Why are men so obsessed with pornography? (Robert Jensen)

[Editor's note: This article previously appeared at Julie Bindel's writing and podcasts.]

A young Andrea Dworkin, 1965

With a sense of both joy and grief, I offer as my text for today Andrea Dworkin’s “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape,” a speech she gave to the National Organization for Changing Men in 1983 in St. Paul, MN. The joy comes from remembering how her words helped me understand feminism, the first step in understanding myself. The grief comes from how relevant her analysis remains in today’s broken world.

So, let’s start with a story to remind us of the state of contemporary sexual politics.

In my last five years at the University of Texas at Austin, I taught a course that I designed called “Freedom: Philosophy, History, Law.” We reviewed philosophers’ conceptions of freedom and then studied how the term has been defined and deployed politically throughout U.S. history. The course concluded with the radical feminist critique of the contemporary pornography industry, set in the context of the feminist critique of men’s violence, as a case study in the complexity of conflicting claims about freedom.

In the fall of 2016, I delivered that lecture on men’s violence right after the election of Donald Trump. Despite the tense political environment, I thought it would have been irresponsible to avoid the obvious. Without commentary, I summed up the uncontested facts. The president-elect had bragged about being sexually aggressive and treating women like sexual objects, and several women had testified about behavior that—depending on one’s evaluation of the evidence—could constitute sexual assault. Does it seem fair, I asked the class, to describe him as a sexual predator? No one disagreed.

Trump sometimes responded by contending that Bill Clinton was even worse. Citing someone else’s bad behavior to avoid accountability is a weak defense, and of course Trump wasn’t running against Bill, but I suggested that we take that claim seriously. As president, Clinton took advantage of his powerful position by having sex with a much younger woman who was first an intern and then a junior employee. He settled a sexual harassment lawsuit out of court, and he had been accused of rape. Does it seem fair to describe him as a sexual predator? No one disagreed.

I asked students to reflect. A former president, a Democrat, had been outed as a sexual predator but continued to be treated as a respected statesman and philanthropist. The incoming president, a Republican, was elected with the widespread understanding that he was an unapologetic sexual predator.

That day has been on my mind since Clinton endorsed Andrew Cuomo, who was running for mayor of New York City after having resigned the governor’s office on the heels of multiple complaints of sexual harassment. More women have given accounts of Trump’s sexual misconduct, and a year before his reelection a jury had found that he had sexually assaulted a woman.

Between 2016 and today, the #MeToo movement emerged, forcing a cultural reckoning of sorts about men’s sexual exploitation of women. For a while. That movement can claim some gains, just as the decades of feminist work against rape, harassment, and violence changed the culture in many ways—rape shield and marital rape laws, sexual harassment lawsuits, domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers.

But Donald Trump is president again, and Bill Clinton is still applauded in public. I am not suggesting that the two men and their political projects present the same threat—to women, democracy, or the larger living world. I am suggesting that we be honest about the sexual politics of the United States.

Andrea Dworkin died in 2005. I don’t know what she would say if she were alive today, but I know what she wrote in her first book, published in 1974:

The commitment to ending male dominance as the fundamental psychological, political, and cultural reality of earth-lived life is the fundamental revolutionary commitment. It is a commitment to transformation of the self and transformation of the social reality on every level. [Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974), p. 17].

In my lifetime, the United States has never been a revolutionary society, even during the fabled 1960s. Change has come much slower. Three steps forward, four steps back? Or maybe three steps forward, a step to the side, then back a couple of steps? Only in hindsight can we see how much permanent progress was made. But whatever that future assessment may be, we can both be grateful to feminists for their work and recognize that attempts to make revolutionary change have failed. Sometimes, even attempts to make minor reforms have failed. And sometimes even holding the ground to protect small changes is difficult.

My topic today is the one project on which we clearly have lost ground since the initial feminist critique—the harms of pornography.

That brings me back to “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape.” My thesis can be stated simply: Andrea Dworkin was right, specifically about pornography and more generally about patriarchy, feminism, and men. And more than ever, we need that analysis.

But first, a bit more autobiography. In 1983, when Andrea delivered that speech, I was living about an hour north of the Twin Cities, working at a small Catholic college, where I got my first lessons in the sex/gender system and power. But as a professor of mine said when he realized he was sliding into a digression, “That’s another story for another course.”


I had no idea the men’s conference was taking place, but I wouldn’t have attended. At that point in my life, I was sure I knew everything I needed to know about feminism: Feminists were ugly women who were angry because they couldn’t get dates. I wasn’t a tough guy, but at that time I believed what I had been told by other men and had no idea of what feminism was or could mean to me. If I had been in the audience, I doubt I would have been able to understand what Andrea had to say.

But five years later, when I started graduate school at the University of Minnesota and began studying the feminist critique of pornography, I got a second chance. That year, Andrea published her book Letters from a War Zone, which included that speech, and this time I was paying attention.


One additional biographical note. That change in my assessment of feminism was due in part to the influence of a friend, Jim Koplin, who had been a volunteer in the antipornography movement in Minneapolis that Andrea had helped lead. The power of Andrea’s writing opened a door, and Jim helped me get past my fear and walk through it. It’s a reminder of how important we men can be in helping each other understand and embrace feminism. After Jim died in 2012, I wrote a book about my life with him, Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully, in which I described how his quiet commitment to radical politics changed me. That book was my attempt to describe how love between men changed me.

A few years later I met Gail Dines, who had been working to understand pornography in her UK graduate program. As we were getting established in our faculty jobs in the early 1990s, pro-porn ideology was becoming dominant in academic feminism and I’ll never forget the day I met Gail, watching her stand up at a conference and challenge that ideology. That’s also another story for another course. As the so-called “sex positive” approach become dogma in women’s studies, Gail’s fierce commitment, along with Jim’s ongoing support, helped keep me going.

Now, finally, back to my thesis, point #1.

Andrea was right about pornography. When I say “Andrea,” I really mean all the feminists who developed the critique of pornography and the other sexual-exploitation industries, including street prostitution, escorts, stripping, massage parlors, and now the online sex industry. Andrea was one of the most prominent of those critics but she was not alone. I focus on her writing because it influenced me the most dramatically.

In 1979, Andrea published the book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, which helped expand the political conversation about obscenity law from a liberal-versus-conservative framing about moral judgment to include a feminist critique of harm to women, which led to a civil-rights ordinance that was the basis for the Minneapolis organizing. Think back to the most common pornography of the 1970s, when she was developing her analysis: Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler magazines, and the movies “Deep Throat,” “Behind the Green Door,” and “The Devil in Miss Jones.” All were sexually explicit, sometimes depicting coercion and force, but remarkably tame compared with the sexual degradation and violence that is readily available on the internet today. Yet even then, Andrea saw that pornography was not just sex on the page and screen but sex presented in a domination/subordination dynamic, sex that eroticized power. Male domination/female subordination was the core pornographic power dynamic, but any social hierarchy—race, ethnicity, class, nationality, disability—could be eroticized for the primarily male viewers.

Fast-forward a half century, and the images that anyone of any age with a smartphone or computer today can access easily in seconds illustrate the accuracy of that analysis. Pornography has become more intensely cruel and degrading to women. Pornography is without question the most openly racist mass media genre. Scenes of rough sex that pornographers once considered too dangerous to market are now considered unremarkable. Girls report that the boys they date want to replicate those scenes during sex, including strangulation. Young women report abandoning the hope of a male partner who doesn’t use pornography. Women in relationships with men report a sense of betrayal when partners refuse to give up pornographic pleasures.

And then there are the women used in the production of pornography, the women Andrea demanded that we never forget. I don’t mean the “porn stars” who explain how they are empowered by the pornography industry. I’m not mocking those women but simply pointing out that they are not representative of an industry that, as one pornography producer told me, “chews up and spits out women.”

Andrea was right, but I doubt that she could have predicted the intensity of the misogyny in today’s pornography. Multiple penetrations, gang bangs, ass-to-mouth are standard practices. I won’t bother making an argument that these sexual practices are degrading, because even pornography producers acknowledge that. When I asked producers back in the early 2000s what trends to expect in the coming years, they said that couldn’t predict. During the filming of the documentary “The Price of Pleasure,” one producer responded rhetorically: “How many dicks can you stick in a girl at one time?” Producers told me that they didn’t know how to devise sexual scenes more extreme than what was already being filmed. That’s what we call “mainstream pornography,” which is presumed to be legal. Beyond the mainstream is more disturbing. The industry long denied it profited from filmed rape until a journalist documented the practice, and of course far more brutal material exists in the darker corners of the internet.


If a political movement offered an insightful analysis of a destructive social phenomenon and, decades later, that analysis proved to be more accurate than anyone could have predicted, it would make sense for the culture to pay attention. It would make sense for politicians to devise public policies to respond to the harm being done. It would make sense for scholars to pursue research to deepen our understanding of the power dynamics. It would make sense for journalists to report on the crisis. It would make sense for educators to include this analysis in health curricula. Indeed, a few people in those positions have done those things, but rarely do they even mention the foundational feminist critique. For the most part, the dominant culture has not paid attention. Why?

Let’s move to point #2.

Andrea was right in challenging men to care more about the well-being of women than about their own sexual pleasure. She was right to point out that in societies characterized by institutionalized male dominance—that is, patriarchal societies—men would find ways to avert their eyes, not only from the harms of pornography and the other sexual-exploitation industries, but also from rape, battery, sexual harassment. It was no surprise that the backlash to the #MeToo movement was almost immediate.

But why has such a compelling feminist critique of pornography been so ignored? The seemingly endless expansion of the pornography industry is partly a story about economics forces and technological developments. The profit motive in capitalism drives pornographers just as in any other business. VCRs, DVDs, computers, smartphones, and the internet have made distribution much easier. But behind those factors, pornography and the sexual-exploitation industries are fueled by men’s demand for sexual access to women. Liberal-left/secular men call it “sexual freedom,” by which they mean the freedom to pursue sexual pleasure without constraints from other men and without concern for the consequences for women. Conservative-right/religious men reject that libertarian ideology, preferring “traditional family values” that give them control over “their” women at home, but right-wing men are patrons of the industry all the same.

When I began speaking and writing in support of this critique, men constantly asked me, “Why are radical feminists are so obsessed with pornography?” My question in response has always been, “Why are men so obsessed with pornography?” The simple answer, of course, is that pornography works—it provides quick and easy sexual stimulation without any emotional investment in another person.

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But after lots of self-reflection about my years of using pornography as a young man and conversations with many men, I think it’s about more than just the demand for sexual access. Men use pornography to shore up a sense of power over women—women who never talk back, never challenge men or men’s desires. That illusion of control helps men evade our fears. Real men are not supposed to be afraid, of course, but I have never met a man who wasn’t at some point in his life afraid of at least one thing: The fear that he is not “man enough.” In patriarchy, men are trained not only to control women but to fear being controlled by other men if we aren’t strong enough to dominate. Men routinely fear that we are not capable of living up to the pathological profile of a “real man.” Pornography shores up illusions about male power.

Before I conclude, an important clarification. I realize I have been talking about heterosexual practices, but this is not solely a question for straight men. Gay men are targets in patriarchy, but they are implicated in patriarchy as well. Chris Kendall's book Gay Male Pornography: An Issue of Sex Discrimination is a good place to start to understand the complexity in the context of pornography. And, I should make it clear that when I talk about gay men, I include myself. Most of my intimate relationships have been heterosexual, but some have been with men. That’s also another story for another course, but it’s important to mark that many straight men have some gay experience and our often fumbling attempts to make sense of that is another example of how patriarchy constrains men.

Andrea asked men to embrace feminism for women’s sake, but she also knew that feminism was men’s only hope of escaping what some call “the man box.” She challenged us to renounce our sexual prerogatives, let go of our fears, and help women and ourselves. I’ll conclude with her words from that speech, starting with evidence that, in spite of the stereotypes, feminists indeed have a sense of humor and do not hate men.

I came here today because I don’t believe that rape is inevitable or natural. If I did, I would have no reason to be here. If I did, my political practice would be different than it is. Have you ever wondered why we are not just in armed combat against you? It’s not because there’s a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It is because we believe in your humanity, against all the evidence.

Next are the words of Andrea that I have quoted most often. When I first read them, I felt their power in my body. Every time I re-read them, I feel that same power.

We do not want to do the work of helping you to believe in your humanity. We cannot do it anymore. We have always tried. We have been repaid with systematic exploitation and systematic abuse. You are going to have to do this yourselves from now on and you know it. [Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1987 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1988/Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books 1993), pp. 169-170.]

Many of us have tried to meet that challenge, with varying degrees of success, but as a movement we have failed. We are living through another “crisis of masculinity,” which periodically appear when social movements threaten change. In this period of male panic, the conservative case for a benevolent sexism has been pushed aside by the hostile sexism of the manosphere. Liberals concerned with the problems of boys and men reject a radical feminist analysis, or often any feminist analysis. Instead of looking to feminism, men too often blame women and feminism, explicitly or implicitly.


That’s why I keep saying, over and over, as often as possible—that radical feminism is not a threat to men but a gift to us. If we take feminism seriously, it offers us a way to let go of that fear of inadequacy, which creates the possibility that we can let go of our obsession with being real men and instead try to be fully human.

This is where most speakers offer the upbeat ending, the reminder that social change takes time, that others before us kept struggling after defeats, that we have no right to give up. I agree we have no right to give up, but I don’t think that platitudes help. My assessment is that things are going to get worse before they get better and that there is no guarantee they will get better. In addition to the many failures of human beings to treat each other with respect and compassion, we face unprecedented ecological collapse for which there are no simple solutions, and perhaps no solutions at all. Progressive social change is likely to be more difficult against that background.

Fifteen years ago when I wrote “pornography is what the end of the world looks like,” I meant that in pornography we can see what a world without empathy looks like, and societies devoid of empathy couldn’t continue indefinitely. Today, the high-energy/high-technology systems we take for granted are closer to the end than I could have imagined. Fear often keeps us from confronting both social hierarchies and ecological collapse, but failing to confront crises does not resolve crises.

I’ll end with one more personal experience, not exactly upbeat but honest. I now live in rural New Mexico, and one of my new friends is a young man who shares many of my concerns. Because I didn’t want to be the old guy who annoys young people with unwanted advice, I was at first hesitant to offer too many stories from my life. But I finally realized that he wanted those conversations, that he feels cut off from most men in his own generation as he and his partner try to craft a life that is humane and ecologically sane. That got me thinking about my late friend Koplin, and how more important to me than his analysis were his stories about his life choices, which had given me a sense that I could let go of trying to be a real man and find a way to be a decent person. His example of how to face harsh realities and yet live a fulfilling life was crucial to my embrace of radical feminism.

That’s a reminder that while it is good for men to practice humility—to talk less and listen more, to remember we don’t have all the answers—we have to open up to each other, both to hold each other accountable and to help each other deal with our lives. We have to talk more about ourselves, not out of self-indulgence but out of a commitment to challenge and care for each other.

Andrea was right: We have to do it ourselves.

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Robert Jensen, an Emeritus Professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics from Olive Branch Press. His previous book, co-written with Wes Jackson, was An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity. To subscribe to his mailing list, go to http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html or visit

https://robertwjensen.org/


Email him at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu.

*A version of this essay was presented to the National Organization for Men Against Sexism’s 50th anniversary conference on July 17, 2025.*