter how sexually explicit. Speech treating women in the disapproved way—as submissive in matters sexual or as enjoying humiliation—is unlawful no matter how significant the literary, artistic, or political qualities of the work taken as a whole. The Constitution forbids the state to declare one perspective right and silence opponents.

--Judge Frank Easterbrook, Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, American Booksellers Assoc. v. Hudnut