 Third, pornography may silence women by causing their speech to fail to be understood, or to be misunderstood. For example, pornography may help to form and reinforce the general view that women who utter “no” in sexual contexts frequently do not intend to refuse a man’s sexual advantages by so speaking, and indeed may often intend to further encourage them in order to heighten sexual excitement. In a social environment in which this expectation is prevalent, women may not be able to successfully communicate the idea of refusal to others: Although they may utter the appropriate sounds (e.g., “no”), those sounds may frequently fail to communicate the idea they were intended to express. Pornography may thus prevent women from communicating their ideas to others, not by preventing them from producing or distributing sounds and scrawls, but by preventing those sounds and scrawls from securing “uptake” (“illocutionary disablement”) or being understood by hearers as expressing the idea they were intended to express (Langton 1993; Hornsby 1995; Hornsby and Langton 1998; Maitra 2009; McGowan 2003, 2019; McGowan, Adelman, Helmers, Stolzenberg, 2011; Mikkola 2011; West 2003, 2021; for criticism, see Anthony 2011, 2017; De Gaynesford 2010; Jacobsen 2001; Bird 2002; Bauer 2015). If pornography silences women in this way, there may be some reason to be skeptical that the solution preferred by many liberals (and feminists) of countering the harms of pornography with more speech – protest, satire, education and public debate – will be effective, for pornography may make the relevant speech acts “unspeakable” for women.