Pornography is speech. So the courts declared in judging it protected by the First Amendment. Pornography is a lund of act. So Catharine MacKinnon declared in arguing for laws against it.' Put these together and we have: pornography is a lund of speech act. In what follows I take this suggestion seriously. If pornography is speech, what does it say? If pornography is a lund of act, what does it do? Judge Frank Easterbrook, accepting the premises of antipornography legislation, gave an answer. Pornography is speech that depicts subordination. In the words of the feminist ordinance passed in Indianapolis, pornography depicts women dehumanized as sexual objects, things or commodities; enjoying pain or humhation or rape; being tied up, cut up, mutilated, bruised, or physically hurt; in postures of sexual submission or servility or display; reduced to body parts, penetrated by objects or animals, or presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture; shown as filthy or inferior;

What one ought to mean by “speech,” in the context of discussions of free speech, is whatever it is that a correct justification of the right to free speech justifies one in protecting. What one ought to mean, it may be argued, includes illocution, in the sense of J.L. Austin. Some feminist writers, accepting that free speech includes free illocution, have been led to take the notion of silencing seriously in discussions of free speech.

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