In hashing out the debates between, say, Violet Blue’s new Our Porn, Ourselves and this weekend’s Stop Porn Culture conference it’s really important to make sure everyone’s defining their terms the same way.

In conversations this week I was reminded again how many bitter opponents of “porn” will add the qualification that they have no problem at all with “erotica.”

This is a bigger deal than you might think.

For a lot of people the word “pornography” means, by definition, arousal-oriented text and images that are calculatedly exploitative, coercive, violating, violent, high-risk, unsafe, objectifying, and disrespectful.

For instance Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon defined it very specifically in their model antipornography civil rights ordinance

“Pornography” means the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words, including by electronic or other data retrieval systems

See the rest of the model ordinance here.

If that’s your definition, and then if someone else tells you they’re on their way to the Feminist Porn Awards there’s going to be a little cognitive dissonance. If that’s your definition then “feminist porn” is going to sound as intentionally, incomprehensibly, insultingly disingenuous as “vegetarian beef.” If that’s not the other person’s definition then there’s going to be a… communications breakdown.

Here’s the problem: A lot of people who define porn the way “anti-porn” activists do define material that’s not those things as “erotica.” And just so you know, in numbers that might surprise you a lot of people who are “anti-porn” can speak very fondly about the pleasures of erotica. Similarly, the vast majority of progressives and feminists who speak fondly of porn are also opposed, often bitterly, to “arousal-oriented text and images that are calculatedly exploitative, coercive, violating, violent, high-risk, unsafe, objectifying, and disrespectful.”

In other words many people who see themselves as “anti-porn” are actually perfectly comfortable with porn (i.e. erotica.) And many people who see themselves as “pro-porn” are actually anti-porn (i.e. unsafe, non-consensual, etc.)

You can quibble about the terms, and it’s certainly not the case that it’s just all one big misunderstanding. For instance some anti-porn really are opposed to any kind of representations of erotic material at all, period. And people really are so committed to tolerance of free speech that they refuse to condemn any kind of porn, period. No matter what terms you use, reconciling those two extreme positions is going to be very hard. On the other hand there’s still a lot of room in the middle where using the same terms would be very useful for discussion.

But if you don’t get that there’s a technical definition of “porn” that’s different from the way it’s more generally used then clear debate is going to be pretty much impossible.