Successful political alliances require coalitions and compromises, and feminist causes such as pornography are no exception. Although women are capable of a diversity of viewpoints, many have reached a consensus on pornography. The issue for feminists and non-feminists alike is that pornography degrades and harms women.
As Beulah Coughenour notes, "You have to zero in. You can't do politics if everyone has to have the same beliefs about everything" (Downs 121). In this context, Coughenour was defending her alliance with radical feminist Catherine MacKinnon in developing an anti-pornography ordinance for the city of Indianapolis. Coughenour described herself as a conservative Christian; her background included chairing the Indianapolis campaign against passage of the ERA. In forming an alliance with MacKinnon to combat pornography, Coughenour found that the harms-based argument was relevant to women regardless of their stances on gender equality issues.
Pornography is almost always degrading to women, particularly hard core pornography. Pornography depicts women as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure via pain, humiliation, rape, or physical violence. Many people, including police officers, who testified at the Indianapolis public hearings on pornography related their experiences in dealing with men who were addicted to pornography. These men are often perpetrators of sexual assaults on women.
Even soft core pornography, like Playboy magazine supports the viewpoint of male domination over women. Women are regarded as sex objects, whose physical attributes are valued much more highly than their interpersonal and mental qualities. Soft core pornography creates a fantasy world of gender equality, all the while supporting the male desire for sexual domination. In most soft core pornography, women consent to male domination in contrast to hard core pornography, where women are forced to submit to domination. ...