Enraged accusations such as 'man hating feminist' have been hurled at Gail Dines for her emphatic stance on the tough stuff of pornography.
Dines is professor of sociology and women's studies at Wheelock College, Boston, and the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. She comes well credentialled and with 20 years of research under her belt.
Dines was in Australia for the Sydney Writers and Festival and appeared on the ABC's Q&A this week. Her anti-porn message has been attacked with pitbull-like ferocity.
Admittedly Dines pulls no punches. She was here to tell us that the voracious consumption by young men of 24-hour on-tap, hardcore internet porn is fouling their minds with sadistic and hateful views of women and sex. Women, said Dines, are feeling increasing pressure to behave and look like porn stars, which had led to the banishment of pubic hair and the rise of the full Brazilian wax.
Dines contends that consumers of porn are coming to expect that real-life sex ought to replicate the contrived marketed fantasy of the enormously erect man indulging in aggressive and often painful (for the woman) sexual congress. This is the sexual revolution down to the wire: sans tenderness, sans intimacy, sans love and sans human vulnerability.
What can only be described as a feminist fight ensued over assertions of what was 'old' and 'new' feminism, while tweeters barracked from the sidelines. The attacks on Dines centred on two themes. She was denounced as demonising men; and of promoting a wowserish, anti sexual liberation stance.
The first point is reminiscent of early critiques of feminists as 'man haters'. The second implies that all open and unfettered approaches to depictions of sex are progressive, and that any moves towards 'censorship' is retrograde and inhibitory of a healthy sexuality.
Dines argues that the hardcore porn industry promotes a damaging view of sex that shapes young men's (and women's) fantasies and expectations of how sex should be, at the cost of healthy intimacy. While she makes her point with some feisty statements, she raises important issues.
No-one would wish to return to the sex education model of the 1950s, which erred on the side of suppression and sterility. But neither is the opposite extreme, of sex that eliminates all emotion other than aggression, a desirable alternative.
I am not in favour of censorship. It does not work, and the lines drawn can be arbitrary and absurd,