Why are the women who once burnt their bras for equality so reluctant to embrace pornography? Des Ibekwe discusses.

I was recently watching a debate in which Germaine Greer had renounced pornography and the industry as a whole. Her revulsion initially angered me. Greer in her seminal work ‘The Female Eunuch’ had spoken out against the repression of female sexuality and said to the New York Times in 1971 that “women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire”.  Why should Greer, a figurehead of the bra burning, pill popping, liberated ‘second wave’ feminism be denouncing an industry in which women are given an avenue for sexual expression, casting expectations of how female sexuality should be channeled. Greer then goes on to talk about how degrading pornography can be, how it fetishizes the body, how the industry itself is filled with exploitation and barely legal practices. The…