Sex-positive vs anti-porn feminists

'Starting in the late 1980s some feminist scholars began to see porn as a tool that women could appropriate to liberate themselves from patriarchal norms of behavior and beauty. Porn sexuality, they argued, wasn't simply about subjugation. Instead, ''what pornography is trying to do is create, using real bodies, a fantasy of a kind of idealized and perfectly abundant pleasure,'' says Linda Williams, a film studies professor and leading porn theorist. What others might see as a masturbatory aid was cast instead as a genre of utopian social criticism. As for the anti-porn crusaders, Williams adds: ''Really, who are they to tell us where our sexual imaginations should go?''' The fight continues, even as porn rains in globs. 'Adelphia Communications has become the first American cable company to offer its subscribers triple-X-rated porn. Five years ago the company dropped Spice, a popular softcore pornography channel. Asked about the reversal, a spokeswoman replied, ''People want it, so we are trying to provide it. The more Xs, the more popular.''' More pro and con here. Seems the cons are losing; today we grow up with porn; vaginas gape openly all over. To think that in my adolescence, I wanked furiously to photos of women covered in night-gowns.