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 “distortion, reflection, projection, expression, fantasy, representation or symbol” (MacKinnon, 1984, p. 326) of reality and, therefore, not real. Yet, “fantasy expresses ideology” (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 pornography– that is, that “women enjoy sexual mistreatment” (Dines, 2010, p. 64), consent to their own humiliation, and never say “no” to degrading acts– shows how eroticization and women’s subordination are strictly connected, with the latter becoming “socially real” 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 women’s “no” is part of the fantasy, and force is no longer seen as force “because it is inflicted on women and called sex” (MacKinnon, 1984, pp. 340–343). Under this pretense, almost everything becomes justifiable, including degrading and violent acts such as shoving a woman’s head down the toilet, gagging her, or making her ingest her own vomit. While women become powerless in pornography—as willing actors who ask to be acted upon—men become powerful and always obtain as much sex as they want, how they want it. For a short time, men “get to see what life would look like if only women unquestionably consented to men’s sexual demands” (Dines, 2010, p. 63).
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