In a society in which so many men are watching so much pornography that is rooted in the pain and humiliation of women, it is not difficult to understand why so many can't bear to confront it: Pornography forces men to face up to how we have learned to be sexual. And pornography forces women to face up to how men see them.

The only resistance is collective, and the pornographers want to squash it

When I critique pornography, I often am told to lighten up; sex is just sex, people say, and I should stop trying to politicize pornography. But pornography obviously is political. Telling men stories about sex in which women are three holes and two hands, not people, is political. It offers men a politics of sex and gender. And that politics is patriarchal and reactionary.

As with any political issue, successful strategies of resistance to injustice and oppression must be collective. There cannot be personal solutions to political problems. If we avoid engaging political problems in public and hope to make the best of things in private, we fail. Pornographers know that, which is why they want to make sure no collective remedies for women (through legislation or the courts) are considered, let alone enacted. But they also would prefer that none of these issues even be discussed in public. In recent years, their strategies for cutting off that discussion have been remarkably successful. When we criticize pornography, we typically are told we are either sexually dysfunctional prudes who are scared of sex, or people who hate freedom, or both. That works to keep many people quiet. The pornographers desperately want to keep people from asking the simple question: What kind of society would turn the injury and degradation of some into sexual pleasure for others? What kind of people does that make us -- the men who learn to find pleasure this way, and the women who learn to accept it?

The pornographers want to label any collective discussion of the meaning of intimacy and sexuality as repression. They want to derail any talk about a sexual ethic. They, of course, have a sexual ethic: Anything goes. On the surface that seems to be freedom: Consenting adults should be free to choose. I agree they should. But in a society in which power is not equally distributed, "anything goes" translates into "anything goes for men, and some women and children will suffer for it." Any society that claims to take freedom seriously must engage in a discussion about power, and take steps to equalize power. That means taking steps to end men's domination of women.

There are many controversial questions in the pornography debate: What is the nature of the relationship between sexually explicit media and behavior? Under what conditions can the consent of people involved in acts that may be detrimental to their own well-being be questioned? What harms of speech acts can trump free-speech concerns?

But there should be nothing controversial about this: To criticize pornography is not repressive. To speak about what one knows and feels and dreams is, in fact, liberating. We are not free if we aren't free to talk about our desire for an egalitarian intimacy and sexuality that would reject pain and humiliation.

That is not prudishness or censorship. It is at attempt to claim the best parts of our common humanity -- love, caring, empathy, solidarity. To do that is not to limit anyone. It is to say that people matter more than the profits of pornographers and the pleasure of pornography consumers. It is to say, simply, that women count as much as men.

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Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a founding member of the Nowar Collective, www.nowarcollective.com. He is the author of Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights Books). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

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