Using the introduction to "A Taste for Brown Sugar" (written by UCSB's own Mireille Miller-Young) and the introduction to "the Feminist Porn Book," in 300 words or more please identify at leasttwopopu

by Emma Schaefer-Whittall - (She/Her/Hers) Monday, May 18, 2020, 10:39 PM

The labeling of pornography as a public health crisis diminishes the faces and censures the stories behind sex work. In Fox’s piece, the narrative of her experience as a sex worker appeals to the idea of “epistemic injustice” which is inherent to the understanding of the moral crusader’s use of national resources and its elevation onto a critical level (Fox 2018: 197). Leaving the dialogue to the public health officials, abolitionist feminists, and the evangelical right perpetuates limits of knowledge in which the knower is absent from the conversation, a key component of the construction and victory over legislative and medical opinion. The most important statement that Fox fruitfully posits is that through the dual construction of sex work professionals (important rhetoric to combat the defilement of sex work as “work”) as both “helpless victims” and “powerful manipulators”, porn artists are believed to “pollute the social environment” (Fox 2018: 198). Webber and Sullivan reveal the lens of porn’s supposed harms complicating the victim profile that conservative crusaders use to influence public opinion. Moral crusaders pushing for a “porn panic” lobby the abuse, manipulation, and social disposition of women as a direct effect of pornography. However, Webber and Sullivan look beyond this desultory plagued agenda unveiling that the harms “revolve largely around the mainstream white, heterosexual, cisgendered male, a victim of his own limitless capacity for porn consumption” (Webber & Sullivan 2018: 193). Moral crusaders construct porn as a public health crisis because they want so badly to believe this is a feminist issue establishing women as vulnerable, exploited dolls in a multibillion dollar misogynistic operation aimed to quell America’s moral integrity and privatized, sexual respectability. But the victim narrative they prey upon, relies on a few, hand-selected horror-stories and erases the women on screen and off viewing porn as a mode for playing with gender and fetishes and encouraging consensual and safe sex (Webber & Sullivcan 2018: 195).