form of illocutionary silencing that women face because of pornography, can be
defined by uptake not being present. Now it looks like illocutionary disablement isn’t
too dissimilar from perlocutionary silencing, but as explained above this does not
explain everything illocutionary frustration does and so the possible recommendation
that Langton (1993) simply accepts Hesni’s (2018) notion that the scenarios are the
same and calls them both perlocution silencing is not valid.
Although I agree that Langton (1993, pp. 321) is wrong in her claim that the harm
of pornography on women can be explained solely by illocutionary silencing, I do not
think this is sufficient to disregard the whole of her text ‘ Speech Acts and Unspeakable
Acts’ . Her text (Langton, 1993) is the first to show how women are linguistically
harmed by the effects of pornography, and how this leads to the perpetuation of rape
and assault on women. She is also the first to successfully link Austin’s speech act
theory (1976) to instances of rape by identifying subordination as the illocutionary
force of pornography (Langton, 1993). It is important to note that when looking at the
result and conclusions of Langton (1933) and Hesni (2018) their outcomes and
potential arguments, in terms of how to combat this issue would be identical. Both
texts are of the opinion that pornography harms women through its linguistic power to
be a speech act, and each demonstrates the harm of pornography suggesting it can and
does lead to the rape of women and thus provide an argument for censorship.
Therefore Langton’s (1993) claims can be justified in their conclusions, in terms of the
harm that pornography imposes on women but not in their premises that this is
because of illocutionary disablement (through the way she defines it).
Despite agreeing that scenarios 1 and 2 are the same, regarding recognising that
uptake has taken place and that a woman has refused sex, I think that a case can still
be made that they are different, and that scenario 1 can best explain the harm imposed
on women by pornography over scenario 2. The difference lies in how seriously the
women’s refusal is taken, and how uptake occurs. In scenario 1 successful uptake can
be explained via the model of nonliteral speech (Hesni, 2018, pp. 954). Yet in scenario
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