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The Feminist Sex Wars: The Argument That Reorganised a Movement
By Niall Brannagh, Law, language and community Published 9 September 2026
In brief
A conflict inside American feminism running from the late 1970s through the 1980s over pornography, prostitution, butch and femme roles and sadomasochism. Anti-pornography organisations formed in San Francisco in 1976 and in New York in 1979. The conflict reached its set-piece at the Barnard College conference of 24 April 1982, which was picketed and whose booklet the college confiscated. It ended in the courts: the civil rights ordinances drafted by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon were struck down by the Seventh Circuit in 1985 and that ruling was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1986.
Most of the arguments in this history are between the subculture and somebody outside it: a psychiatrist, a prosecutor, a legislature. This one was different. It ran inside a movement, between people who agreed about nearly everything else, and it was conducted with a ferocity that only that situation produces.
The organisations
Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media was organised out of a San Francisco conference in 1976 and formally launched at the start of 1977. It began with a few dozen members and grew past a thousand by 1982. In November 1978 it held the first national American feminist conference on pornography, and on the Saturday of that conference around three thousand women marched through the city’s red-light district, the first national Take Back the Night march in the United States. Andrea Dworkin, born in 1946, spoke.
Women Against Pornography formed in New York in 1979, founded by Dolores Alexander, Lynn Campbell and Susan Brownmiller among others, and ran guided tours of the Times Square pornography trade for journalists and supporters. It disbanded in 1990.
The other side had no comparable machinery, which is a significant asymmetry. It had writers, academics, a scattering of small groups and, in San Francisco, the organisation described in Samois, founded in June 1978. Samois asked repeatedly to meet the anti-pornography organisation in its own city and was refused, and in April 1980 answered a forum on sadomasochism it had not been invited to with a leaflet arguing that the picture being presented was false.
Barnard, 24 April 1982
The ninth in Barnard College’s annual Scholar and the Feminist series was subtitled Towards a Politics of Sexuality. Its academic coordinator was Carole Vance, and the planning committee had met every two weeks for eight months, producing a seventy-two page booklet called Diary of a Conference. Around eight hundred people came.
Two days before it opened, Barnard’s president ordered all fifteen hundred copies of the booklet confiscated, following a week of telephone calls to the college’s officers and trustees from anti-pornography feminists. The organisers were told less than twenty-four hours in advance and instructed to tell attendees it had been delayed at the printers.
At the gates, picketers from a coalition of anti-pornography groups wore T-shirts reading for a feminist sexuality on the front and against sadomasochism on the back, and distributed a leaflet naming organisations and individuals, including Samois, Gayle Rubin for her association with it, and Patrick Califia, who was in the audience and had no role in the programme.
The most useful correction to the standard account is a matter of the programme. Of the eighteen afternoon workshops, none was specifically about sadomasochism and one was about butch and femme roles. The characterisation of the day as a celebration of sadomasochism originates in the leaflet handed out against it, and has outlived every other document from the event.
Barnard eventually paid to reprint the booklet with two lines of type removed, the ones naming the college and the foundation that had funded the conference, and it was mailed to attendees in June 1982. In August, Dworkin posted copies to her own contacts with a covering letter urging them to read it as evidence of what was being justified.
Rubin’s paper from that day was finished the following year and published in 1984 in Pleasure and Danger, the anthology Carole Vance edited from the conference. It became the most cited essay in the field.
The ordinances
The conflict then moved out of conferences and into legislatures, which changed its character entirely.
In autumn 1983 Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon taught a course on pornography at the University of Minnesota Law School, and in October the Minneapolis city council retained them to draft an amendment to the city’s civil rights ordinance. The approach was new: rather than criminalising pornography as obscenity, it defined it as a practice of sex discrimination and gave individuals a civil action. The council approved it by seven votes to six on 30 December 1983. Mayor Donald Fraser vetoed it on 5 January 1984, on the ground that it would not survive judicial review. A revised version passed by one vote in July 1984 and he vetoed that too.
Indianapolis enacted a version. Mayor William Hudnut signed it on 1 May 1984, with amendments the following month.
It lasted a matter of months. The federal district court held it unconstitutional in 1984, and on 27 August 1985 the Seventh Circuit affirmed in an opinion by Judge Frank Easterbrook, holding that the ordinance discriminated on the basis of viewpoint: it permitted depictions of women in approved postures and prohibited them in disapproved ones, which is precisely what the First Amendment does not allow a government to do. The Supreme Court affirmed summarily in 1986. That is an affirmance on the merits, not a refusal to hear the appeal, and the distinction matters because it means the reasoning stands as precedent.
A group founded in 1984 as the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce, whose members included Ellen Willis, Nan Hunter and Sylvia Law, filed an amicus brief against the ordinance in that appeal. Feminists arguing on opposite sides of a federal constitutional case is the clearest single image of how far the movement had split.
What it settled
Nothing, and everything.
The substantive question was never resolved and cannot be, because it is a question about whose interpretation of a woman’s testimony governs. What was settled is narrower: the legal route was closed in 1986 and has stayed closed, and the anti-pornography organisations of the 1970s had wound up by 1990.
What the conflict produced, on the other side, is the analytic vocabulary that the whole field now uses. Rubin’s argument that sexuality has to be analysed in its own terms rather than as a subdivision of gender, and her model of respectable and disreputable sex, came directly out of this fight and were written to win it. Dworkin died in 2005. The era in which all of this happened is set out in the era essay for 1970 to 1989, and the dates are in sequence on the full timeline.
This page is assembled from published biographies and the notes at the back of them, period magazines and newspapers, the minutes, newsletters and membership records that organisations left behind, court reports and published judgments, and academic histories of sexuality. Dates and events are taken from that documentary record rather than from what the subculture repeats about itself, and the two often disagree. Where the record is thin, where it survives only through a single interested witness, or where historians still argue about what happened, the page says so in the text instead of smoothing it over.
Questions readers ask
What were the sides actually arguing about?
Not pornography, in the end. The anti-pornography position held that sexuality under male dominance is shaped by that dominance, that consent given inside such a system cannot be taken at face value, and that eroticised power is therefore the mechanism of subordination rather than an exception to it. The other position held that a movement which overrules women's own accounts of their desires has reproduced the authority it exists to oppose, and that the practical result of censorship law is always the suppression of minority sexuality first. Both positions are about who is entitled to interpret a woman's own testimony, which is why neither could concede.
What happened at the Barnard conference?
The ninth Scholar and the Feminist conference, subtitled Towards a Politics of Sexuality, was held at Barnard College on 24 April 1982 with around eight hundred people attending. Members of a coalition of anti-pornography groups picketed the gates in T-shirts reading for a feminist sexuality on the front and against sadomasochism on the back, handing out a leaflet that named individual participants and organisations. Barnard's president had already ordered the conference booklet, a seventy-two page publication called Diary of a Conference, confiscated two days beforehand. The organisers were told less than a day in advance and instructed to say it had been delayed at the printers.
Did the anti-pornography ordinances ever take effect?
No. The Minneapolis city council passed a version on 30 December 1983 and Mayor Donald Fraser vetoed it on 5 January 1984; a revised version passed in July 1984 and was vetoed again. Indianapolis enacted its version, signed by Mayor William Hudnut on 1 May 1984. It was held unconstitutional by the federal district court that year, and the Seventh Circuit affirmed on 27 August 1985 in an opinion by Judge Frank Easterbrook holding that the ordinance discriminated on the basis of viewpoint. The Supreme Court affirmed that judgment summarily in 1986, which is a decision on the merits rather than a refusal to hear the case.
This thread has not been cut
Law, language and community argument all keep moving, and the people moving them are in the same rooms as everyone else.
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