Sexual Solipsism

Abstract

Abstract This book collects together fifteen chapters on pornography and objectification. Arguments from uncontroversial liberal premises are shown to yield controversial feminist conclusions that pornography of a certain kind subordinates and silences women, and that women have rights against it. The arguments draw on speech act theory and pragmatics to show how such pornography may be speech that subordinates and silences. It subordinates if it is an illocution that ranks women, deprives women of powers, and legitimates violence and discrimination. It silences if it creates illocutionary disablement, preventing women's words having the intended illocutionary force. The chapters explore the idea that there is something solipsistic about pornography, in the way women are treated as things, and things are treated as women. They develop an understanding of the wider concept of objectification, which is itself shown to be solipsistic. Objectification is traditionally viewed in Kantian guise as the idea of treating someone as a thing, a mere instrument, and denying their autonomy. But it has unnoticed epistemological aspects. On a feminist conception of objectification, moral and epistemological features interact: for it is, partly, through a kind of self-fulfilling projection of beliefs and perceptions of women as subordinate that women are made subordinate and treated as things. Pornography can have an epistemological role here, shaping desires that guide wishful, oppressive belief, providing evidence confirming oppressive belief, suppressing counter-evidence, by silencing. Kant's moral philosophy threads through a number of chapters: his pessimism about some pathologies of sexual love; his optimism about love and friendship, which offer an escape route from solipsism.

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