Naked ambition: Pornography, Taste and the Problem of the Middlebrow

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, pornography was generally positioned as an object of criticism by feminism. A great deal of feminist work was devoted to analysing it as an almost pure expression of patriarchal ideology and power. Although these assumptions were never fully accepted, even within feminism, they did none the less have an almost taken-for-granted status, which meant that those who called for a more complex understanding of this area were largely marginalised. Whether drawing on classic works of popular feminism (see, for example, Dworkin, 1979; Lederer, 1980; Griffin, 1981) or on the more theoretical critiques of "woman as image" (see for example, Mulvey 1975; Pollock, 1977; Kappeler, 1986), this work assumed that pornography addressed male sexuality and was generally based on a violent subjugation of female sexuality and subjectivity.