"Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality"
About this Quote
Steinem draws a hard line with a rhetorician's scalpel: two words, "dominance" and "mutuality", that smuggle an entire politics of sex into a neat moral contrast. It's not a prudish anti-sex move. It's a power analysis disguised as a genre distinction, aimed at rerouting the conversation away from titillation and toward who gets agency, who gets reduced, and who gets to say yes.
The intent is strategic. By framing pornography as dominance, she links mainstream sexual imagery to the same hierarchies feminism fights in workplaces, courts, and homes. It suggests porn isn't simply explicitness; it's an instruction manual in inequality, a script that normalizes conquest, coercion, and the disappearance of the other's interior life. "Erotica", by contrast, isn't code for tasteful nudity. It's an ethical claim: desire can be reciprocal, negotiated, and still hot. Mutuality makes arousal compatible with consent rather than adjacent to it.
The subtext is also a rebuke to the easy defense that "it's just fantasy". Steinem implies fantasies have infrastructure: they train attention, shape expectation, and set default roles. The quote lands because it refuses the culture-war binary of sex-positive versus anti-sex; it offers a third axis: power. In the context of late-20th-century feminist battles over porn, she's making an argument that anticipates today's consent discourse and the push for "ethical porn", while warning how quickly the market turns sex into a hierarchy you can click, binge, and internalize.
The intent is strategic. By framing pornography as dominance, she links mainstream sexual imagery to the same hierarchies feminism fights in workplaces, courts, and homes. It suggests porn isn't simply explicitness; it's an instruction manual in inequality, a script that normalizes conquest, coercion, and the disappearance of the other's interior life. "Erotica", by contrast, isn't code for tasteful nudity. It's an ethical claim: desire can be reciprocal, negotiated, and still hot. Mutuality makes arousal compatible with consent rather than adjacent to it.
The subtext is also a rebuke to the easy defense that "it's just fantasy". Steinem implies fantasies have infrastructure: they train attention, shape expectation, and set default roles. The quote lands because it refuses the culture-war binary of sex-positive versus anti-sex; it offers a third axis: power. In the context of late-20th-century feminist battles over porn, she's making an argument that anticipates today's consent discourse and the push for "ethical porn", while warning how quickly the market turns sex into a hierarchy you can click, binge, and internalize.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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