It’s bad enough when Andrea Dworkin and assorted anti-porn feminist followers seek to write out the personhood of female sex workers. They position themselves as The Woman who speaks for all others, occluding the voices, agency and personalities of the workers whose labour they reduce to a spectacle of spread-eagled body parts, revelling in the grotesque descriptions of acts they profess to oppose.
But when men start doing this, start using this language that posits women as objects in order to talk about objectification, it’s not just a gross elision of female agency. It’s a shameless appropriation and a mirror of the way less ‘feminist’ men talk about women in every sexist medium and arena going. None of anti-porn feminism treads softly, or indeed with nuance, which is perhaps why it appeals to men who want to maintain their social right to shout louder, talk over and stomp across women’s lives, voices and demands while claiming feminist credentials.
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