at Black women's "animallike sexual appetite went so far as to lead black women to copulate with apes" (Gilman 1985, 212). The treatment of all women in contemporary pornography has strong ties to the portrayal of Black women as animals. In pornography women become nonpeople and are often represented as the sum of their fragmented body parts. Scott McNall observes: This fragmentation of women relates to the predominance of rear-entry position photographs.... All of these kinds of photographs reduce the woman to her reproductive system, and, furthermore, make her open, willing, and available--not in control.... The other thing rear-entry position photographs tell us about women is that they are animals. They are animals because they are the same as dogs-bitches in heat who can't control themselves. (McNall 1983, 197-98) This linking of animals and white women within pornography becomes feasible when grounded in the earlier denigration of Black women as animals. Developing a comprehensive analysis of the race, gender, and class dynamics of pornography offers possibilities for change. Those Black feminist intellectuals investigating sexual politics imply that the situation is much more complicated than that advanced by some prominent white feminists (see, e.g., Dworkin 1981) in which "men oppress women" because they are men. Such approaches implicitly assume biologically deterministic views of sex, gender, and sexuality and offer few possibilities for change. In contrast, Afrocentric feminist analyses routinely provide for human agency and its corresponding empowerment and for the responsiveness of social structures to human action. In the short story "Coming Apart," Alice Walker describes one Black man's growing realization that his enjoyment of pornography, whether of white women as "objects" or Black women as "animals," degraded him: He begins to feel sick. For he realizes that he has bought some of the advertisements about women, black...
