It was telling that Cordelia Fine’s essay (“The Porn Ultimatum”, September) was published under your cover line “Porn Wars”. The latter was of course a name given to the internal feminist battles begun in the 1980s during which views on pornography among feminists were among the most divisive: sex-positive feminists facing off the likes of Andrea Dworkin (“all heterosexual sex is coercive”) and other earlier incarnations of the essays’ author. Having been on the board of the public company Sharon Austen Limited (started by a woman with two women on the board!), which distributed movies directed by the feminist director Candida Royalle, I can assure Fine that there is a plethora of pornography produced by women and watched by women and there has been for many years (containing much of the imagery she finds so distasteful). The internet age has seen an explosion in women entering the pornography industry and being in control from inception to delivery. So it’s not so much a battle between male pornographers and feminists as between the feminists themselves. How will any board satisfy Fine? The only very regrettable addition to the so called ‘porn wars’ was Fine’s intentionally provocative and needless comparison between her definition of offensive porn and her fictional sub-genre of racist “comedy”.
Craig Ellis
Sydney, NSW