Ethics

Ethics Study Guide ©2018 Achieve Page 75 of 116 practices violate the basic ethical principle that we must never treat another person only as a means, but always as an end. Pornography is the verbal or pictorial representation of sexual behavior in an explicit way. It can be a degrading and demeaning portrayal of the role and status of women as sex objects to be exploited and manipulated sexually. In some pornography, women are characterized as slavishly dependent on men. The role of the female is depicted as one simply to provide sexual services to men. Sometimes, in violent pornography women are bound, tortured, gang-raped, mutilated, killed, or abused in many other ways as a means of providing sexual stimulation or pleasure to men. Whether material is pornography depends on its contextual feature. Not all sexually explicit material is pornographic. What makes it pornographic is its implicit, or even explicit, approval of sexual behavior that is immoral, i.e., that physically or psychologically violates the personhood of the participants in such a way as to endorse degradation. The definition of pornography has historically been difficult and sometimes controversial. The word itself comes from a Greek word meaning “writing about prostitutes.” Some have said this original root word is no longer relevant to the modern usage of the term. However, this is a useful starting point for a modern analysis. A well-developed definition of pornography comes from the feminist analysis of Helen Longino. She defined pornography as verbal or pictorial explicit representation of sexual behavior that includes, as a distinguishing characteristic, the degrading and demeaning portrayal of the role and status of the human female as a mere sexual object to be exploited and manipulated sexually. Under this definition, pornography is one distinct type of sexually explicit material. It is not the sexual content that many feminists object to. It is the advancement of sexual behavior that physically or psychologically violates the personhood of one of the participants. A related legal precedent includes: • American Booksellers v. Hudnut (1985): In the 1985 case American Booksellers Association v. Hudnut, a federal appeals court struck down the Indianapolis Anti-pornography Civil Rights Ordinance. Pornography, under the ordinance, was the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women, whether in pictures or in words, that also includes one or more of the following: 1. Women presented as sexual objects that enjoy pain or humiliation 2. Women presented as sexual objects that experience sexual pleasure in being raped 3. Women presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt, or as dismembered or truncated or fragmented or severed into body parts 4. Women presented as being penetrated by objects or animals 5. Women presented in scenarios of degradation, injury abasement, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual