rship of pornography. She believes that women have expended tremendous effort to control the proliferation of pornography. But she finds common ground between feminism and pornography: both establish women as sexual beings. She argues that both feminism and pornography have made sex an experience open to public examination and debate and feminist support for censorship will lead to a dead-end. She believes censorship will result in conservative governments and male-dominated courts and police controlling the sexual freedom and control for which women have fought. She argues that instead we must work "to repossess our sexuality, through sex education and the production of sex-positive imagery, and through changing the economic and social position of women and men--steps that will undermine the demand for sexist sexual imagery."
The arguments put forth by Diamond and Cole largely establish the parameters of the debate surrounding feminist support or lack thereof for censorship of pornography. However, Anna Gronau also argues that feminists who support censorship tend to believe that images have a fixed meaning that can seduce viewers into imitative action. She calls this belief "dangerous" because she believes that it invests those who have the most power in society with the power to make us believe that images affect us. She argues that this only leads to a population that is more susceptible to advertisements and propaganda. Further, she also believes that it leads us to believe that we must be protected from the image and we may abdicate the power to make and interpret images to the very people who create the images.
The feminists who argue against the censorship of pornography believe that, as feminists, we must not focus on the pornographic images in the hope that their removal will result in the removal of other pervasive anti-woman symbols. Steele argues that merely focusing on pornography or other such im...