Reducing women to objects in pornography is a precondition to make the violence they endure look acceptable. When women stop being people, acts of violence against them stop being harmful, as objects cannot be harmed. The legitimation of VAW in pornography is also supported by two latent assumptions. First is the idea that pornography is a ādistortion, reflection, projection, expression, fantasy, representation or symbolā (MacKinnon, 1984, p. 326) of reality and, therefore, not real. Yet, āfantasy expresses ideologyā (MacKinnon, 1984, p. 327); it expresses the reality of the subordination of women entrenched in the way we understand sex, in and out of pornography. In fact, the second assumption that legitimizes VAW in pornographyā that is, that āwomen enjoy sexual mistreatmentā (Dines, 2010, p. 64), consent to their own humiliation, and never say ānoā to degrading actsā shows how eroticization and womenās subordination are strictly connected, with the latter becoming āsocially realā through its enactment in pornography (MacKinnon, 1984, p. 327). The illusion of consent covers the sexist nature of these acts and allows the refusal of sex not only to become indistinguishable from the desire of sex, but also normalized and eroticized. In pornography, even womenās ānoā is part of the fantasy, and force is no longer seen as force ābecause it is inflicted on women and called sexā (MacKinnon, 1984, pp. 340ā343). Under this pretense, almost everything becomes justifiable, including degrading and violent acts such as shoving a womanās head down the toilet, gagging her, or making her ingest her own vomit. While women become powerless in pornographyāas willing actors who ask to be acted uponāmen become powerful and always obtain as much sex as they want, how they want it. For a short time, men āget to see what life would look like if only women unquestionably consented to menās sexual demandsā (Dines, 2010, p. 63).
āĀ āI Donāt Hate All Women, Just Those Stuck-Up Bitchesā: How Incels and Mainstream Pornography Speak the Same Extreme Language of Misogyny (Alessia Tranchese and Lisa Sugiura)














