Pornography is a divisive issue for feminism. Whereas some feminists embrace pornographys emancipatory potential to liberate us from sexual inhibitions and transgress oppressive norms of sexuality, others condemn it as an integral part of a larger public institution for the subordination of women.  One question central to this debate is whether exposure to pornography causes various sexist attitudes and behaviors, thereby contributing to the gender inequality that plagues our society.  In other words, does pornography harm women? 

Although feminists typically frame the issue in more subtle ways, the question of harm is at bottom the central issue for feminists addressing pornography.  Even feminists who aim to move beyond the pro or con debate have a view about whether there is a causal connection between pornography and harm to women.  The problem of harm seems unavoidable, and rightly so, for how can one take any kind of normative stand on pornography without deciding whether it has an effect on its consumers attitudes and behavior, or whether that effect is detrimental, beneficial, or neutral?

The issue of whether exposure to pornography causes sexist attitudes and behaviors is an empirical one which would seem to benefit little from philosophical scrutiny.  And so feminists on both sides of the debate marshal studies based upon laboratory experiments, cross-cultural comparisons, and personal testimony, in order to support or deny such a connection.  Given these elaborate efforts, it is surprising that so little attention has been paid to just what is meant by cause in this debate.  The anti-porn feminists (with one notable exception [1] ) do not define it, although causal terms abound in their criticism of pornography. [2]   Likewise, their critics typically do not specify what they mean by the term when they deny a causal connection between pornography and harm.  Both camps treat the term cause as if its meaning were self-evident and free from ambiguity.

But is the meaning of cause unambiguous?  Even before we subject the concept to philosophical scrutiny, our use of causal concepts in ordinary language clearly reveals several importantly different senses of the term.  We say, for example, that kindling a flame under a pot of water will cause the contents to boil.  If the water is reasonably pure and the altitude close to sea level, then raising the temperature to 100 C will cause water to boil in every instance, and there is no way to make water boil without heating it to just that temperature.  In philosophical parlance, we might say that raising the temperature to 100 C is both necessary and sufficient to make water boil. [3]   To take another example, we describe drowning as the cause of a persons death, although surely the person would have eventually died anyway, even if she had not drowned.  In this case the cause is sufficient, but not necessary, for its effect.  In yet another instance, we say that regular cigarette smoking causes lung cancer.   We all know, however, that not every person who regularly smokes gets lung cancer, nor did each person with lung cancer ever smoke, much less smoke regularly.  In this case, smoking is neither necessary nor sufficient for contracting the disease, although doctors and medical researchers nevertheless insist that it causes lung cancer.

The fact that our everyday conception of causation comprises such different senses, coupled with the fact that anti-porn feminists do not say just what they mean by cause, ought to give us pause with respect to the debate about pornography.  Just what do anti-porn feminists mean when they assert that pornography causes harm, and what do pro-porn feminists and others mean in rejecting this proposition?  I shall argue that whereas anti-porn feminists mean (or ought to mean) one thing by cause when they claim that pornography causes women harm, their critics saddle them with a quite different and less tenable conception of causation.  That the two camps are usually talking past each other goes unnoticed in the literature, and the resulting confusion obscures the real issues of the debate.

This paper aims to dispel this confusion by developing a philosophically defensible conception of causation to which anti-porn feminists can help themselves. [4]   This will have the effect of casting the anti-porn feminists causal argument in the most plausible light and rendering their position stronger than usually supposed.  This is meant not as a defense of their position (for the truth of their claims about pornography can only be decided empirically), but rather as an attempt to sift out irrelevant criticisms of their view and get down to the real issues of the dispute.  Once we have precisely defined the terms of the debate about pornography and harm, we can begin to see the serious objections that threaten the anti-porn feminist view.  The conception of causation provided by this paper, then, only partially defends anti-porn feminists against their critics; it also serves to highlight aspects of their argument that need work.

The paper takes the following shape.  Section 1 reconstructs the anti-porn feminists argument with an eye toward specifying just what kind of harm pornography is said to cause.  Section 2 examines the most common criticism of this view and uncovers the conception of causation that the critics assume is operative in the anti-porn feminist picture of pornography.  I shall argue that these criticisms are deflected by attributing to the anti-porn feminists a more reasonable conception of causation.  Section 3 concludes by briefly exploring the remaining difficulties that must be addressed by this more plausible causal argument.