and women in society as a whole . Intention behind the censorship of pornography clearly plays a role here . Mackinnon was clear that she wished to avoid the censorship of pornography on the traditional grounds of it being indecent , as this does nothing to address the specific issues pornography presents for women , but instead just insists that the subordination of women in sex is only to be done privately .
The speech act argument for censorship of pornography is based on the action of the speech , rather than the content , meaning this would be very difficult to enshrine in law without potentially censoring other materials not intended for pornographic use . This could have the unwanted effect of silencing women ’ s accounts of sexual violence , such as Lovelace , if they were labelled as pornographic . Saul points out that context is an indispensable facet of speech acts . She uses the hypothetical example of ‘ Ethel ’ who writes an ‘ I do ’ sign which she uses to perform a variety of speech acts like getting married or confessing to murder ( Saul , 2006 , pp . 235 ). This shows that illocutionary acts are dependent on the context in which they are performed , and the utterance cannot be separated out from this context . This suggests that the pornography itself is not the issue but that the context it is viewed in is , but this does not translate easily to legislation . For example , pornography platforms could simply rebrand themselves as ‘ educational ’ to get around laws prohibiting sexual content for pornographic use .
A stronger case for the censorship of porn may have to move beyond framing pornography as speech at all . Feminist journalist Megan Murphy points out that prostitution is not speech but is in fact “ filmed prostitution ” ( Murphy , 2021 ). With this in mind , perhaps changes to pornography law should not be made on the basis of pornography as a speech act but instead should focus on bringing these laws in line with laws concerning rape , sexual assault and prostitution .
In conclusion , Langton is successful is defending the philosophical soundness of Mackinnon ’ s argument using Austin ’ s speech act theory . However , her argument ( as she herself admits ) does not provide enough grounds to justify the censorship of pornography on the basis of the philosophical conclusions alone . The practical considerations of censoring pornography require evidence-based arguments showing that censoring of pornography would most likely result in a better outcome for women . Unfortunately , Langton ’ s defence using speech act theory cannot provide this without the addition of concrete statistics .
Borumandnia , N ., Khadembashi , N ., Tabatabaei , M , et al , ( 2020 ). The prevalence rate of sexual violence worldwide : a trend analysis . BMC Public Health 20 ( 1835 ). Available at :
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