[Catharine MacKinnon] has an unexpected vice: an addiction to People magazine, the American celebrity weekly that is obsessed with Britney and Angelina Jolie. "I read it cover to cover", MacKinnon confesses, who also tells me about "this incredible, velvety swing coat thing" that she got years ago at a Farhi sale. ..Amazing. People magazine is just pornography for women. They buy it for the titillating pictures of sexy movie stars.
In the late 1970s she helped to pioneer laws on sexual harassment and went on to draft legislation with Dworkin in the 1980s designed to make pornography a civil offence on the grounds of sex discrimination and giving women the right to sue for redress. The gambit didn't work: in America porn remains a protected form of free speech, but the debate made her famous.
George writes:
People magazine is not pornography. Wanting to read People magazine is better explained by evolutionary psychology. We evolved from hominids living in clans where everyone knew everything about everyone in the clan. But we don't have enough gossip anymore satisfy our instinctual urges, so we have to read People magazine and watch TV soap operas. It is all about relationships, not sex.I don't buy it. Your theory doesn't explain why the market for such stuff is predominantly women, or why these urges are only satisfied by pictures of sexy men and women. Women don't just read text messages with gossip about ugly people.
Women do read romance novels with no pictures. But those novels with filled with titillating sexual descriptions, and I regard them as pornographic. The books would not sell otherwise.
Yes, pornography for women focuses more on the relationships than on the sexual acts. That reflects a basic difference between men and women. Women are huge consumers of pornography that is oriented towards their sexual fantasies.
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