In this essay, I argue that pornography silences women by corrupting the very conceptual capacities through which we understand gender and sexuality. Building on J.L. Austin’s Speech Act Theory (SAT) and the Feminist Speech Act Theory (FSAT) developed by Langton and Hornsby, I extend their view to show that pornography not only subordinates women but also degrades men’s ability to interpret and respond to women as moral equals. To support this claim, I begin by outlining the pornography debate between libertarian and radical feminists before defending the radical feminist position. I then develop my own contribution: that pornography is concept-denigrating for its consumers. Drawing creatively on Cora Diamond’s idea of losing your concepts, I argue that pornography erodes men’s conceptual understanding, disabling their capacity for uptake and thereby perpetuating the silencing and harm of women.

The pornography debate exists between the libertarian and radical feminists on issues of feminist sexual morality. Both camps value female sexual liberation but diverge on where pornography fits into this. The libertarian stance is that pornography is positive, and sex is potentially liberating in exchange of pleasure between consenting partners.¹ Here, porn actors are employed in their occupations because they enjoy sexual intercourse and make lucrative salaries doing sex work.  

It is important to note the moral issues with this view, despite them not being the focal point of my essay. By framing sex as a mere job, sexuality no longer concerns mutual desire but is reduced to performance for economic gain. 

Furthermore, it is commonly known that while there is a minority of pornstars making lucrative salaries many actors are underpaid and face unsafe working conditions. Producers, distributors, and corporations profit disproportionately in comparison to performers. Thus, the sexual liberation claimed in the libertarian stance is in actuality exploitation.

On female sexual liberation: the claim that pornography is potentially liberating assumes sexual freedom equals empowerment. Pornography, however, entrenches patriarchal control, presenting liberation as an illusion. 

Even if sex is pleasurable for performers, consumption of pornography normalises instrumentalisation of women for sex, dominant versus subordinate gender hierarchies and subsequently violent depictions of sex. “The silencing claim pits pornographer’s liberty to produce pornographic materials against women’s liberty to perform important speech acts.”² 

So, turning to the other side of the conversation, under the opinion of the radical feminists, pornography does not support women or their sexual prerogatives. Sexuality in a maledominated society involves danger.³ Sexual practices such as pornography function as a streamlined system of violence towards women due to implicit and explicit analyses that tie dominant versus subordinate power relations to the perpetuance of male dominance. 

Before I criticise this position, I will explain Austin’s SAT, in order to discuss H&L’s application of it to pornography. Simply put, Austin’s position is that all speech entails an action. Speech acts are actions done with words. “To say something is in the full normal sense to do something.”⁴ 

When we utter sentences, some are assessable via truth-aptness. For example, the sentence ‘My laptop is overheating.’ is either true or false. However, not all utterances that we produce are assessable in this way: statements are not true or false but felicitous or infelicitous – not all utterances are judged by truth conditions. There is a distinction between saying anything; saying something with a specific force; and the further effects of saying something with a specific force. These linguistic acts are respectively named locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutions by Austin. 

Locutionary acts are uttering anything at all with the literal meaning of the words in mind.

The focus in locutionary acts is on the semantic content of the statement.⁵

Illocutionary acts are uttering something with a specific purpose.⁶ Illocutionary acts concern the intended meaning of a statement. For example, asking a question, stating an imperative, wishing a wish: The stater of the statement ‘I wish I brought a coat, it is chilly out’ might actually mean ‘I’m cold, may I borrow your coat?’ without directly stating that.  

Perlocutions are the consequential effects of an illocutionary act.⁷ After S says, ‘I wish I brought a coat, it is chilly out,’ O might take off her jacket to give to S. In illocutionary acts an utterer partakes in communicative action in saying something such that she lets a hearer know she wants to be understood. Whereas in a perlocution, the speaker aims to produce an effect on the hearer and thereby bring about something in the world.

An obvious issue for Austin’s analysis is that the intended force of a speech act cannot be ensured. He even recognises that “infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir.”⁸ Even if S says, ‘I wish I brought a coat, it is chilly out,’ with the force (meaning) of ‘may I borrow your coat’ to bring about the action of O giving her coat to S, there is little guarantee that O will react in the way S desires, in spite of S constructing her sentences specifically to bring about the ends she desires. 

Austin’s response to this is enclosed within his argument. There exist formal and informal conditions and institutions of social and linguistic interaction that ensure the force of a speech act. These conventions he calls felicity conditions. “If we sin against one of these six rules our performative utterance will be […] unhappy.”⁹ Felicity conditions ensure the illocutionary force of a speech act from misfiring. I will now explain what it means for a speech act to misfire. 

Misfires are infelicities, cases in which a speech act fails to be performed at all. The “act [is] purported, but void.”¹⁰ For example, if I say ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’ but am not a licensed officiant, the marriage does not legally happen, and the declaration misfires. I have failed to change something in the world (marry two people). I have performed an act of speech but no speech act. 

Another speech act might misfire because the addressee of said act has failed to respond with appropriate uptake. The illocutionary act requires recognition by the addressee, otherwise the act fails to take effect. For example, S says to me ‘I’m sorry for missing your birthday.’ With the expectation of my acceptance or acknowledgement. However, if I roll my eyes or stay silent, ignoring the statement, S’s apology does not function socially and misfires as its’ purpose is unfulfilled. 

The other kind of infelicity is abuse: “act[s that are] professed but hollow.”¹¹ The paradigm of felicity conditions is sincerity. This is because individuals cannot communicate effectively, have contracts, or bring about actions in the world without the assumed convention that people say things sincerely. If I promise to my partner ‘I will marry you tomorrow’ but I do not have any intention of fulfilling this promise, then this illocutionary act is not felicitous because it is not sincere. My act is therefore an abuse because it fails to live up to a standard appropriate for speech acts of its kind.¹²

Now I that I have explained infelicities, I can turn to H&L to apply SAT to pornography. Their work illustrates two key mechanisms: first, the problem of failed uptake, and second, the possibility of abuse. From here, the analysis can be extended to cases of rape, which can in turn be mapped directly onto the structure of speech acts. I’d like to clarify that pornography doesn’t stop women from speaking, but blocks their illocutionary force, “specifically, pornography may make it nearly impossible for women to refuse unwanted sex.” ¹³ 

To see how this works in practice, H&L distinguish three distinct forms of silencing: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. Locutionary silencing, where the woman is prevented or intimidated into not speaking. Illocutionary silencing, where the woman is unable to carry out the act she intends to in her speech. And Perlocutionary silencing, where the subject’s speech act cannot have its’ intended purposes executed.  

H&L’s position is that pornography is a kind of SAT where the action speech entails is the silencing (and therefore subordination) of women. Silencing is a kind of abuse, specifically defined as a failure to act.¹⁴ Furthermore, it is a systematic failure due to consumption of pornography “Silencing… captures cases where one’s illocutionary intentions systematically fail to be recognized, despite one’s best efforts.”¹⁵ 

To further specify, Hornsby claims that illocutionary acts are essentially communicative; a necessary condition of linguistic communication is reciprocity.¹⁶ Communication is powered by the interlocutors being able to do with their words what they intend to and in turn recognising the other’s intention. Thus, we can now understand the issue with illocutionary silencing. The declaration of faux perspectives about women interferes with reciprocity, a precondition of communication. 

I must note that it is not that pornography itself preventing women from producing locutions, but rather pornography undermining women’s capacity to do things with their locutions.

Pornography interferes with women’s ability to successfully perform the speech act of sexual refusal.

Now to apply H&L’s theory to reality: pornography creates an environment where a woman’s refusal to have sex is taken as part of the seduction. H&L argue that pornography enables the genesis of an uncomprehending communicative climate that interferes with men’s uptake abilities. Consumption of pornography invokes the literal inability to realise the illocutionary intention of a woman’s ‘no’. “A woman says ‘No’ to a man, when she is trying to refuse sex; she uses the right locution for an act of refusal, but somehow her speech act goes wrong… there is no uptake in her hearer.”¹⁷

I will explain this further, using examples that stick close to Austin’s SAT: any attempted refusal to have sex is illocutionarily silenced if it is not even recognised as a refusal; and a woman’s refusal to have sex is perlocutionarily silenced if, despite recognition of refusal, she is forced to have sex anyway. “Since in Austin’s framework the hearer’s uptake is necessary for illocuting, a woman’s ‘No’—not understood for what it was (a refusal) or misunderstood for something else (a consent)—ends up misfiring.”¹⁸ 

I think it is important to add that the climate of incomprehension is aided by the fact that within the confines of the artifice of pornographic material, both men and women are performers. Pornography-as-performance is an established, systematic category of silencing, by framing sex as a performance in the minds of both men and women, “the hearer takes the speaker to be performing a non-serious act, that is, not to be illocuting.”¹⁹This impacts reality as individual’s conceptual framework is distorted, rendering their ability to uptake a ‘no’ as a ‘no’ and instead as a game or façade (both examples of perlocutionary silencing, as previously outlined). 

Furthermore, pornography must not be mistaken as mere fantasy. Whilst it undeniably has fictious elements, the individuals participating in it are real. It is a glitzy, simulated depiction of a real thing that has been reified as the thing itself in the mind of its’ consumers. 

First, pornography undermines the felicity conditions of refusal, skewing the conventions and expectations required for a woman’s ‘no’ to be felicitously recognised as a refusal. Second, it fosters conditions for illocutionary failure: a woman’s utterance of ‘no’ risks not being taken up as refusal, but instead being reinterpreted through pornographic scripts as part of the game. In this way, pornography contributes to the systematic silencing H&L describe, where speech is deprived of its intended illocutionary force.

I will now move to my critiques of H&L. Anthony argues that a majority of pornography is not in fact speech. For her, use of Austin’s model “metaphorically to cover actions that do not involve speech” is taking things too far.²⁰ The point is that Pornography is pictorial, not linguistic. For Austin, for an act of expression to be illocutionary, it must also be locutionary; pornography however does not utter.

The response to this objection comes from Hornsby, who surprisingly also argues that pornography is not speech. As mentioned previously, for Hornsby the primary function of language is communication. This does not mean random locutions or utterances, but rather a meeting of minds.²¹ Pornography does not constitute communicative illocutionary actions. Since communication is the hallmark of speech, noncommunicative pornography should not be considered as such. Thus, Austin’s model can still be used to understand how pornography silences women.

A practical issue in cases of sexual assault and misfiring is that in criminal law, a rape conviction includes proof of a guilty mind²². If proof of guilty mindedness is necessary then in certain cases if a person engages in sexual intercourse with another, honestly believing the other has consented then, however unreasonable and unbelievable this belief may be, he did not have intercourse with a ‘guilty mind,’ and thus could not have raped.²³ This is a troubling issue for H&L’s argument as accepting this diminishes perpetrator’s culpability because they cannot satisfy the mens rea requirement. 

My response to this rests with Mikkola’s argument that even if H&L’s silencing claim exonerates perpetrators, there is “no reason to accept that putative illocutionary disablements of refusals are actual confusions between insincere and sincere refusals.”²⁴ Moreover, the silencing claim is only under threat if a lack of refusal were to entail consent, which I believe it does not. If the victim did not consent, the actus reus is satisfied, and this objection only has legs if we accept the implicit premise that consent is entailed by an absence of refusal, which it is not in law, or in logical practice. 

An important issue to consider is the importance of uptake in the success of illocutionary acts (specifically refusals). An objection from Bird, is that uptake (defined by him as “the appreciation by an audience of the intended illocution of the speaker”²⁵) is unnecessary for successful illocutionary refusals. 

H&L believe when pornography prevents women’s locutions from securing the required uptake the locution will fail to satisfy the required conditions for a speech act to successfully count as a refusal. For Bird, successful locutions depend on “the words [locuted], their normal meaning, and the context alone.”²⁶ If we believe this then securing uptake is not relevant. I do not share Bird’s opinion that uptake is unnecessary for successful refusals (to continue Hornsby’s line of argument) as it does not sufficiently appreciate the communicative nature of refusal.

This is not to say that successful illocution and communication are the same. However, illocutionary refusals are essentially communicative: “The hallmark of communication is reciprocity, and so when it fails interlocutors are talking at cross-purposes. This is what happens when illocutionary refusals misfire [originally argued by H&L] demonstrating such misfiring to involve communicative failures.”²⁷ How I see it, the locution ‘No.’ has two aims:

first, to refuse (sex); second, to communicate this to the hearer. Therefore, uptake is necessary for illocutionary success. 

I would even take the necessity of uptake for successful communication further. Where H&L focus on uptake failure from pornography; I argue it hollows out the very conceptual resources consumers need to respond to speech acts in the first place, in turn systemically harming women. I claim this with the support of Cora Diamond’s Losing Your Concepts (1988). 

Diamond outlines three kinds of concept-loss, MacIntyrian: “those who say that we have actually lost concepts central to moral life” (Diamond, 1988, 256); Cavellian: “those […] who point out that some or many philosophers write as if we inhabited a world from which those concepts had vanished.” (Diamond, 1988, 256); And Murdochian. I will specifically be referring to the first one, where a concept can no longer be applied intelligibly in one’s life, because i) one’s practices (way of living) have eroded the ability to use it; or ii) because of a lack of moral vocabulary and lack of mode of application of said moral vocabulary.

Diamond stresses that to lose a concept is to lose a mode of thought, a way of seeing and responding to the world. Pornography encourages precisely such loss, this is not just a matter of failing to register a woman’s refusal, it is not making men merely inattentive, but rather rendering them conceptually incapable of recognising refusal, dignity, or respect as binding categories. “The language and the appearances of morality persist even though the integral substance of morality has to a large degree been fragmented and then in part destroyed.”²⁸

These concepts are still there in language for him, but his consumption of pornography has corroded his ability to live by and apply them. “Things significant in their lives are not so much unnamed as misnamed. […] one’s thoughts cannot properly be thought, are misexpressed or not expressed at all” (Diamond, 1988, 259).²⁹ H&L’s model remains within Austin’s framework of uptake and felicity conditions, but using Diamond means I can argue for the far more disturbing prospect that the very possibility of uptake is destroyed once the underlying concepts are corrupted, rather than concepts being misexpressed, uptakers of pornography cannot express moral sentiments at all.

For example, The conservative MP Neil Parish who held the seat of Tiverton and Honiton for twelve years, resigned in 2022 after peers raised a complaint about seeing him watching pornography in parliament. Initially, Parish claimed it to be an accident – that he had been looking at tractors and stumbled upon a blue website of similar name.³⁰ He later admitted to purposely seeking out pornography whilst in the voting chamber. 

His own description of this as a ‘moment of madness’ exemplifies my diagnosis: he could no longer make sense of his conduct within the moral framework that would ordinarily guide one’s behaviour. “Someone with no such grasp would be unable to see the pattern in the application of the term.” or what standards of responsibility and propriety he had undermined.³¹ Parish’s actions did not simply misalign with social expectations; they revealed that the concepts by which such expectations could be understood had already collapsed for him.

To conclude, I have outlined the debate between libertarian and radical feminists, critiquing the liberal stance in order to turn to the radical one, so that I may discuss H&L. Before presenting criticisms of H&L’s perspective, I outlined Austin’s SAT so as to give a foundation to FSAT. I propose that while H&L are right to argue that pornography silences women by undermining their capacity to perform speech acts, their account misses the perspective that pornography also corrodes consumer’s conceptual capacities, producing agents who cannot even recognise refusal as refusal, in turn harming women even further. Pornography is not only an instrument of women’s subordination, but also a force that annihilates men’s moral intelligibility. Without this recognition, the analysis of pornography’s harms remains incomplete.