 A pattern of culpable behavior could make a speaker unable to perform one speech act type. Could a pattern of culpable behavior–intentional or inadvertent—on the part of others in a speaker’s community achieve the same effect? This could happen if enough such speakers decide never to accept one person’s bets, warnings, or promises. Beyond such hypothetical cases, it has been argued that patterns of social inequality can prevent members of certain groups from performing the speech acts they would choose to. Building on and refining McKinnon’s (1993) claim that pornography silences women, Langton (1993), and Hornsby and Langton (1998) argue that the industry and consumption of pornography deprive women of the ability to perform the speech act of refusing sexual advances. Refusing is a speech act, but if large enough numbers of men deny uptake (with such thoughts as, “By ‘no’ she really means ‘yes’,” etc.) then, these authors argue, women’s attempts to refuse sexual advances will be characteristically inert with respect to the speech act of refusal. Women will still be able to attempt to refuse sexual advances, and can still try to prevent them by physical means, but a crucial illocutionary form of protection will be closed to them. So too, apartheid, Jim Crow, and even patterns of discrimination of which the perpetrators are not consciously aware, can deprive racial, religious, and ethnic minority groups of the ability to perform speech-act types requiring uptake. These phenomena are generally referred to as illocutionary silencing.