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This book offers a cutting-edge, cross-disciplinary analysis of how the explosive spread of pornography contributes to violence against women, including prostitution, while presenting a political and legal theory on how to effectively stop it. It guides the reader through fifty years of significant empirical research on the harms, including a vast array of different studies illuminating pornography's powerful impact on men, a majority of whom consume it. In a comparative analysis of legal challenges in Canada, Sweden, and the United States, it demonstrates why civil rights, not criminal laws, can empower those hurt, subordinated, and exploited while efficiently dismantling the sex industry, consistent with free speech guarantees.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Max Waltman is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, Stockholm University, who has published on the politics of legal challenges to prostitution, sex trafficking, and pornography, including its association with gender-based violence and sex inequality. His work is comparative and international in outlook and has appeared in Harvard J. Law & Gender,Political Research Q.,Michigan J. Int'l Law,Women's Stud. Int'l Forum,Law & Inequality, and Wisconsin J. Law, Gender & Society, and other publications. His op-eds have been published in the New York Times,Toronto Star, Swedish newspapers, and various online news sites. Legislative bodies domestically and abroad have consulted him, and he works on policy initiatives with prostitution survivors and feminist groups. Waltman was a visiting postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University 2016-2017 and at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 2017-2018.
Zusammenfassung
Pornography has long proven a polarizing and vexing subject in legal and feminist debates. Women's social movements have fought ferociously against pornography since the 1970s, emphasizing its contribution to violence against women. At least two to four of ten young men consume it three times or more per week. The pornography industry exploits poor populations, who are multiply and intersectionally disadvantaged based on gender, race, or other vulnerabilities. A thorough analytical review of empirical studies using complementing methods demonstrates that using pornography substantially contributes to consumers becoming more sexually aggressive, on average desensitizing them and contributing to a demand for more subordinating, aggressive, and degrading materials. Consumers are also often found wishing to imitate pornography with unwilling partners; many demand sex from prostituted people, who have few or no alternatives. While the supporting scientific evidence of harm is growing exponentially, the politics of legal challenges to pornography still constitutes an amalgam of some of the most intractable, thorny, and adversarial obstacles to change.
This book assesses American, Canadian, and Swedish legal challenges to the explosive spread of pornography within their significantly different democratic systems, and constructs a political and legal theory for effectively challenging the sex industry under law. The obstacles to this challenge are exposed as more ideological and political than strictly legal, although they often play out in the legal arena. Legal challenges to the harms are shown to be more effective under legal systems that promote equality and when the laws empower those most harmed, in contrast to state-enforced regulations (e.g., criminal obscenity laws). Drawing on feminist and intersectional theory, among others, this book argues that pornography is among the linchpins of sex inequality, contending that civil rights legislation and a civil society forum can empower those harmed with representatives who have more substantial incentives to address them.
This book explains why democracies fail to address the harms of pornography, and offers a political and legal theory for changing the status quo. These insights can be applied to other intractable problems associated with hierarchies, and will appeal profoundly to political theorists and those invested in civil and human rights.
Zusatztext
The most salient implication of the study that Waltman underscores is the intractable problems of inequality (Waltman, 2021, p.401). Should the issue be in the hands of civil society or should it belong to the state? The problem is somewhat of a dilemma, which Waltman illuminates through a huge number of empirical examples commented upon throughout the book. The knowledge he exhibits in the different politico-legal systems of the United States, Canada, and Sweden is impressive.
