022. FINAL POEM FOR MY BODY.

the itch to interpret.

Welcome to ISSUE 022: FINAL POEM FOR MY BODY ❤️‍🔥

paloma magazine’s first ever themed call proved generative, sincerely raw, and strikingly clear in its message: there will be no taboos when it comes to (re)claiming our bodies. Calling for submissions on themes surrounding eros, sexualities, and feminist theory, the unprecedented number of submissions invoked a collective uproar.

When G.E. writes “I have travelled far enough away from the prison of understanding and right where I long to be: in the arms of the living” in “Crush Me,” I itch to make more room for the erotic, to welcome creative impulse the likes of which one only feels in one’s entire body. Abby Lacelle reviews Melissa Febos’ new memoir, The Dry Season, wondering how sex and celibacy function structurally and socially. In Lorraine Olaya’s poem “mujer de la casa,” she defiantly declares having “hollowed my womb / with a spoon” and thus reclaimed her bodily autonomy. For it is not just a mechanistic appreciation of our bodies that make them our tools for creation, it is also (and most importantly) their existence as vessels through which to feel. In the essay “Pornsick,” Calvin Major repudiates the “imagery of a woman who […] exhibited an erotic longing for violence which legitimized its act upon her.” In the recapture of our own bodies, we recapture our rightful eros. Charlotte Buckles’ “final poem for my body” seeks, even (or especially) in heartache, to find agency again through grounding in one’s body: “mine, like / my body, I think.”

The coherent association of these pieces, bound by an energy that feels like voltage through the body, is nothing short of electric. We hope you enjoy.

Nilay C | poetry editor

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Crush Me by G.E. [Non-Fiction]

The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex (Book Review) by Abby Lacelle [Culture]

mujer de la casa by Lorraine Olaya [Poetry]

Pornsick by Calvin Major [Non-Fiction]

final poem for my body by Charlotte Buckles [Poetry]

Crush Me by G.E.

It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found. - Winnecott 

The short light of the morning, the sun coming in through newly unfurled maple leaves. I would prefer not to talk about the ways spring, this season, makes my body sing for fear of bursting, leaving, and never returning to civilization. I am a poet writing, standing solidly, solely. 

Would it be a bad time to mention that I have had a crush for two weeks, that it has woken me up to myself, that I can’t stop thinking about it? 

I used to believe that every feeling meant something — that feeling sure of a flood meant the rain would come. I speak of fantasy, but if what I see is more real than what I feel, I don’t get to decide what touches the sun, what reaches for the light. 

A few days ago, we were on a beach, salt water dripping from my body, his body. We were trying to regulate from the shock of cold water, our breath heavy and syncopated. It had been sunny earlier, it had been sunny when the skin on my stomach started to redden and brown. Now, the clouds passed over the sun, giving the water a green black hue, the clarity still there, just less noticeable to eyes adjusted to the light.  “There’s no construct to joy,” I jotted ten days ago in my diary. 

When you get so good at pretending, you start to believe the act of your pretending self. You become the facade, for all the ways you built it up have shrouded your Inner Self, the one peeking out behind shuttered gates, peering through the windows of the soul you boarded up. It is, as Nuar Alsadir writes in Animal Joy, when the “exterior becomes interior, the As-If personality, a ‘repetition of a prototype [but] without the slightest trace of originality.’” An artist replicating a previously popular work, claiming it to be their niche, mimics it so much that the new piece lacks depth or feeling. Whether we want to or not, we can feel what people are trying to suppress in themselves, what they hide away.  

Susan Sontag said that in good movies, “there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.” Good art speaks from the unconscious, which travels to us through our own subconscious via mirror neurons, our feeling centers in the brain responsible for social interaction and survival. We become fluent in this “language” during infancy and early childhood. In order for caregivers to understand our needs without being able to hear words (“I’m hungry”, “I am tired”, “I feel scared”, etc.), we have to find a way to communicate. That “way” is through emotion, pure feeling. It registers in the bodies of our caregivers, helping them distinguish and helping us speak through them. It also never stops speaking. 

In her 1978 essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Audre Lorde writes that “there are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise.” Erotic force, erotic power, is “rooted in… the power of unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” As women, she says, this wellspring of power belongs to the feminine and feminist experience. It is also the center of a war for docility, submissiveness, placation, and denial. To maintain patriarchy, erotic power must be suppressed. We are taught within this suppression to be suspect of our creative urges, our impulses, our bodily wants — the erotic. The language of infancy and early childhood, of pure feeling and of understanding beyond words, is banned to make way for the domination of logic and inspection. We become guards of a prison we build ourselves, learning to distrust the erotic, which is to say, to distrust what we find compelling, enthralling. The sad truth, they try to whisper, is that living is not for you, that you are not even alive. Don’t even try. 

Since sex is what most people conflate with the erotic (i.e. pornography), women are confined to learning about it through romance and sexuality. "Of course, women so empowered are dangerous,” writes Lorde, “so we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex.” You can be sexual and not erotic. You can be erotic, and not sexual, although women are socialized to believe this cannot be true. To experience the world of the erotic through a crush, then, is natural, even socialized in me. Its power goes beyond the throes of attraction. 

My subconscious has been interpreting this aliveness in sexual dreams, which have starred various leading actors (not just my crush) to draw the same conclusions: that sexuality is the only acceptable place to put this raw wildness. I could interpret them and the crush literally, to seek our bodily erotisicm as purely sexual, and not take it into the seat of deep feeling and creativity. My dreams, essentially, are trying to  give me an escape route from what my subconscious deems inescapable. 

A few years ago, an energy healer told me that my spirit was above my body, “just to the left, above your head.” She said it not so much matter-of-factly, as she did with the intonation of someone describing a painting. What brings the spirit back? I asked. You call it down, she answered. 

This newfound attraction has agitated me— I am an awake, alive, monstrous being. I have become prolific. I write in my journal every day, scribble poems on napkins at work, rush home to dance to a song looping in my head, trembling out of my body. This paradox of the erotic is the source of its power.  To utilize deep feeling, to have an outlet for it, means I hold myself to the standards of my Inner Self, the one who needs to dance, shake loose the projected self. Lorde continues: “[O]nce we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.” Of course, we don’t have to understand ourselves as capable of this kind of joy. We can numb it out. 

The consequence of suppressing our Inner Selves—those creatures— is that they will come in fuller force in twitches of the unconscious. They will make themselves known, whether in laughter, or anger, physical ailments, or dreams. We do not get to decide what craves to be in the light. Therefore, the work of the erotic is to become so vividly ourselves, to own our desires, that the aspiration for suppression has no hold. “The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance,” writes Lorde. I was horribly afraid of the truth of my attraction, that it meant becoming a sexual object to another, that it meant I was lost and tired and alone. 

We are so afraid of what we want that we pretend we do not know. In admitting my crush, I affirmed my desire for something I didn’t have the words for — deep feeling and bodily sensation translated through art. After a winter of stagnancy, of what seemed like a never-ending drought of the erotic, this crush felt like a divine intervention, a kismet impetus. Was he really that inspiring, that fateful?  

Picture me writing this question. Now picture me laughing. 

Leaning up against large, spring-filled windows in my living room, is a 4’x4’ canvas I bought on Facebook Marketplace. On it are figures of Neolithic women—sixteen of them— representing what was made before we knew the words for feeling, for the erotic. My only requirements to work on the piece is that I sit down without my phone, windows open, and that I must listen closely to how my body feels when I look at it. As much as possible, I shy away from picturing anyone else commenting, gazing, judging, and pull closer my Inner Self, the alive one, the voice calling me to a place I should dare to go. Then, when I begin to feel the shakiness and excitement of seeing a crush, I know I have travelled far enough away from the prison of understanding and right where I long to be: in the arms of living. 

In the words of Clarice Lespector:

“And it’s inside myself I must create someone who will understand.”

He is good at pretending. He’s good, but not so good that I can’t feel the heat radiating from him. On the beach, I stretch my ocean-wet body across the smooth rocks, waiting for him to change into new underwear. “I won’t look,” I said, laughing, turning my head. He says nothing, but the air jolts. See, silence indicates an internal vocalization— a tremor of the heart and of the body. I close my eyes, think of my partner at home. My nose crinkles and I cringe. He knows what I think he doesn’t.  

Where does the thrill go? Where does the nervousness, the kinetic energy, the momentum of attraction end up? Does it act under a set of laws, like physics? Or does it dissipate in two bodies, resonating until the last of the sound hangs in the air? Not an echo, but a kind of lasting, a holding out. What is spoken between us—when I compliment him or when he asks, in half-joke intonation, to live with me one day—I speak as myself and not a jointed thing, a partnered person. 

An echo is two parts. I am one song, untethered.

The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex (Book Review) by Abby Lacelle

The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex is a triptych portrait of multi-award-winning memoirist Melissa Febos’ diffuse obsessiveness which revolves mainly around her drive for romantic affection and is, in many places, pathetically relatable. The narration is blunt and candid, embarrassing and accessible. Who among us hasn’t acquiesced to sex, awkwardly fallen in love with a friend, lost ridiculous amounts of time fantasizing over a crush, stayed a little too long in a terminal relationship out of sheer convenience? On her purported journey toward self-love and reciprocal relationships, Febos returns through a catalogue of her past love and sex ‘failures’ to expunge herself and provide personal and social context for near-single-mindedness when it comes to desire. Linking her history of addiction, disordered eating, and kleptomania to Western culture’s privileging of (heterosexual) romantic affection, Febos details the ease with which she self- affirmed and effaced through devotion to lovers. As corrective for a pattern of serial monogamy and a trail of broken hearts, she opts for a three-months-turned-one-year commitment to celibacy. While jejune and a little self-indulgent, the book’s readability and its interventions into the patterns of young (queer) women’s sexual compulsions makes it a noteworthy publication for new feminist readers raising their consciousness at a divisive moment in contemporary sexual politics.

During her celibacy, Melissa fights off hoards of women (and some men!) who seek to cause her to stray from her self-enlightenment. She narrowly resists, opting instead to research historical accounts of monastic medieval women (like the beguines) or artistic progenitors (like Agnes Martin, Virginia Woolf, and Octavia Butler) to compile referents of passion beyond lovesickness which might inspire her to sublimate her libido into (nevertheless compulsive) creative production. She looks frequently to Edna St. Vincent Millay, admiring her output and guile but condemning her perpetual affairs and struggle with addiction. Through “Vincent,” Febos questions more broadly the aggrandizement of a certain addictive and romantic lifestyle thought to facilitate art but which, she argues, in fact stifles its creation. 

Asceticism appears as a motif throughout the text; hard and fast rules against flirtation, sex, even, at times, friendliness emerge in service of this project of reinvention and artistic steadfastness. Even still, she writes: “I wanted celibacy to be, well, sexier.” The irony of her own desire isn’t lost on her, and in fact bears itself out in the style and structure of her book. Confident in the power of her own pretty privilege and animal magnetism, she coasts on them, detailing her body turning itself on to optimize sexual advances, flirting to acquire new academic colleagues or get better tips as a server—sexuality can be mobilized or exchanged as a commodity in every realm of life. She lingers over and again on scenes of her own sexual abjection. Hence, she’s come to rely on love and sex not only socially, but structurally—it literally moves her story along, marks the milestones of her life, opens her chapters and gives her content for her books. Febos seduces her reader, frontloading the book with the carnage from past relationships which built up toward her sexual and spiritual crisis (much of which is detailed also in her earlier works Whipsmart and Girlhood). Here though, she somewhat flips the script: she edges gratification in sex and love even as the narrative’s ostensible goal is to imagine pleasure beyond sex. The first page presents unfulfilled longing, followed by a series of chapters speckled with analepsis sexcapades and self-realization and then, quite conventionally, the whole thing concludes with a marriage plot.

For the ways Febos details queer relationships with raunch and pith, it reminds me of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dreamhouse or Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. Febos too peppers digestible references to academic theory and feminist literature to critique media and culture that normalize all-consuming heterosexual or homonormative love (read as queer love which adopts the contractual and reproductive goals of heterosexualism as a means of legitimating itself politically and socially) as the central devotion of women’s lives. Yet, similar too to Nelson’s seminal text (which centers the corporeality of motherhood and queer marriage as an act of resistance), Dry Season reads as a defense of Febos’ own decisions about sex and marriage with a desire to paint its outcome as being somehow radical. The urge to launder one’s own life through feminism, as justification for certain ‘choices’ belies the fact that no one or thing is feminist all the time. In truth, the book engages in a liberal feminism which superficially cites works by Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Sara Ahmed as licence for her lifestyle but fails to see beyond individualism, takes Lorde’s erotic out of its context and limits how it can signify (i.e., imagines it as a function of hermetic optimization of artistic production). In diaristic fashion not unlike the thrust of other New York art monsters and autofiction writers, namely Chris Kraus and Kathy Acker, the book draws on the private as political fodder and cites works by feminist and queer theorists to intellectualize personal life. Dry Season is, however, comparatively formally conventional: its plain prose and short repetitive chapters read, at times, as transcripts from therapy. As Rita Felski tells it, a certain aesthetic technique or generic mode (i.e., that of confession, disclosure) which in one context (say, the New York art scene in the final decades of the 1900s) appears radical does not inherently carry its revolutionary charge across space and time. How and when an author takes up the autofictional mode bears on its potential to move or radicalize the reader.

With that, I can’t help wondering how Dry Season holds up as a post-MeToo book, one which problematizes consent (in that it resists depictions of sex as hinging on yes or no rather than being complexly inflected by sociocultural factors and motivations) and asks its reader to think seriously about how sex functions to build and break community. Sex is political, is polarizing. With right-wing pundits stripping pleasure from sex and pushing the State’s pro-natalist futurism and left-wing women (somewhat misled by liberal illusions of choice and self-responsibility) turning to birth strikes and celibacy in response to repressive reproductive healthcare and lack of social infrastructure to combat austerity and the climate crisis, sex is entirely sublated in popular imagination. The liberatory practice of sex (as an act or time-space beyond the capitalist grind, a means of moving and making a body with and for another) is nowhere to be found. My worry then with this book is that it forwards celibacy as a vestibule toward an eventually ‘appropriate’ (read homonormative, married) relationship without decentering it as the right goal, without offering alternate pleasures which do not just feed the same repressive sexual systems Febos seeks to evade. There is some attention to friendship, though mostly to discuss the desire to fuck one’s friends or to critique the relationships of friends. There are a very few lines of text at the conclusion dedicated to Febos’ desire to maintain her own home separate from her partner and to open the relationship, but what this looks like or how it functions remains undetailed—maybe that’s for the next book. 

The Dry Season, on sale 3 June 2025.

mujer de la casa by Lorraine Olaya | Website | Instagram

Pornsick by Calvin Major | Instagram

When a radical feminist movement emerged in the late 1970s critically opposing porn, its theorists asked, broadly, how the newly technologized material might be hurting women through its creation, dissemination, and consumption practices. By the 1980s, critiques of gendered relationships within the sex industry—of which porn was (and remains) a highly profitable branch—focused largely on the sex industry harming or otherwise exploiting its workers, and how increasingly accessible depictions of subordinated women could, in some way, actually be reflective of the population’s views of women. Anti-porn feminist perspectives varied, but many agreed they couldn’t conceive of a revolutionized world without some complete and total overhaul of porn, taking the innumerable testimonies of women’s cyclical and systematic abuse by the industry as demonstration that porn in and of itself was irreparably unconscionable. Many, too, demanded justice for these harmed women by whatever means necessary, with legislative regulation of porn taken up as one process of actualizing, and concretizing, this justice. This energized and urgent moment is historicized as the consummate point of ideological rupture within women’s lib—in the radical/liberal split, radical feminists failed women who saw porn consumption as their inalienable right, and, most damningly, failed sex workers by envisioning state-backed, carceral methods of intervention to the sex industry that would ultimately aggravate the violent policing of their lives. While liberal feminists failed us by being liberals.

This of course grossly reduces its complexity, as all historicization must. But with the momentum of late 1970s/early 1980s anti-porn feminism having now largely dissolved, it has become cemented to history, for leftists anyway, as irreconcilably repressive, moralistic, (god-forbid) maternalistic, soulless shilling for christian-conservative policymakers. The entire debate, as Kay Gabriel in Feminism Against Cisness writes, is a “moralism”; “useless” (142). And yet, this historical moment holds so much beyond obsessive, imposing desires for a kind of lateral policing of sexuality. Radicalism in this movement has become an undesirable signifier, and it’s difficult to see reticence toward recognizing value in a radical analysis of male supremacist methodology. Why are these women considered so ideologically irredeemable? To a degree, it’s clear why—misogyny, maybe. But there is also tremendous documentation and analysis undertaken to indicate the movement’s limitations. It has been thoroughly, and I believe rightfully, autopsied, yet the bulk of what I see out there seems to hold critique as its final nail. It is difficult to engage with any kind of contemporary discussion of porn-critical feminist theory without being fatally diverted to what it ignores, and where it corrupts. Which is to say, there is a vacuum left by critique where imagination seems constrained, and in this limit-seeking tendency, I find a kind of ideological inertia. I don’t want to be frugal where gendered forms of violence are concerned, and I’m wary of how the impetus to excise the “bad ones” from our movement risks abandoning generative, perhaps vital, sites of inquiry. As such—lapses in mind—I want to think through the driving engine behind the anti-porn movement, working alongside its internal logic rather than against it, to understand what brought it to such a potent moment in feminist history.

Three pressure points are considered the instigators of the anti-porn movement’s coalescence: the breakthrough successes of the porn films Deep Throat (1972) and Snuff (1976), and the 1976 advertisement for the Rolling Stones’ album Black and Blue. Carolyn Bronstein chronicles these events in her book Battling Pornography, where you can learn how actress Linda Marchiano was coerced into sexual acts for the entirety of Deep Throat’s production (a film depicting a woman whose lack of orgasmic satisfaction during sex is “cured” by her physician), and advertisement for Snuff titillatingly suggested it captured an authentic rape/murder—made in Argentina “where life is cheap” (83). The Stones advertisement, tasteful as you can imagine, depicted bound and bruised model Anita Russell aside the tagline “I’m Black and Blue for the Rolling Stones—and I love it!” (95). The current from Deep Throat to Black and Blue swells in junctions of violence, desire, and sexuality, where the idea of porn as the delight of dank theatres now breached the chic public sphere. It’s notable that these three pins on the anti-porn timeline show us how the movement was forged in collective response to imagery of a woman who, in some capacity, exhibited an erotic longing for violence which legitimized its act upon her. Some viewers undoubtedly felt this as a pearl-clutching moment in repulsion to graphic sexuality (and acted accordingly), but for radical feminists, this was a repulsion to the idea that all women want it—it being whatever violence porn was selling. From Andrea Dworkin’s speech Woman-Hating Right and Left: “[Men] say what the pornography says: you really like it don’t you. There’s something in you that really...it really satisfies. And then when you go for help, thinking you're an individual person who does not like to be hurt, the psychologist says, “There's something in you that really liked it, isn't there?” You say: ‘Gosh, no. I don't think so.’ And he tells you: ‘Well, you're not being honest and you certainly don't know yourself very well.’ And you go to your yogi, and he's liable to tell you the same thing” (34). Each event doesn’t speak to a singular outrage—one coerced sex, one exploited actress—but rather an analysis contextually linking the uncontested violence against women as it transpired in porn to its enactment in the home—one instance of battery per three minutes, to be precise. (Today, in the US, it’s now closer to one minute and a half.)

1970s anti-porn feminists archived, translated, narrativized, and platformed the experiences of women whose harm was systematized, and planned. When, as said by an anonymous woman in Take Back the Night (1980) on her experience in porn, “we [are] sectioned by race, stratified—girls as young as eleven in big demand”; we are over-represented survivors of rape, battery, incest, and discrimination, producing films such as “Expectant Pain, Cry Rape, Black and Chained, Love Gestapo Style, Slave Girl, Angels in Pain, Corporal Punishment, Club Brute Force” (24, 60).

To define porn in 1970s terms, there’s the impulse to ask the Greeks for some clarifying and true meaning nested within its etymology. The word pornography sees pornē signifying “prostitute” or, more colloquially, a female slave used for sex, and -graphia indicating its written form. As Dworkin eloquently puts it, the “visual depiction of whores” (36). Pornē relies on sexual forms of labour being exchanged, closely tying it to the kind of sex work we associate with prostitution. It’s an etymological origin which offers us some historical context, but does little to define pornography in any practical, usable, concurred terminology. In Jewel Amoah’s 1997 essay Back on the Auction Block: A Discussion of Black Women and Pornography, Amoah cites the Oxford English Dictionary (now behind a paywall) which defines porn as “the explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in literature, painting, films, etc., in a manner intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings” (205). This definition provides another useful contextualization—that porn possesses 1) an intended erotic effect, and 2) an absence of any aesthetic value. The aesthetic qualifier was dropped in Lynn Comella’s 2021 definition: “any material (such as writings, photographs, or movies) depicting sexual activity or erotic behavior in a way that is designed to arouse sexual excitement” (165). One value to this liberalized feminist definition is that it is actually quite unconstructive to cite porn as a concept—that is, what is defined simply as visual material for sexual stimulation—to be the driver of any inherently oppressive machinations, or a product which necessitates subordinated subjects for its creation, or even its erotic potential. I would be cautious to say any explicit material creates gendered dynamics in and of itself. But it can exploit those existing dynamics. And it does.

In an ordinance drafted by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin in 1984, a legislative intervention designed to allow women hurt by porn to pursue damages in civil court, porn is defined through its operation of subordination. Porn is:

“[T]he graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women in pictures and/or words that also includes women presented dehumanized as sex objects, things, or commodities”, “or women presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; as mutilated or physically hurt; or women presented as whores by nature; or women presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or in scenarios of degradation, injury, or torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.” (xxxiii)

You go to your yogi and he’s liable to tell you the same thing, etc. The final line of the full text reads: “If men, children or transsexuals are used in any of the same ways, the material also meets the definition of pornography.” This addition is crucial: by this operational definition, while evidently inflexible to potentialities for non-violent, non-oppressive pornographies, womanhood itself is only categorically relevant insofar as it can be used to organize how porn acts on a subordinated class. The subordination itself is feminized, and men, transsexuals and children embody this feminized category when they too face pornographic violence. Porn, then, is a lens through which gendered dynamics are enacted and codified. Reading this definition, what is clear to me is that anti-porn feminists made urgent the analysis that porn produced in a sex hierarchical world is determined, at the very core of its creation, by the sex hierarchy—feminist and queer subversions notwithstanding. So, porn by this definition is not a unique industry by putting to advantage oppressive modes across sex, gender, race, and class in the creation of its product, but it does make the best of a woman-hating world. How it succeeds in doing so can be widely interpreted, but feels imprudent to deny outright when systematic sexual harm has never been contained to the world of ideas, images, or discourse. And by this measure, Dworkin and MacKinnon aren’t arguing that sexual subordination itself feminizes you, but that feminization is a process in which your oppressor, at the moment of your sexual subordination, interprets this violence as feminizing based on the configurations of our sex hierarchical social structure.

I see clearly how an anti-porn movement based solely on an ascetic aversion to free sexuality would in effect compliment obscenity laws regulating the public sphere—like keeping homosexuals from cruising in public (talk about an inalienable right), banning any depiction of transness as explicit (i.e. unsafe), or carcerally surveying those working in sex. I do not however believe this is the only outcome possible for a critique of porn. This feminist movement functions as an uncomfortable and severe mirror toward the oppressor, and following their logic leads us to an analysis of abstraction as oppressive method, of categorical productions as oppressive instruments, and of experiences sculpted by discourse as warnings: per Monique Wittig, “[pornography] orders us to stay in line, and it keeps those who would tend to forget who they are in step; it calls upon fear” (25). The radical feminist demand to abolish pornography—as an arm of male supremacy, method for subordination, instrument of racialized and gendered exploitation—was extreme. But what else did they have? Master’s tools, master’s house. His ontology, his erection. So what if the anti-porn movement wasn’t just a moralism or puritanical pearl-clutching? This movement is in many ways the most radical effort we have ever seen to materially advocate for those who are sexually hurt—repeatedly, often, horrifically, still to this day. The woman MacKinnon and Dworkin refer to is difficult to digest—she is so abject and vile that she is an indictment of the movement itself, as it bears the responsibility of iterating her into existence. Opposition to her degradation is, plainly, a muzzle on the freedom of us all.

Amoah, Jewel. “Back on the Auction Block: A Discussion of Black Women and Pornography.” National Black Law Journal, vol. 14, no. 204, 1997.

Bronstein, Carolyn. Battling Pornography. Cambridge University Press, 27 June 2011.Comella, Lynn. “Pornography". Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies. Ed. by Kyla Wazana Tompkins. New York, New York University Press, 2021, pp. 29–34. Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography. 1981.

---. Woman-Hating Right and Left. 1987.Dworkin, Andrea, and Catharine A MacKinnon. Pornography and Civil Rights. 1988.First World Whores Congress. “World Charter for Prostitutes’ Rights”. Feminist Manifestos: A Global Documentary Reader, Ed. by Penny A. Weiss. New York New York University Press, 2018.Gardner, Tracey A. “Racism in Pornography and the Women’s Movement”. Take Back the Night. Ed. by Laura Lederer. William Morrow, 1980.Heaney, Emma, and Kay Gabriel. Feminism against Cisness. Asterisk, 3 May 2024.Hill Collins, Patricia. “Pornography and Black Women’s Bodies”. Gender Violence, 3rd Edition. By O’Toole, Laura L, et al. NYU Press, 14 July 1993.

Indigenous Women Against the Sex Industry. “Manifesto.” Feminist Manifestos: A Global Documentary Reader, Ed. by Penny A. Weiss. New York New York University Press, 2018.Jones, Jane. “Interview with a Former Pornography Model”. Take Back the Night. Ed. by Laura Lederer. William Morrow, 1980.Lederer, Laura. Take Back the Night. William Morrow, 1980. MacKinnon, Catharine. Liberalism and the Death of Feminism. 1990.

---. “OnlyFans Is Not a Safe Platform for “Sex Work.” It’s a Pimp.” The New York Times, 6 Sept. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/09/06/opinion/onlyfans-sex-work-safety.html.Miller-Young, Mireille. A Taste for Brown Sugar Black Women in Pornography. Duke University Press, 2014. Our Porn, Our Selves. “Pro-Porn Principles”. Feminist Manifestos: A Global Documentary Reader, Ed. by Penny A. Weiss. New York New York University Press, 2018.Sayers, Naomi. “Municipal Regulation of Street-Based Prostitution and the Impacts on Indigenous Women: A necessary Discussion”. Red Light Labour. Ed. by Elya Dursin. UBC Press. 2018.Preciado, Paul B. Countersexual Manifesto. Columbia University Press, 2018.Walker, Alice. “Coming Apart”. Take Back the Night. Ed. by Laura Lederer. William Morrow, 1980.Weiss, Penny. Feminist Manifestos: A Global Documentary Reader; Ed. By Penny A. Weiss. New York New York University Press, 2018.Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston, Beacon Press, 1992.

final poem for my body by Charlotte Buckles | Instagram

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