From the Other MacCain, The Secret Sell-Out of Pro-Sex Feminism:

“The leaders of the feminist anti-pornography movement tended to be radicals like Dworkin and Catharine McKinnon, who saw porn as a violation of women’s rights. Among those who continued that radicalism was Nikki Craft, whose work exposing child pornography advocate Lawrence Stanley was helpful to me in my 2002 coverage of Stanley’s arrest (see “Porn lawyer charged in Brazil girls case“).

If you talk to radicals like Craft — who carried out civil-disobedience protests against Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler — they will tell you bluntly that so-called “pro-sex feminists” sold out. Women Against Pornography co-founder Dorchen Leidholdt demonstrated that the Playboy Foundation helped fund the ACLU as well as various front groups, such as the National Coalition Against Censorship, that fought to keep pornography legal. This is a chapter of history that contemporary feminists are eager to suppress, the way Stalin had Trotsky airbrushed out of photos of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The Left must constantly re-write its own history to create the appearance of consistency in its advocacy of progress, but the Left’s definition of progress is itself constantly changing, and feminism’s embrace of pornography — celebrating objectification as “empowerment” — is but one example of this re-definition project.

UPDATE: Linked by Ann Althouse, who remembers anti-porn feminism, and cites a 1990 book by Dorchen Leidholdt and Janice Raymond, Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism, which I’m sure is omitted from “Women’s Studies” curricula nowadays.”

Comment:

I should make it clear that I’m on neither side of this Western feminist divide – anti-porn (Dworkin-McKinnon-Dines etc.) or pro-porn (Young, Wolf, and most third-wave feminists today).

I’m not a fem-inist per se, but a human-ist.