Gail Dines

Anti-pornography scholarship and activism

Dines is the founder of Stop Porn Culture, a politically feminist organization which publishes material for activists to use for anti-pornography "education".

Half of her beef is with the porn industry for profiting off of the humiliation of women and men, reproducing (har) and reinforcing sexist and racist ideology, preying on adolescent and pre-adolescent minors, and, in her view, trying to make everyone's sexuality the same. The other half of her beef is concerned with the fact that soft-core pornography has migrated into mainstream culture (shocking, we know).

Opinion of third-wave feminism

While acknowledging that third-wave feminism has produced some good-work, like intersectionality, she claims that on the whole, it is just neoliberal ideology applied to the women's movement.[1] Among her arguments is that third-wavers seem to emphasize individual women's empowerment, whereas second-wavers were big on women's liberation as an entire gender/class. She's not wrong that there are plenty of third-wavers who think this way, or that it seems to be the prevailing feminist ideology today. Where she is incorrect is in seeing second-wavers as the radicals and third-wavers as the (neo)liberals. There have been radical traditions in all three waves, and there have been liberal/moderate/conservative traditions in all three waves.

Books
  • Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality (with Robert Jensen and Ann Russo, 1997; ISBN 978-0-415-91813-8)
  • PornLand: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (2010; ISBN 978-0-8070-4452-0)

See Also
  • Andrea Dworkin, whose anti-pornography work inspired Dines's to some extent (however Dines has managed not to absorb her slight misandry)
gollark: There are also agnostics, which is kind of similar to what you might consider "soft atheism" I guess?
gollark: Yeeees, it does seem very subjective.
gollark: I want maximum customizability on both, since a phone is in essence just a highly integrated portable computer.
gollark: I've heard it said that there's one group which basically just wants something which works for some set of tasks and can't understand why you would want to go to all the work of configuring a device the way you want it, and another one which wants something maximally customizable to set it up as desired and can't understand why you would buy something which doesn't allow that.
gollark: Yes, lots of people don't care.

References
  1. Neo-Liberalism and the Defanging of Feminism (YouTube), a lecture of hers from July 2012
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