Fallacies Of Feminist Theory

Feminist Theory http://fty.sagepub.com Exposing the fallacies of anti-porn feminism
Laurie Shrage
Feminist Theory 2005; 6; 45
DOI: 10.1177/1464700105050226
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Moreover, ‘as an Object of appetite for another’, Kant writes, a person becomes a thing and can be treated and used as such by every one. This is the only case in which a human being is designed by nature as the Object of another’s enjoyment. Sexual desire is at the root of it; and that is why we are ashamed of it, and why all strict moralists, and those who had pretensions to be regarded as saints, sought to suppress and extirpate it. (Kant, 1963: 163–4)

If sexual acts involve reducing a person to an object for our enjoyment, then they violate the basic rule of morality, which, for Kant, obliges us to treat persons always as ends in themselves and never as mere instruments for our use. Kant’s sexual philosophy led him to condemn virtually all sexual acts, including extramarital sex, masturbation, paid sex, and homosexuality. Kant condoned only procreative sex between heterosexual marital partners because, for reasons explained below, procreative sex between marital partners mitigates the moral wrongs of instrumental use, and avoids degrading the humanity of the participants (Herman, 1993:
60–1; Brake, 2005: 58, 76–7).
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Therefore, in a legal marriage, a woman does not always get back what she surrenders, while her sexuality and labour are legally at the disposal of one man. Moreover, the state typically enforces a man’s right of sexual use of his wife, even when his use is non-consensual and uncaring (e.g., in jurisdictions in which a wife cannot legally charge her husband with sexual assault). Thus marriage, for MacKinnon, does not mitigate the harms of sexual use, but compounds or aggravates them.
Indeed marriage, with its attendant myths of mutual love and happiness, obscures what pornography makes evident: the cultural institutions and beliefs that permit men to use women sexually, and to secure their selfsurrender and subordination.
Elizabeth Brake has argued that marriage cannot resolve the problem of instrumental sexual use even for Kant, let alone for MacKinnon. Brake writes, ‘Kant’s account of legal marriage as a remedy for the injustice of unmarried sex fails . . . because legal rights are insufficient to alter the tendencies to objectification which Kant identifies in sex’ (Brake, 2005:
59). Brake alleges that the primary problem about sex for Kant is that, in surrendering our bodies sexually, we alienate our inalienable right