Pornography To Women: An Argumentative Analysis

Pornography has long been regarded as a taboo within society. As a result, there are various perspectives on whether pornography is harmful, particularly to women. This essay will assess the argument of Cooke, who states pornography is not harmful as it is simply a work of fiction (2013). By redefining fiction, as well as utilizing ideas from Liao and Protassi about response and non-response realistic fiction, this argument will be criticized. This essay will conclusively argue that the consumption of pornography does harm women, if the fictitious beliefs from pornography are transported into everyday life.
Pornography is often a difficult subject to discuss ethically due to its controversial nature within society. Despite pornography becoming far more accessible in recent years due to technological advancements, as well as arguably more accepted within society over time, there is still great debate of the consequences of these materials. It order to discuss the extent to which pornography is harmful, it must first be defined what pornography is. From this point and thereafter the term pornography will be assumed to be “sexually explicit material (verbal or pictorial) that is primarily designed to produce sexual arousal in viewers” (Stanford) . This is the definition provided by Williams and is widely used in discussion of pornography due to its ability to distinguish between merely sexually explicit …show more content…
This is that there is not adequate evidence that false beliefs obtained from pornography is harmful. I disagree with this statement also. Despite there being criticism of authors such as Eaton on the substantiality of empirical evidence, I believe there are real world examples which suffice. To critique Cooke’s argument on false beliefs I will use the works of Langton and West as well as Liao and