Erotica v Pornography
Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire anytime it wanted to go somewhere. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one...and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon. It is safe to assume that every man and woman in America has seen some sort of pornography, whether it is a Calvin Klein billboard, or the latest issue of Playboy. The two may seem unrelated, but the link is that they both objectify women. People who view this material transform the human in the picture into an object of desire,
The first point Steinem fails to address is that there are other barriers to women becoming equal to men. Gender roles, gender stereotypes, and also the natural inferiority of women all contribute to their inequality. All of these barriers, including pornography, contribute to women's inequality, and eradicating just one of them would achieve next to nothing. Another thing women have to fight are the stereotypes that still exist. Women are supposedly weak individuals, who function best in a position where not many major decisions are to be made. It is not often that a woman is in an executive position of a corporation. Even if one were, she would have had to overcome some major struggles to get there. On every step of the corporate ladder, men would be wondering if she was strong enough to withstand the 'perils' of being an executive; would she be able to endure other executives' pressure as well as a male could? It would be logical to assume that men would be trying to take advantage of her all the time, since she is 'just a woman'. In Gloria Steinem's essay 'Erotica vs. Pornography', pornography is seen as objectifying women, and in doing so continues to keep them in a position of sublimation. She tries to prove that eradicating pornography would eliminate social injustices against women. Steinem first talks about the separation of "all nonprocreative sex with pornography" (153). She believes that just as work has been separated from play, sex should be separated from pornography. She goes on to assert that the opposition to censoring pornography comes from "friends of civil liberties and progress" (154). These people, she says, oppose censorship because it invades their privacy, despite the fact that it objectifies women. She believes, however, that pornography itself infringes on women's privacy because it infringes on the rights and lives of women everywhere. She next counters the idea that simply enjoying pornography makes it okay. Steinem believes that pornography makes sex synonymous with domination o
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Approximate Word count = 1378
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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