Fred Turner in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
“DID PORN KILL feminism?” asked Amia Srinivasan in her widely read book The Right to Sex (2021). In the internet age, it sure can look that way. As Srinivasan pointed out, top commercial porn sites host billions of visitors every month. Today’s college students grew up with those sites just a click away. Many had their first sexual experiences in front of a computer screen. When she talked with her own college students, she saw the consequences:
Could it be that pornography doesn’t merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real, I asked? Yes, they said. Does porn silence women, making it harder for them to protest against unwanted sex, and harder for men to hear those protests? Yes, they said. Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for the marginalisation of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it.
If that’s true, then what should we make of the life of Candida Royalle? As Jane Kamensky’s beautifully crafted new biography, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below, reveals, Royalle, who died in 2015, was a porn star and a feminist. And so were many of her friends. As Srinivasan notes, it would be easy to blame porn and the sex wars of the 1980s for turning a women’s liberation movement that “exploded with such joyous fury” in the 1960s into “a fractured and worn thing” today. But Kamensky’s deft portrait of Royalle undercuts that explanation, and even the tale of feminism’s decline.
More here.