Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Feminism

Pornography is an effective propaganda tool for supporting patriarchal ideology. It is man-made imagery of women which has had the effect of conditioning many viewers of it and into accepting and believing its deceptions of women as the natural sexual objects of male desire. The boundaries between art and pornography continue to shift and raise complex issues for feminist cultural and sexual politics. It is these shifts in the boundaries of high culture and the legitimization of sexual representation through the category of erotic art that this essay addresses. The principal concern in this essay is to focus on how feminism has played a positive role in cultural production, and should not be seen only as a reactive, but also as a positive process. It has become clear that the art that has proceeded according to a feminist ideal for the female body – is not only a representational idea, to replace the Venus de Milo or Madonna, but a conceptual ideal, based on a principal of inclusiveness, of an erotically appealing female body.