 In an influential account of the phenomena of silencing, Langton (1993) deploys speech act theory to examine the case of sexual refusal. According to the silencing argument, pornography depicts women as not (genuinely) refusing sexual advances with utterances of ‘no.’ Indeed, according to the myths perpetuated by pornography (among other social influences), a woman’s ‘no’ is not a refusal, but rather part of an elaborate sexual script. As a result, when a woman says ‘no’ in a non-pornographic context, intending to refuse a man’s sexual advances, she may find herself unable to be heard—that is, her words won’t have the force and effect she intends, and her hearer will not take her to be refusing. She may find herself silenced in this particularly horrendous way, unable to use the standard methods of refusing another’s sexual advances. The claim is that this occurs as a result of pornography silencing women’s refusals in the context of sex. It renders their words powerless.