Probably the most attractive thing to me about the second wave radical feminists (I mean people like Sheila Jeffreys and Andrea Dworkin) was their intolerance: they staked out a “yes/no” position in the middle of a zone of disarming cultural and political complexity, and defended it with an admirable combination of guile, malice and polemical fervour. Even today it seems to me that many of those who want to insist on the complex and many-faceted character of the question of sexist ideology are basically looking for excuses to renege on the radfems’ absolutely unequivocal hostility towards sexism in all its forms. It’s not that it isn’t a complex question; it is rather that the decision point on which the radfems’ polemical stance was based was a formally simple proposition with complex consequences. Is sexist ideology to be tolerated, or not? If it isn’t, then its pervasive manifestation in and as pornography (both vulgar and sophisticated, “pulp” and “literary”) is not to be tolerated either. It is no more to be tolerated in Bataille than in Hustler.

This to my mind was one of the real shocks delivered by Dworkin’s Pornography: that Dworkin read The Story of the Eye in exactly the same way as she read tit mags. It wasn’t that she didn’t know there was a difference. The question of whether a pornography might exist that was not a manifestation of sexist ideology, of whether there might be more to pornography than the sexist ideologemes that, everyone admits, certainly circulate freely within it, was I think of little interest to the radfems. Dworkin made various gestures towards a sexual literature that would manifest intelligence rather than stupidity, but her focus was on the destruction of error rather than the production of a new sexual subject.

The “anti-porn” moment in radical feminism was one of a turn to the state: the question gradually ceased to be how to make war on sexist ideology, and became one of how to identify pornography as a genre, quantify its harms, establish a legal framework with which to certify and repress certain categories of content. An apparatus of knowledge was brought forth: definitions of pornography were issued, cataloguing precisely which positions were demeaning, which acts intrinsically violent. There is an instructive parallel here with the way the state proposes to combat racism: again, the terms of abuse are identified and “hate speech” accordingly criminalized, with the emphasis falling on overt manifestations of hostility or gestures of denigration. The racism of the police, for example, is addressed through training in “cultural sensitivity”. Ideological struggle is replaced by the management of attitude and opinion; the question becomes one of the extent to which opinion informs behaviour. Many of the anti-porn feminists were side-tracked into defending the claim that there was a demonstrable causal relationship between the availability of pornography and the prevalence of sexually violent acts, a claim which is both easy to undermine and, from the standpoint of their original critique, totally irrelevant.

The radical feminists’ understanding of pornography as one of the forms taken by sexist ideology, and consequently as a legitimate target of ideological Kulturkampf, was informed by two conceptions: firstly, their conception of ideology as a system of received ideas which performed the function of naturalising power relations, and secondly their conception of pornography as a genre which “normalised” the actions and attitudes it depicted. Sexist ideology naturalised the power relations whose institutional form was compulsory heterosexuality, so that the object of coercion - the resisting woman - would be identified as unnatural and in need of correction. The role of pornography in this coercion was to define sexual normality for women in terms of obedient availability, depicting a sexual universe in which consent was to be taken for granted, arousal efficiently maintained, and the path to satisfaction deterministically plotted.

However, contemporary heterosexual porn has arguably much the same relationship to actually existing heterosexuality as glossy lifestyle magazines have to the tedium, stress, indignity and increasing financial burden of real domesticity: it does not so much naturalize heterosexuality as derealize it, projecting an image of fulfilment from which all conflict, delay and disappointment have been expunged. Its function in relation to compulsory heterosexuality is not so much one of reinforcement as one of crisis management. It is often said that pornography is “fantasy”; slightly less often that it is “utopian”. But it remains an entirely reactive fantasy, a utopia - like that of Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Branch, say - systematically structured by denial.

I imagine that the support of groups such as Justice For Women for the proposed legal restrictions on the possession of “extreme pornography” is based on the assumption, inherited from the radfems’ critique of heterosexual hardcore, that such material normalises what it depicts; that it represents an escalation of heterosexist coercion, a new wave of intimidation. But the entire point of “extreme” material is to establish a definitive break with normality, to convoke - be it in the form of unbearable visual horror or insufferable psychic torment - a Real beyond the de-realized consensual utopia of mainstream pornography. The single most significant word in the vocabulary of BDSM is “vanilla”, the word used to describe conventional sexual practices (whatever, at any given time, these may happen to be); the term does not merely identify one flavour amongst others, but indicates a flavour without flavour, a minimally flavoursome alternative: the alternative against which all the other alternatives are able to distinguish themselves as “alternative”. Nobody is ever going to be persuaded by images of consensual genital injury that it is the sort of thing everybody would be doing if they only knew how much fun it was.

My objection to the proposed legal measures is not therefore that they are intolerant; there is no virtue in tolerating reactionary falsehood. It is rather that in turning to the state to define and regulate the “extreme”, it inevitably produces an incoherent and dangerously vague discourse of legal opinion, which will in turn be selectively employed to further victimize the sorts of people who usually end up getting victimized by this sort of thing. This is not - and nor can it be - the opening up of a new front in the war on sexist bullshit; it’s supplying Christian Voice-style bigots (“moral entrepreneurs”, to borrow Julian Petley’s useful phrase) with further ammunition to use in their never-ending war on nonces.