Langton’s article “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts ” argues that pornography silences women. This is similar to Katherine MacKinnon’s thesis and throughout the rest of her article, Langton labels pornography as a speech act, or an utterance, which has illocutionary effects that support MacKinnon’s claims of: 1) pornography subordinating women and 2) pornography silencing women. Langton introduces the terms locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary to explain the effects of pornography. To explain how women are subordinated as a result of pornographic speech acts, the locutionary effect would be a portrayal of what is acceptable in sex, the perlocutionary would be that these “rules” or “methods” depicted rank women as having less worth than men, and the illocutionary would be that women are unfairly subordinated as inferior. Similarly to subordination, pornographic speech acts silence women. The locutionary effect in this case would be that pornography portrays women as objects of pleasure that can’t say “no,” the perlocutionary effect would be that men see women as objects that don’t really mean the words they say and are willing to have sex at all times, and the illocutionary effect would be that women’s words have no substance and therefore women are silenced.
