To which, again, this is a literary experiment. Dworkin circles back again and again to the control of language that men have implemented in their quest to merge reality and porn inextricably. This is why the porn that she describes is, in very large part, written pornography. Skeevy Hustler write-ins are juxtaposed with the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille. The register of this written pornography spans the full scale from “smut” to “eroticism,” and every step of the way Dworkin is there to level the playing field with wry, exacting descriptions of the action. It’s almost an exercise of restraint and patience that she commits to entirely describing each piece in its entirety before making any commentary. At least she withholds any commentary other than a tongue-in-cheek “sic” here and there. And Dworkin knows what she is doing. Throughout this whole book she mentions the linguistic reality in which we live that scaffolds the pornographic reality in which we live. “Porneia” comes from the Greek for a lower class whore. “Vagina” comes from the Latin for “sheath.” These linguistic symbols mark out a reality in the same way that the visual symbols they have morphed into mark out a reality. Dworkin seems to think that the only way to deflate the power of written pornography is to cut to its very core, then shove our faces into it like a misbehaving dog.

Important to Dworkin’s analysis is the fact that technology has evolved in the last century in much the way language has evolved. The atom bomb opened Pandora’s box and out have slithered both the information networks of control that make porn and its effects a daily reality, as well as the porn itself that could only exist in the nuclear detritus of a culture gone mad. And, make no mistake, we are mad. I can draw you a straight line from the atomic bomb to PornHub, a website that has publicly disavowed the very practices that allowed it to become a massive corporation. A company that’s solved concerns of underage models being used in videos by flooding the world with a cosmic firehose of amateur videos that could never be vetted for human trafficking even if AI was actually as impressive as zealots claim it to be. I can draw you a straight line from the atomic bomb to a man on the subway wearing a jacket that depicts hundreds of cartoon women doing the “ahegao” sweaty cross-eyed orgasm face. But what I cannot tell you is what any of this could possibly mean. And this lack of meaning is very intentional. It is baked into the very bones of an industry that makes its bread trying to depict sadomasochism as accurately and topically as possible. An industry born in the fluorescent glow of skulls shaved to normalize humans into cattle and Mengeleian test subjects in the name of science.

And yes, of course, have no worry. I’m going to talk about gooning. And The Goon Squad. But there seems to be a strange wall between Dworkin’s world and this one. Things seem so different as to be almost unrecognizable. How do we rectify porn’s transformation from full-page magazine images surrounded by ten-thousand word short stories into men sitting in dead-eyed trances for six hours looking at videos of a woman’s feet? Well the same way that we rectify the dehumanization of the Holocaust with the dehumanization of the slave trade. The same way that we incorporate young men falling into their own online navels and becoming so radically misogynistic that they feel empowered to shoot up an elementary school or a sorority house: by observing the sheer level of detachment. We must acknowledge that the hyperreality crafted by Hustler in the 80’s is the same hyperreality crafted by PornHub and Brazzers in 2025. Whether you are looking at magazine images of a woman whipping a man or an iPhone shot video of a nameless couple, abstraction is king and reality is servant. Detachment and nihilistic withdrawal from the Real is as bad as it’s ever been. It doesn’t matter if you are watching something that’s “female-centered” in a six hour goon session. What you’re doing is engaging with an image in your head for six hours. You are spending six hours in an echo chamber of symbol and stereotype and prejudice that is allowed to feedback on itself with no external true input to the point of speaker failure. And in a world where nothing matters and creative expression is stifled for these men, speaker failure can be catastrophic. I’ll leave off with Dworkin making roughly the same point.

“Nihilism, like gravity, has a a law of nature, male nature. The men, of course, are tired. It has been an exhausting period of extermination and devastation, on a scale genuinely new, with new methods, new possibilities. Even when faced with the probably extinction of themselves at their own hand, men refuse to look at the whole, take all the causes and all the effects into account, perceive the intricate connections between the world they make and themselves. They are alienated, they say, from this world of pain and torment; they make romance out of this alienation so as to avoid taking responsibility for what they do and what they are. Male dissociation from life is not new or particularly modern, but the scale and intensity of this disaffection are new. In this Brave New World how comforting and familiar it is to exercise passionate cruelty on women[…]For men, their right to control and abuse the bodies of women is the one comforting constant in a world rigged to blow up but they do not know when.”

Better things are possible. But they are only possible here, where people have real emotions, bodies do not behave like sex toys, and dialogue exists.