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“Women can be sexual beings without forsaking other aspects of their
identities … Suppression of women’s sexuality tends to coincide with the
suppression of women’s equality”, writes Nadine Strossen in Defending
Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (Abacus,
£8.99, ISBN 0 349 10765 3). In answer to the pro-censorship crusade that
has swept the US recently, led by feminists Catherine McKinnon and Andrea
Dworkin, Strossen suggests that repressing sexual material serves only to
aggravate discrimination and violence. Fresh, explicit, strident and an
indication of how virulent the pornography debate has become within feminism,
this book often seems to be more of a personal attack on McKinnon and Dworkin
than an argument against their ideas.