Page 62 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

56 CULTURAL STUDIES

political, but the very site of politics itself. Whereas the language of conspiracy
in feminist writings of the early 1960s formed an appropriation and
reconfiguration of contemporary political scenarios, its use by feminists in the
1980s produced disturbing echoes of long since discredited sexual and national
politics.
The second point is that pornography became theorized not just as a
representation of an act of violent sex, but as a violent act in itself. In this way
the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical was strategically
collapsed, thus producing an insistence that pornography is not just like rape, but
is rape itself; and that rape is not just like violence, but is violence itself. Once
again, naming becomes a political act. As Andrea Dworkin comments in the
introduction to her book on pornography, a man ‘actively maintains the power of
naming through force and he justifies force through the power of naming’ (1981:
18). By the 1980s, then, the issue of naming the problem had been replaced by
the problem of naming, an issue which has become crucial to the discussions of
whether ‘date rape’ counts as ‘real’ rape.
Finally, the emphasis on the causal power of pornography to incite men to
violence—a view summed up by Robin Morgan’s slogan, ‘pornography is the
theory, and rape is the practice’—in effect marked a return to a conspiracy theory
of mass culture, except that now it was men rather than women who were the
duped and robotic consumers of ideological messages. Andrew Ross, in his study
of intellectuals and popular culture, argues that during the 1980s ‘the vestigial
Cold War opposition between the advanced minority of an “adversary culture”
and the monolithically victimized mass was being played out by the new
feminist intellectuals’, leading to the ‘moral panic and conspiracy mania that are
shared features of the discourses of both anticommunist and antiporn
intellectuals’ (1989:186–8). In the anti-rape and anti-porn campaigns, then, the
language of conspiracy and a conspiracy theory of representation became
intertwined, producing a disconcerting return to earlier formulations in the
discourse of paranoia.

Crying wolf

I now want to return to The Beauty Myth, in order to show how the debate over
what is to count as the literal or the metaphorical reaches a crisis point in this
popular feminist polemic. Wolf tells a parallel story to Friedan’s account of an
ideological backlash against the previous gains of feminism, For Wolf, ‘the more
legal and material hindrances women have broken through’ in ‘the two decades
of radical action that followed the rebirth of feminism in the early 1970s’, ‘the
more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to
weigh upon us’ (1991:9–10). And, like Friedan, Wolf often presents this not as a
congruence of diverse historical forces, but the result of conscious planning,
particularly by the advertisers and the very industries which stand most to gain
from such a return to domestic virtues. At times Wolf is explicit about her