Gerry Ellis investigates 'Watching all the currents within feminism is very interesting. We noticed the number of films, particularly in porn, in which women were forcibly stripped at gunpoint or knifepoint and raped. They were eventually, as they say, screwed into submission, threw their arms around their attacker and thanked him for this glorious liberating experience. Plainly, the message in these films was that when a woman says no she really means yes. Pornography is a generalising medium.
Serious films make their own rules.
Anyone who has taken a media studies course during the eighties will probably know about the male gaze. For feminist film theorists, it was fundamental to the way Hollywood misrepresented women. Pornography was seen as the most extreme example of the way cinema privileged the male gaze at the expense of women. For feminist theorists like Professor Linda Williams, demonising male voyeuristic pleasure in this way created its own problems. Its moral distinction between 'normal' and 'perverse' subjectivities, she says, is what led some feminists to line up with the anti pornography crusades of the moral right.