ANDREA DWORKIN and CATHARINE A. MacKINNON
Copyright © 1988 by Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin
Al rights reserved
First Printing 1988
Second Printing 1989
Copyright © 1988 by Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin
Al rights reserved
Library of Congress card number: 88-190876
ISBN 0-9621849-0-X
To al the people who have worked
to pass the Ordinance into law and
to al the people who need to use it.
CONTENTS
The Meaning of Civil R ights. . ..... . ..... . ..... . . . . . . . . . . 7
The Nature of C hange........................................................17
Authority and Resistance.................................................... 19
Equality as a Social G o a l.................................................... 21
Pornography and Civil R ig h ts...........................................24
The O rdinance.....................................................................31
Statement of Policy........................................................31
Findings ........................................................................32
Definition .....................................................................36
Causes of A c tio n ...........................................................41
C oercion................................................................. 41
Trafficking..............................................................44
F o rce ........................................................................49
Assault .................................... . .............................50
Defamation..............................................................51
Defenses ........................................................................52
Enforcem ent................................................................. 54
Civil A ction..............................................................54
D am ages................................................................. 54
Injunctions..............................................................55
Technicalities................................................................. 56
Severability..............................................................56
Limitation of Action ..............................................56
Civil Rights and Speech .................................................... 58
Questions and Answers........................................................67
Table of Authorities ...........................................................97
Appendix A: The Minneapolis O rdinance.......................99
Appendix B: The Indianapolis O rdinance....................106
Appendix C: The Cambridge Ordinance ....................133
Appendix D: The Model O rdinance..............................138
Pornography and Civil Rights
5
The Meaning of Civil Rights
Civil rights as we understand them are new, not old.
Equality was not a constitutional principle or legal imperative in 1776. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution were passed in 1865, 1868,
and 1870, not in 1776. They made slavery illegal, introduced
the principle of equal protection under the law, and gave Black
men the vote. The first civil-rights statutes were passed in the
same period to help undo the effects of slavery. Still, the after-
math of slavery was segregation. The Supreme Court decided
to outlaw segregation in public schooling in 1954, not in 1776
or 1868. Modern civil-rights acts to dismantle segregation and
prohibit discrimination were passed in 1957, 1960, 1964, and
1968, not in 1776 or 1868. The Voting Rights Act was passed
in 1965, not in 1776 or 1868. In the United States for most of
its history, Black people were virtual y excised from the body
politic, first through the constitutionally protected slave trade,
then through constitutionally protected segregation.
There were two kinds of segregation. De jure segregation
was mandated by law, enacted by statute, enforced by the police. De facto segregation was separation of the races without the overt sanction of specific laws: Blacks had inferior status,
worth, and resources.
In the South, there was de jure segregation. Laws forbade
Blacks access to public accommodations, including toilets, restaurants, hotels, parks, and stores. Blacks were allowed only restricted access to public transportation. Jobs, housing, and
education were marginal and often debased in quality. De jure
segregation effectively kept Blacks from voting. De jure segregation implicitly sanctioned physical violence against Blacks.
There was widespread police brutality and vigilante terrorism, including lynchings and castrations.
De jure segregation set the standard for the way Black people
were treated throughout the United States. The degraded civil
status and racial inferiority of Blacks were taken for granted. In
The Meaning of Civil Rights
7
practice, segregation in housing and to a somewhat lesser extent
in education was the rule. The use of the word nigger was commonplace. Unemployment and menial labor ensured that Blacks were economically dispossessed and political y disenfranchised.
Narcotics, especial y heroin, were dumped on Black urban ghettos, law enforcement collaborating in targeting a Black population for addiction and despair. White contempt for Blacks was expressed openly in humor, in street harassment, in condescension, in infantilizing or animalistic media stereotypes, and in physical violence. Until de jure segregation was dismantled,
no Black person lived independent of it no matter where they
lived, because de jure segregation meant that the authority of law
applauded the debasing of Black people. Every Black person
was affected adversely in their rights and dignity by de jure segregation, humiliated by its very existence. De jure segregation also had this deep and pernicious ef ect: it made de facto segregation
look benign by comparison. Institutionalized racism had two
ostensibly distinct, even opposite systems serving to validate it.
In the South, this racism had the authority of law. In the rest of
the country, the social inferiority of Blacks had the appearance
of being natural, not imposed by force.
De jure segregation was destroyed over many years because
vast numbers of Black people with some brave white al ies
fought it, sometimes at the cost of their lives.
De jure segregation was fought in the courts and in the streets.
“The streets” included shops, restaurants, buses, hotels, parks,
toilets, because of the high priority put by the movement on integrating public accommodations. Much of this activity was il egal. The courts and the streets were not separate arenas.
When the Supreme Court disavowed segregation in public
education in 1954, it was left to Black children to desegregate
the schools. They faced white mobs led by armed police and
elected white of icials. The children, not the Supreme Court,
integrated the schools. When Rosa Parks refused to give up
her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on
December 1, 1955, she was arrested and convicted for breaking a state segregation law. The Black community organized a boycot of the Montgomery buses that eventually led to their
8
Pornography and Civil Rights
desegregation. Endless acts of civil disobedience resulted in
perhaps hundreds of thousands of arrests over a period of at
least a decade; marches led to continuous confrontations with
violent police; civil-rights activists used the courts, sometimes
as litigants, sometimes charged as criminals.
The courts were the courts of segregation; north or south,
federal or state, they had protected segregation. The streets were
the streets of segregation. The police were the police of segregation. The vote was the vote that had kept segregation inviolate. Civil-rights activists confronted the institutions of segregation because they wanted to destroy segregation. They went to where the power and injury were and they confronted the power
that was causing the injury. This power hurt them whether or
not they fought it. In fighting it, however, they forced it to reveal itself—its cruelty and its sadism but also its premises, its dynamics, its structural strengths and weaknesses. Each confrontation led to another confrontation, more and worse social conflict, often more and worse police or mob violence. The courts
led to the streets and the streets led to the courts. The good judicial decisions led to the armed police who did not accept those decisions, which led back to jail and back to the courts. There
were also in time negotiations with two Presidents of the United
States (Kennedy and Johnson) and the Justice Department; then
back to the street, back to jail, back to court. There were battles
and compromises with federal legislators; then demonstrations,
marches, civil disobedience, jail. In the impoverished rural areas
of the Deep South, civil-rights workers taught illiterate Blacks
to read and write so they could pass the literacy tests that were
being used to keep Blacks out of the voting booths. The civil-
rights workers were met with white violence. So were the Blacks
who tried to register to vote, throughout the South.
The social conflict was real. Many were hurt and some were
killed. The conflict escalated with each confrontation, inside
the courts or in the streets. Each confrontation became more
costly, both to the civil-rights activists and to the white-su-
premacist society they were fighting. Each confrontation
forced people throughout the society to ask at least these two
fundamental questions of power and dignity: Who is getting hurt
The Meaning of Civil Rights
9
and why? By attacking de jure segregation on every front, however dangerous or difficult, the civil-rights activists made
the cost of maintaining the racial status quo higher and higher.
Eventually it became too high. The Civil Rights Act of 1964
opened up public accommodations, first in the South, later
everywhere, to Black people. The Voting Rights Act of 1965
opened up the voting booths.
The high cost of maintaining the status quo forced change;
and so did the increasing moral authority of the protesters.
They risked everything. Their bravery indisputably expressed the eloquence of their humanity to a nation that had denied the very existence of that humanity. Each assertion of
rights enhanced the persuasive power of those who demanded equality. The moral authority of the protesters eventually exceeded the moral authority of the state that sought to crush
them. They won access to public accommodations and to the
voting booth; and they won the respect of a nation that had
hated them. De jure segregation no longer set the standard for
the contemptuous disregard of the rights of Black people; instead, Black people set the human standard for courage.
Principles:
1. Confront power by challenging it where it is strongest,
meanest, and most entrenched. (For instance, white supremacy was strongest in the legally segregated South; meanest in the streets, including in public accommodations; and most entrenched in the courts. ) 2. Intensifying and escalating social conflict leads to social
change.
3. The status quo must become too costly for the dominant
society to bear.
4. The moral authority of those confronting entrenched
power can be a force for change.
10
Pornography and Civil Rights
Our contemporary understanding of civil rights—what they
are, what they mean—comes out of the Black experience: ’the
human rights of Black people—their rights of citizenship and
personhood—were violated in de jure and de facto systems of
segregation. Civil-rights legislation grew out of the specific
configurations of Black exclusion from society, dignity, and
rights. Other groups were also af orded legal protection from
discrimination. Where the pat erns of discrimination experienced by those groups were analogous to pat erns of Black exclusion under segregation, civil-rights laws remedied longstanding, systematic deprivations. For instance, the disabled, now protected under civil-rights legislation, have a right of
equal access to public schooling and public accommodations.
The effort to stop racial discrimination in jobs, hiring practices,
and housing has provided many stigmatized groups legal redress.
Generally, discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, color,
national origin, marital status, disability, or, in some cities and
states, sexual or affectional preference, is banned. This broadening of civil-rights protection to many stigmatized groups was the result of political activism, legislative initiatives, and many, many
lawsuits. It was not simply decreed one bright day because it was
right and bigots had recognized the error of their bad ways.
It is especially important to understand that Blacks includes
Black women and that women includes Black women. When
Black people as a whole or women as a whole are discriminated against or hurt, Black women are denied rights. (For instance, when Blacks were given the vote, but women were
excluded, Black women could not vote. )
Women have benefited greatly from civil-rights legislation
and litigation when discrimination has taken the form of exclusion because of sex, especially in employment. When the pat erns of sex discrimination resemble those of race discrimination, especially as they developed under segregation, civil-rights law offers remedies. But when injuries on the basis of
sex are distinct and different—as, for instance, in systematic
sexual abuse—there are no effective civil-rights remedies in
law even though basic rights of citizenship and personhood
are being denied or violated.
The Meaning of Civil Rights
1
The legal history of women’s rights in the United States is
appalling.
Put in the simplest terms: women were the chattel property
of men under law until the early part of the twentieth century.
Married women could not own property because they were
property. A woman’s body, her children, and the clothes on
her back belonged to her husband. When the husband died,
another male, not the mother, became the legal guardian of
the children. The body of a married woman belonged to her
husband just as a slave’s body belonged to the white master.
A single woman was under the legally formidable authority of
her father or other male relatives. Mar ied women were what
nineteenth-century feminists called “civil y dead. ” Single
women sometimes paid taxes. No women had rights of citizenship. Women did not have a constitutionally protected right to vote until 1920.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution was
ratified in 1868. The Fourteenth Amendment is unique in the
Constitution. It is an equality-based amendment; it says that
equality under the law is a right. The Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Amendments gave Black men the vote. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed citizens equal protection under the
law. The Fourteenth Amendment intentionally excluded
women. * Only in 1971 did the Supreme Court hold that
women too were entitled to the equal protection under the
law promised by the Fourteenth Amendment.
The banning of discrimination on the basis of sex in the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a partial and mean af air. Trying
to defeat the whole Civil Rights Act, racist Southern Congressmen proposed to add sex on a par with race to Title VII, the
* Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment indudes the fol owing: “But when the
right to vote at any election for the choice of electors... is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age... or in any way abridged
... the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. ” (Emphasis added. ) In other words; when states deny any man the right to vote in federal or state elections, the Fourteenth Amendment is violated. The Fourteenth Amendment, by express language, declined to extend this equality right, the right to vote, to any women. The Nineteenth Amendment, which extended the franchise to women, was passed in 1920.
12
Pornography and Civil Rights
part of the bill designed to prohibit race discrimination in hiring practices. (Women were not included in the public-accommodations protections in 1964 or 1968. ) This segregationist
amendment adding sex was passed only because the Civil
Rights Act could not be passed without it.
The segregationist amendment was a serious effort to defeat
the bill. It outraged liberal Congressmen who wanted the
1964 Civil Rights Act to pass. It was intended to be—and was
taken as—a massive and foul insult to Black people and to
those in Congress who favored integration. It was widely regarded as a moral obscenity that demeaned the whole concept of civil rights.
The insult of the amendment was: saying Blacks could be
equal with whites was like saying women could be equal with
men, a transparent absurdity. The insult was: the inequality
between Blacks and whites and especially the incapacities of
Blacks were as natural, as normal, as biologically inevitable,
as divinely ordained, as the inequality between the sexes and
especially the incapacities of women. The insult was: Blacks,
like women, are by nature servile and infantile; trying to elevate Blacks to some other level would be like trying to elevate women (and, by inference, children)—ludicrous, deranged.
On the gut er level, the segregationists had, in effect, gone
from calling those who opposed segregation “niggers” and
“nigger lovers” to calling them all “pussy. ”
The conviction that women could have or should have any
relief from civil inequality played no part in establishing this
first legislative basis for sex discrimination as a violation of
civil rights; and the conviction that women had a right to substantive and honest equality similarly played no role.
Most major advances in sex equality under civil-rights
law—from af irmative action to redress for sexual harassment—have come from litigation, not legislation, though Congress subsequently af irmed a commitment to sex-discrimination law many times, especially in the 1970’s.
Some of the legal rights that feminists regard as fundamental to women’s civil equality have nothing at all to do with civil-rights law or sex discrimination. For instance, the right to
The Meaning of Civil Rights
13
abortion is considered a right of privacy under law, not an
equality right. A man’s right to have and use pornography in
his home is protected under the same right of privacy, and the
pornographers have been active in (1) keeping the two rights
legally linked and (2) persuading feminist groups not to
pursue the right to abortion as an issue of sex equality in law.
Also, it is no surprise that civil-rights law has not killed racism. It wounded its most protected social expressions but, with segregationists having enormous power in Congress and
nearly two centuries of racism saturating the society, no one
asked Blacks to make social policy that would cor ect socially
pervasive debasement. Instead, there was a negotiation with
America’s segregationists, world-class racists by any measure.
It is not just that there are limits to what law can do; there
were serious limits to what this society would even consider
doing. There stil are.
FACTS:
1. Women were chattel property until the early part of the
twentieth century.
2. The Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed equal
protection under the law and, with the Fifteenth Amendment, gave Black men the right to vote, intentionally excluded women.
3. Women did not have a constitutionally protected right to
vote until 1920. In 1971, the Supreme Court said women
had a right to equal protection under the law.
4. “Sex” was amended to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the
section concerning hiring practices by segregationists to
try to defeat the whole bill.
5. The right to choose abortion is a right of privacy under
law, not a right of equality.
6. When discrimination against women takes place in the
same ways as discrimination against Blacks, there are civil-
14
Pornography and Civil Rights
rights remedies. When the pat erns of discrimination are
different, having different origins and different dynamics, there are no such remedies, no mat er how egregious the discrimination is or how violating the pat erns of sex-based inequality are.
In the job market, women have been forcibly excluded and
forcibly segregated. The low status of women has been partly
created and partly maintained through the exclusion and the
segregation. Civil-rights law is used to fight the exclusion and
the segregation in themselves and to fight the continuing bad
effects of past segregation.
In the common fabric of everyday life, women are, in a
sense, forcibly integrated, intimately. integrated, with society
organized so that women’s sexual and reproductive capacities
have been control ed by men. Women have been kept out of
the marketplace to be kept in the home, or kept in the bed,
or kept in the kitchen, or kept pregnant. Social institutions,
pat erns, and practices force women to fulfill the sexual and
reproductive imperatives of men.
Because so much of women’s social inequality centers on
forced sexual and reproductive compliance, the ways in which
women are debased in rights and in personhood center on issues of bodily integrity, physical self-determination, and the social eradication of forced sex or sexual abuse. Systematic violations of women’s rights to safety, dignity, and civil equality take the form of rape, battery, incest, prostitution, sexualized
torture, and sexualized murder, all of which are endemic in
this society now. These are acts of sex-based hate directed
against a population presumed to be inferior in human worth.
These are means of keeping women subjugated as a group
with a low civil status and a degraded quality of life.
The second-class status of women is justified in the conviction that by nature women are sexually submissive, provoke and enjoy sexual aggression from men, and get sexual
pleasure from pain. By nature women are servile and the servility itself is sexual. We are below men in a civil and sexual The Meaning of Civil Rights
15
hierarchy that mimics the sex act. It is our sexual nature to
want to be used, exploited, or forced. Sex equality is seen to
violate the very natures of men and women, presuming a
sameness where none exists; and violations of women are seen
to be part of normal human nature, not the result of a coercive social system that devalues women.
Women need laws that address the ways in which women
are kept second-class: the institutional sanctions for violence
and violation, de jure and de facto; the pat erns of exploitation and debasement; the systematic injuries to integrity, freedom,
equality, and self-esteem.
Principles:
1. Remedies for inequality must be derived from the specific
kinds and pat erns of inequality that exist. They must
address the real ways in which people are hurt.
2. Civil inferiority is social y coerced, not natural.
3. To dismantle the coercion, you have to figure out how
society organizes and maintains it.
4. Those who are civil y inferior are presumed to have a nature that deserves the treatment they get.
5. Women’s human rights are violated through sexual exploitation and abuse. Rape, battery, incest, prostitution, sexualized torture, and sexualized murder express contempt for the human worth of women and keep women second-class.
6. Sex-based violation can both express an at itude and be a
material means of keeping women down.
16
Pornography and Civil Rights
The Nature of Change
People seem to resist change and to defend the status quo
whatever it is. Sometimes the defenses are bigoted and violent.
Sometimes they are sophisticated and intellectual. If the status
quo is endangered, both kinds of defenses are called into play.
Inequality is made to seem normal and natural, whatever
social form it takes.
When some people have power and some people do not,
creating equality means taking power from those who have
too much and giving power to those who have too little. Social change requires the redistribution of power.
Those who have power over others tend to cal their power
“rights. ” When those they dominate want equality, those in
power say that important rights wil be violated if society changes.
In the segregated South, two kinds of “rights” were defended
by white-supremacists. First, they defended states’ rights. They
said that the framers of the Constitution had given states the
sovereign right to legislate social policy, including the separation of the races, and that the power of the federal government to intervene had been strictly and severely limited by the framers.
What they said was true. In fact, the framers had constructed
the Constitution so that the states had the power to protect
slavery' Segregation could hardly have mat ered a hill of beans
to them. Second, those in power. said that integration would take
from them a precious civil liberty protected by the First Amendment: the right to freedom of association. Forced to integrate schools, parks, hotels, restaurants, toilets, and other public accommodations, whites lost the power to exclude Blacks. This they experienced as having lost the “right” to associate with
whom they wanted, that is to say, exclusively with each other.
Wrongful power is often protected by law because law is the
ordering of power. Law organizes power. In a society where
women and Blacks have been legal chattel, the law is not premised on a sensitivity to their human worth. Law protects
“rights”—but mostly it protects the “rights” of those who have
The Nature of Change
17
power. The United States is a particularly self-congratulatory
nation. We say that we invented democracy and that our Constitution represents the highest principles of civilized governing. Yet our Constitution was designed to protect slavery and to keep women chattel. The “rights” guaranteed to white men
were grants of freedom that established a civil and social dominance over Blacks and women. Change has not occurred because white men developed a passion for equality. (Had they, that passion would not have been constitutional. ) Change has
not occurred because those with power felt that they had too
much and wanted to give some up. Change has come from sustained, often bit er rebellion against power disguised as
“rights. ” Highfalutin legal principles have masked and protected privilege, dominance, and exploitation.
Change is not easy, fast, or inevitable. The powerless are responsible for creating change. They have to, because those who have power wil not. Why should they? This is not fair, but it is
true. Power takes dominance for granted; dominance is like
gravity, not felt as a force at al , simply accepted as the way things
are, each thing being in its proper place. Dominance is dignified—sincerely, not cynical y—as a “right” or a series of “rights. ”
If someone has power over you and you take that power away
from him, he wil say you are taking away his rights. Society wil
have given him a legitimate way—often a legal way—to claim that
dominance is a right of his and that submission is a duty of yours.
Principles:
1. Equality requires the redistribution of power.
2. Those who are social y dominant experience dominance as
a right.
3. Take away wrongful power and you wil be accused of
taking away rights. Often, this wil be true because the law,
under the guise of protecting rights, protects power.
18
Pornography and Civil Rights
Authority and Resistance
Even though the framers gave the states the right (power)
to protect slavery, and even though forced integration did diminish the scope, breadth, substance, and importance of the First Amendment right to freedom of association (for whites,
of course), a time came when these tenets of constitutional law
had to be reinterpreted. The authority of law could be maintained only if law sanctioned the equality that had been anathema to it.
The courts never said they had been wrong; and to this day
it is a dicey business to impugn the more perfect Constitution
of the framers. But law had to bend or break. The authority
of the law always appears to be absolute but in fact it is never
absolute or immutable. Resistance can force it to change its
ground.
The authority of the law had been used to impose inequality.
This inequality gave whites authority. The resistance to
inequality had to confront, resist, and repudiate both the
authority of the law and the authority of whites. To maintain
itself, law changed. The authority of whites was pret y much
destroyed. It had to be, because white authority carried the
contagion of white supremacy beyond where law could go.
Male authority over women permeates every social institution and most intimate exchanges and practices. The state is one agent of male authority. The rapist is another. The
husband is another. The pimp is another. The priest is
another. The publisher is another. And so on. Resistance to
male authority requires far more than resistance to the state
or to the authority of the state. For women, the authority of
the man extends into intimacy and privacy, inside the body in
sex and in reproduction. In worshiping a male God, in conforming to social codes of dress and demeanor, even in using language, women defer to the authority of men.
The means of resistance to this ubiquitous and invasive
authority have never been adequate. Sometimes they hardly
Authority and Resistance
19
seem serious. Even when women resist inequality and the
authority of the state that imposes inequality, women continue
to capitulate to the authority of men, an authority premised
on women’s inequality. In a fight for freedom, such a capitulation is suicidal. Accepting male authority means accepting important elements of one’s own social and sexual inferiority.
Deference to male authority means deference to second-class
status.
The authority of the law must be—and can be—forced to
change its ground: to sanction equality. The authority of men
has to be pret y much destroyed. It is probably impossible to
repudiate women’s inequality while accepting male authority.
So far, hostility to the authority of men appears to be a serious no-no, even though each act or at itude of deference further entrenches male dominance. It is likely that women’s
inequality—the habits and pat erns of discrimination, prejudice, and debasement that injure women—can survive any political resistance so long as the authority of men remains, as
it is now, both sacrosanct and intact.
Principles:
1. The authority of law, which has sanctioned inequality, can
be forced to sanction equality if resistance is intense enough
and if the stakes are high enough, for example, the viability of the law itself.
2. The authority of those who dominate must also be resisted
and destroyed.
3. Deference to male authority means deference to second-
class status.
4. Resisting the authority of men is necessary.
20
Pornography and Civil Rights
Equality as a Social Goal
Freedom of Association
Whites have freedom of association because whites have
power. Whites use it to exclude Blacks. Blacks do not have freedom of association because they are forbidden from going many places under many circumstances. Whites say that if they
are forced to integrate, they wil be deprived of their right to
freedom of association. They are in fact deprived of it so that
this same right can be extended to Blacks. The mathematics of
the situation are clear: as long as whites count as the humans
who have a right to rights, making them integrate means
taking away their absolute control of association in public and
in private. As soon as Blacks count as humans who also have
rights, freedom of association is in fact extended, increased,
significantly multiplied, because Blacks can exercise it by going
to the places whites had been able to forbid them to go.
Freedom of Speech
Women, who have lived in social, political, and legal silence,
are told that freedom of speech is a sacrosanct right, and that
any ef ort to diminish it for anyone diminishes it for women.
Though women have been excluded from access to the means
of communication, from the political dialogue, from education, from economic equity or political power; though women are forced into social silence by contempt and by terrorism;
though women are excluded from participation in the institutions that articulate social policy; women are supposed to value speech rights by valuing the rights of those who have
excluded them. In particular, if a pornographer takes a
woman and hangs her bound and gagged and photographs
her and publishes the photograph, she, that particular woman,
is supposed to value his right to speech over her own; and if
she should suggest that he must not be allowed to profit from
her physically coerced silence, she wil be told that her right
Equality as a Social Goal
21
to freedom of speech depends on protecting his. If she says,
But he gagged me and hung me and I couldn’t talk so I did
not have a right of speech that I could exercise, she wil* be
told to solve her problem in some way that wil not impinge
on or diminish his right to express himself through his use of
her body. If she recognizes that his so-called right is an exercise of power at the expense of her humanity, and if she wants rights of speech that are real in the world such that he cannot
gag her and hang her and photograph her and publish her,
she wil be accused of wanting to take his rights from him. In
fact, she wants to take his power over her from him. He has
power disguised as rights protected by law that fosters
inequality. The mathematics are simple: his diminished power
wil lead to an increase in her rights. The power of the pornographer is the power of men. The exploitation of the woman gagged, hung, photographed, and published is the
sexualized inferiority and human worthlessness of women. If
men cannot gag, hang, photograph, and publish women, men
wil have les power and women wil have more rights.
Because the establishment of equality means taking power
from those who have it, power protected by law, those who
have wrongful power hate equality and resist it. They defend
the status quo through bigotry and violence or sophistication
and intellect. They find high and mighty principles and say
how important rights are. They say that rights wil be lost if
society changes. They mean that power wil be lost, by them.
This is true.
The Constitution, including the Bil of Rights (the first ten
amendments to the Constitution), has served to defend
wrongful power and to protect inequality and exploitation.
This is primarily because Blacks and women were not recognized as fully human and their inequality was built into the basic structure of constitutional law. We need to establish a
legal imperative toward equality. Without equality as a fundamental value, “rights” is a euphemism for “power, ” and legally protected dominance wil continue to preclude any real equality.
22
Pornography and Civil Rights
Principles:
1. Equality means that someone loses power; it is taken from
him. He does not like this and fights it. He cal s his power
“rights” and so does the law.
2. The mathematics are simple: taking power from exploiters
extends and multiplies the rights of those they have been
exploiting.
3. The U. S. Constitution, including the Bil of Rights, has
protected wrongful power disguised as rights. Strong
equality law can change this. We need to put the highest
social value on equality.
Pornography and Civil Rights
Law has traditionally considered pornography to be a question of private virtue and public morality, not personal injury and collective abuse. The law on pornography has been the
law of morals regulation, not the law of public safety, personal
security, or civil equality. When pornography is debated, in
or out of court, the issue has been whether government should
be in the business of making sure only nice things are said and
seen about sex, not whether government should remedy the
exploitation of the powerless for the profit and enjoyment of
the powerful. Whether pornography is detrimental to “the social fabric” has therefore been considered; whether particular individuals or definable groups are hurt by it has not been, not really.
Since, in this traditional view, pornography can only violate
an idea of the society one wants to think one lives in, the question of pornography has not required looking into who can violate whom and get away with it. Once pornography is
framed as concept rather than practice, more thought than
act, more in the head than in the world, its effects also necessarily appear both insubstantial and unsubstantiated, more abstract than real. So both what pornography is and what it
does have been seen to lie in the eye of the beholder, to be a
mat er of what one is thinking about when one looks at it, to
be a question of point of view. And since the accepted solution
for dif ering moral views has been mutual tolerance, one
man’s harm has been seen as another’s social value as the pornography industry in the United States has doubled in the last ten years without effective interference from the courts.
The law has been wrong. Obscured beneath the legal fog of
obscenity law and the shield of the law of privacy and the perversely cruel joke of the law against prostitution has been the real buying and selling of real individuals through coercion or
entrapment, or through exploiting their powerlessness, social
worthlessness and lack of choices and credibility, their despair
24
Pornography and Civil Rights
and sometimes their hope. Shielded from public view, in-part
through the collaboration of law, has been the manufacture
from skin and blood and ruined lives of a vicious product by vicious people. Veiled as well has been the shameless profiteering in run-down parts of town, the pressure deals with unscrupulous
politicians and judges, the arm-twisting of retailers, the
takeovers of magazine distribution networks and underground
control of legitimate entertainment businesses, the threats and
sabotage of the personal, occupational, and public lives of anyone who gets in their way, and the outright buying of liberal credibility, which parades a traffic in human beings—this auction block on every newsstand in the country—as a principled means of sexual and expressive freedom, and stigmatizes doing
or saying anything about it as censorship.
Equally clouded by specious media reports and outright lies
has been the direct evidence of a causal relationship between
the consumption of pornography and increases in social levels
of violence, hostility, and discrimination. * So, few knew of
those trapped in sexually toxic marriages or jobs to keep a roof
over their heads and to feed their children. Few—except the
many who did it or had it done to them—knew that the abuses
of pornography’s production are a mere prelude to the abuse
mass-produced through pornography’s mass distribution and
mass consumption: the rapes, the battery, the sexual harassment, the sexual abuse of children, the forced sex, the forced
* This evidence is consistent across social studies (studies on real people or real data in the real world), laboratory studies (controlled exposure and response situations in isolated settings), and testimony by both professionals (for example, therapists who work with victims and offenders, police who observe evidence of sex crimes) and direct victims (women in al walks of life, such as prostitutes, daughters, wives, students, employees). The evidence is summarized in Diana E. H. Russell, “Pornography and Rape: A Causal Model, ” Political Psychology Vol. 9 No. I (March 1988): 41-73.
Most of the major social and laboratory studies are discussed in N. Malamuth and E.
Donnerstein, eds., Pornography and Sexual Aggres ion (1984) and D. Zillman, Connections Between Sex and Aggres ion (1984). Al the relevant studies, together with analysis of victim testimony, are listed in the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, Final Report (July 1986), 299-349; 1885-1906. Women and men testified to their experience of the causal relation between pornography and harm to them in the hearings held by the Minneapolis City Council on the Ordinance, Public Hearings on Ordinances to Add Pornography as Discrimination Against Women, Committee on Government Operations, City Council, Minneapolis, Minn. (Dec. 12—13, 1983).
Pornography and Civil Rights
25
prostitution, the unwanted sexualization, the second-class status. And the increasing inability to tell the difference between al of that and sex—al of that and just what a woman is.
Those who do this are silent in order to protect their power,
profits, and pleasure. Many who have this done to them are
silent because they are ashamed, afraid, bought, or dead. But
overwhelmingly they are silent because even when they speak
no one listens. This makes them ashamed and afraid—and
even, for al we know, bought or dead. For the rest, those who
have known have not cared, and those who might have cared
have not known—or were kept from knowing, or were not
permit ed to care, or thought they could not afford to know
or care. Completely absent from most legal and political debate on the subject have been the twelve individual men whose names virtually never surface. These are the heads of large
organized-crime families who own, control, and profit from
the pornography industry, buying with terror whatever legitimacy and impunity they cannot buy with money, thriving while others pay the human cost. The entire debate over pornography is primarily for their benefit.
The legal conception of what pornography is has authoritatively shaped the social conception of what pornography does. Instead of recognizing the personal injuries and systemic harms of pornography, the law has told the society that pornography is a passive reflection or one-level-removed
“representation” or symptomatic by-product or artifact of the
real world. It thus becomes an idea analog to, a word or picture replay of, something else, which somehow makes what it presents, that something else, not real either. So its harms have
not been seen as real. They have, in fact, been protected under
the disguise of the name given that world of words and pictures which are not considered real: “speech. ” This could happen because law is an instrument of social power first, and those who produce and consume pornography have social
power. Pornography is made unreal to protect it, in order to
protect the pleasure, sexual and financial, of those who derive
its benefits. Those who are hurt by pornography—society’s
powerless, its disregarded, its rejects, the invisible and voice-
26
Pornography and Civil Rights
less, mostly women and children—are made unreal in order
to keep their abuse defined the way those who enjoy it define
it: as sex. Particularly with women, whose social definition as
inferior is a sexual one, victimization through pornography
has been perceived as a natural state, not as victimization at
al but as fit ing and chosen. When they are thought to be paid
for their exploitation, that both confirms that this is what they
have to sel and, by making it a market transaction, makes it
appear not to be exploitation at al .
Law is often thought to be a neutral instrument. But law has
participated directly in making pornography a legal and social institution. Obscenity law misdefines the problem of pornography as offensive and. immoral public displays of sex, evades the real harms, and is unworkable in design, while always making it seem that the problem could be solved with greater exercise of prosecutorial wil . It is the seductiveness
of obscenity law to seem potential y effective because its terms
are so meaningless they could mean almost anything. As a result, they have meant almost nothing, being (actually) dependent upon the viewpoint of the observer. This makes obscenity law less useful the more pornography is a problem, because
the more pornography is consumed, the more observers’
views are shaped by it, and the more the world it makes confirms that view. Privacy law has further institutionalized pornography by shielding the sexual sphere, where so much of pornography’s violence to women is done, including by outright guaranteeing the right to possess pornography in the home, the most violent place for women. Pornography has
also been legally institutionalized through decrying but permit ing pimping and prostitution (of which pornography is one form), making sure prostitutes are the ones who pay for
doing what the entire social system has given them, as women,
little choice but to do in one form or another.
The law has helped make pornography a social institution
more indirectly as wel . The law of rape makes the pornographic assumption that women may consent to forced sex.
The law of child custody applies the pornographic definition
of the female to mothers. Women who have sexual relations
Pornography and Civil Rights
27
with a man or men not the father of their children have long
been considered loose women, hence not good mothers.
Lesbian mothers have found that a woman who is not being
sexually used by a man is considered an inadequate woman,
hence also not a good mother. The frequent failures of attempts under sex-discrimination law to get women the same pay as men when they do dif erent work of comparable value
permits job definitions and pay scales to continue based on
pornographic definitions of women’s proper role as men’s
hierarchical subordinates, as sexually pleasing to men visual y, and as servicers of male needs. It also keeps women so poor they need to sel sex to men to survive. The law of evidence pervasively permits a woman’s credibility to be based upon the pornographic standard that what a woman is sexual y and does sexually is the relevant measure of her word and her worth. If she has had sex, she is worthless as a human
being and can neither be violated nor believed. If she has not
had sex, she is worthless as a woman, hence is not worthy of
belief. Pervasively, whether by the collaboration of ineffective
or perverse action, or by the complicity of inaction, the legal
system has supported the existence and burgeoning of this industry and its social propriety as wel . Deep legal echos on al levels of the system support the existence of pornography in
the world and make it seem right that the legal system condones it. What the law does, the law must undo.
Law in the United States provides a forum for airing disputes recognized as legitimate and an avenue for redressing grievances and harms considered worth redressing for people
considered worth intervention. For individuals who are hurt
by other individuals, civil court promises dignity to conflict,
recognition to an arguable harm, some ground rules beyond
overt force, an opportunity to fight for one’s life, a chance for
vindication, and the possibility of relief... maybe even a little
change. Those whose harms the society takes seriously are
permit ed access to court; they are full citizens. Those whose
harms the law refuses even to allow into court are not; they
are victims, period. In this country, civil-rights law particularly has been an oppositional force for change. It has given 28
Pornography and Civil Rights
people, dignity, self-respect, and hope, without which people
cannot live. Ever since Black people demanded legal change
as one means to social change, civil rights has stood for the
principle that systematic social inequality—the legal and social institutionalization of group-based power and powerlessness—should and would be undone by law. Law would do this both because it had a shameful part in creating and maintaining social inequality and because it could do something about it. The fact that law had obscured or permit ed inequality, had
reflected and furthered it both, was seen not as a reason that
law should be disregarded but as a reason it had to be used.
This was not done out of political naivete or civics-class faith
in the legal system’s intrinsic justice. It was done out of determination to make this society’s normal everyday mechanisms work for normal everyday people—all of them. Civil rights is
a “Look, we live here, too” movement. It is not dedicated primarily to making the society more comfortable for outlaws or to lessening the stigma of marginality or to making powerlessness feel bet er. It is dedicated to changing basic norms so that what was outlaw and marginal and powerless no longer is. It
aims to alter the mainstream. For civil-rights movements,
then, the fact that law is an instrument of the powerful has
never been an inert fact to be met with complacency or
despair, far less a reason to leave its power in the hands of the
powerful. It has been a reason that the law cannot af ord to
be ignored. The law’s pretense at providing equal justice did
not provide an occasion for cynicism, but a hypocrisy to be
exposed and a promise to be delivered, not a radical reason
to do nothing. The law of sex discrimination, aimed at altering the inequality of women to men, at eliminating the subordination of women to men as a norm, has been a part of this tradition, at least to some of us.
The civil-rights approach to pornography is an application
of this tradition, this analysis, and this determination to the
emergency of pornography and the condition of women. Accordingly, the antipornography civil-rights law (“the Ordinance”) does not admonish or moralize or apologize or request. By making it possible for women who can prove harm Pornography and Civil Rights
29
to sue pornographers, it draws a line by making action
possible. In so doing, it defines a standard that tells the pornographers and their consumers that women are human beings, meaning that when they are hurt, something can be
done about it. Unlike any prior approach to pornography,
this law is based on proof of a harm, not a judgment about the
permissibility of an idea. And, like al civil-rights legislation,
it addresses a harm that derives its meaning and sting from
group status.
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Pornography and Civil Rights
The Ordinance
Statement of Policy
The statement of policy that begins the Minneapolis Ordinance capsulizes its legal approach: Pornography is sex discrimination. It exists in Minneapolis posing a substantial threat to the health, safety, peace, welfare, and equality of citizens in the community. Existing state and federal laws are inadequate to solve these problems in Minneapolis.
Pornography is recognized as a practice of civil inequality
on the basis of gender, posing the threats to its target population that al socially institutionalized inequalities do. This clause also recognizes the obvious fact that, while many of the
acts that make up the distinctive harms of pornography are
formally illegal, no existing laws are effective against them. If
they were, pornography would not flourish as it does, and its
victims would not be victimized through it as they are. Lawyers
seeking to protect pornography often become extremely ingenious in inventing legal theories that they insist already cover all serious harms of pornography—legal theories they
seldom intend to try to make work, by the way.
In fact, no laws now permit those victimized by pornography
to sue the pornographers for the pornography. So long as the
pornography can be made and sold, the harms of its making
and use wil continue, and the incentive to make it and sel it
wil continue. Obscenity laws have proven essentially unworkable against the industry—even with al the power at the disposal of federal, state, and local law enforcement, even in the hands of expert and committed lawyers. Zoning laws move some
of the harms of pornography from one district to another, but
do nothing to address them. Criminal laws exist against rape,
battery, assault, kidnapping, sexual molestation of children, and
many other acts that are standard practice in the pornography
The Ordinance
31
industry. The problem is, police and prosecutors and judges
and juries view the women in the materials the way the pornography does: because of what they are doing, they are not hurt by it. Consider also that the women in pornography are prostitutes, hence unlikely to find the criminal-justice system hospitable to their claims. Privacy laws also exist against commercial exploitation of image in some states. I n theory, these would seem
to protect some coerced models; in practice, they have proven
virtually useless. Some states provide special laws restricting the
use of a person’s image after they are dead—smal consolation
to the victim, one imagines. Attempts are being made through
sexual-harassment law to address pornography in the workplace; results are extremely mixed. Nothing addresses pornography forced on victims at home.
It is not unusual for civil-rights violations to include many
acts that the dominant group has previously recognized as injurious, just not in a way that is workable for the subordinate group. For instance, the acts comprising lynching and much
sexual harassment were formally illegal before they were recognized as abuses of civil rights, but until they were so recognized, nothing was done about them. Moreover, if laws currently addressed pornography through its harms to victims, such laws would be precedent for the Ordinance, not necessarily a reason it should not exist. This is only to say that the Ordinance cannot be both unconstitutional and legally redundant. But, in the real world, women who are abused through pornography have essentially made the same realistic assessment of their chances in the legal system that the legislatures who pass the Ordinance make: no laws now on the books are
likely to work because they have not worked. Defending the
legal status quo at a point like this is nothing but complacency
and complicity with human suffering.
Findings
When legislatures pass a law, they often tell courts what they
have learned and decided and why they are concerned about
the subject. Hearings, constituent letters, and documents usu32
Pornography and Civil Rights
ally substantiate these conclusions of fact and statements of intent, called “findings. ” Findings provide the factual basis for a law; they show the need and grounds for it. They also communicate to the courts that wil apply it what the legislature saw and wanted, and the spirit in which the law is to be interpreted. Courts, as a result, often look at findings to see what the legislature was trying to accomplish, taking findings as
authoritative evidence of legislative intent. Here are findings
similar to those passed by the Minneapolis and Indianapolis
city councils: *
Pornography is a systematic practice of exploitation
and subordination based on sex that differentially
harms women. The harm of pornography includes dehumanization, sexual exploitation, forced sex, forced prostitution, physical injury, and social and sexual terrorism and inferiority presented as entertainment. The bigotry and contempt pornography promotes, with
the acts of aggression it fosters, diminish opportunities
for equality of rights in employment, education, property, public accommodations, and public services; create public and private harassment, persecution, and
denigration; expose individuals who appear in pornography against their wil to contempt, ridicule, hatred, humiliation, and embar assment and target
such women in particular for abuse and physical aggression; demean the reputations and diminish the occupational opportunities of individuals and groups on the basis of sex; promote injury and degradation such
as rape, battery, child sexual abuse, and prostitution
and inhibit just enforcement of laws against these acts;
contribute significantly to restricting women in particular from full exercise of citizenship and participation in public life, including in neighborhoods; damage relations between the sexes; and undermine women’s
* For the exact text of both Ordinances, see Appendix A (Minneapolis) and Appendix B (Indianapolis). Note that the findings here that support a claim for defamation through pornography had not yet been included in either Ordinance.
The Ordinance
33
equal exercise of rights to speech and action guaranteed to al citizens under the Constitutions and laws of the United States and [place].
In Minneapolis, where the Ordinance was first introduced in
late 1983, the City Council held public hearings to inquire into
the ef ects of pornography and to provide the basis for a civil-
rights law against it. Based on these hearings, and expanded
and reconfirmed through the efforts of people in many communities, the Ordinance’s findings outline a range of harms from the individual and intimate to the social and anonymous.
In the hearings, women and men spoke in public for the first
time in the history of the world about the devastating impact
pornography has had on their lives. They spoke of being
coerced into sex so that pornography could be made of it. They
spoke of pornography being forced on them in ways that gave
them no choice about seeing the pornography or later performing the sex. They spoke of rapes pat erned on specific pornography that was read to them during the rape, repeated like a mantra throughout the rape; they spoke of being turned over
as the pages were turned over. They spoke of the sexual harassment of living or working in neighborhoods or job sites saturated with pornography. A young man spoke of growing up gay, learning from heterosexual pornography that to be loved
by a man meant to accept his violence, and as a result accepting
the destructive brutality of his first male lover. Another young
man spoke of his struggle to reject the thrill of sexual dominance he learned from pornography and to find a way of loving a woman that was not part of it. A young woman spoke of her
father using pornography on her mother, and using it to keep
her quiet about her mother’s screams at night, threatening to
enact the scenes on the daughter as wel if she told anyone.
Another young woman spoke of the escalating use of pornography in her marriage, unraveling her self-respect, her belief in her future, the possibility of intimacy, and her physical integrity—and of finding the strength to leave. Another young woman spoke of being gang-raped by hunters who looked up
from their pornography at her and said it al : “There’s a live
34
Pornography and Civil Rights
one. ” Many spoke of self-revulsion, of the erosion of intimacy,
of unbearable indignity, of shat ered self, of shame, and also of
anger and anguish and outrage and despair at living in a
country in which their torture is enjoyed and their screams are
only heard as the “speech” of their abusers.
Therapists spoke of bat ered women tied in front of video
sets and forced to watch, then participate in, acts of sexual
brutality. Former prostitutes spoke of being made to watch
pornography and then duplicate the acts exactly, often starting as children. Psychologists who worked with survivors of incest spoke of sexual tortures with dogs and electric shocks
involving the consumption of pornography. One study documented more rapes in which pornography was specifically implicated than the total number of rapes that were reported at the time in the city in which the study was done. Correlations
showed increases in the rate of reported rape with increases
in the consumption figures of major men’s entertainment
magazines. Laboratory studies showed that pornography portraying sexual aggression as pleasurable for the victim (as so much pornography does) increases the acceptance of the use
of coercion in sexual relations; that acceptance of coercive sexuality appears related to sexual aggression; that exposure to violent pornography increases men’s punishing behavior
toward women in the laboratory. It increases men’s perceptions that women want rape and are uninjured by rape. It increases their view that women are worthless, trivial, nonhuman, objectlike, and unequal to men.
No one claimed that these things never happen without
pornography. They said that sometimes it was because of pornography that these things happened. No one claimed that these are the only things that happen because of pornography.
They said only that no mat er what else happens, this does.
The Ordinance was writ en, as the pornography and its
defenses have been, in the blood and the tears of these women
and men, in the language of their violated childhoods and
stolen possibilities. The Ordinance, unlike the pornography
and its defenses, was writ en in the speech of what has been
their silence.
The Ordinance
35
Definition
The way a legal definition works is that someone who wants
to use the law must prove that each part of it applies to their
case. For example, anyone who wants to use the antipornography civil-rights law would have to prove first that whatever materials they want to attack are pornography, by proving that they fit this definition.
Pornography is the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words that also includes one or more of the following: (i) women
are presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things,
or commodities; or (i ) women are presented as sexual
objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or (i i) women
are presented as sexual objects who experience sexual
pleasure in being raped; or (iv) women are presented
as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or
bruised or physically hurt; or (v) women are presented
in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility, or display; or (vi) women’s body parts—including but not limited to vaginas, breasts, or but ocks—are
exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts;
or (vi ) women are presented as whores by nature; or
(vi i) women are presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or (ix) women are presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that
makes these conditions sexual.
The use of men, children, or transsexuals in the
place of women in [the paragraph] above is also pornography.
Pornography is an industry. It exists in the world. No pornographer has any trouble knowing what to make. No distributor has any trouble knowing what to carry. No retailer has any trouble knowing what to order. No consumer has any
trouble knowing what to buy. But before the Ordinance, the
indefinability of pornography had become the key to its defi36
Pornography and Civil Rights
nition. Men had decided that the bot om line of pornography
was that it was sexual y arousing. Therefore, they were unwilling to have other men define it, or even to admit it could be defined, because that would be a step toward giving up what
they like, which they were unwilling to do. Once the pornographic is synonymous with the sexually arousing, anything that is sexually arousing might be pornographic. But so many
things produce that definite stirring between the legs, including the violence against women and violation of women and objectification of women in R-rated movies or Vogue magazine
or Calvin Klein commercials or Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan. ”
So a definition of pornography with a core of meaning—far
less one with limits that do not depend on whether the viewer
is turned on or not—was pronounced intrinsically impossible.
The Ordinance adopts a simple if novel strategy for definition. It looks at the existing universe of the pornography industry and simply describes what is there, including what must be there for it to work in the way that it, and only it,
works. It is true that pornography exists on a larger social
continuum with other materials that objectify and demean
women and set the stage for and reflect women’s social devaluation. It is true that many materials (such as some religious works and sociobiology texts) express the same message as
pornography and are vehicles for the same values. This does
not mean either that pornography cannot be defined or that
it does not operate in a distinctive way.
Pornography is not what pornography says. If it were, the
Ordinance’s definition of pornography would be itself pornography, because it says exactly what pornography is. In other words, the Ordinance does not restrict pornography on
the basis of its message. The same message of sexualized
misogyny pervades the culture—indeed, it does so more and
more because pornography exists. But that does not make
“Dallas” and “Dynasty” into pornography, however close they
come. Indicators of the difference are that no one is coerced
into performing for Calvin Klein commercials; no one is tied
up in front of “The Secret Storm” and forced to enact its
scenes later; no rapist or john we have heard of has read
The Ordinance
37
Masters and Johnson or Ulys es aloud to his victim and demanded she perform its contents. Nor are these materials peddled on New York City’s 42nd Street by organized crime.
These indicators are no substitute for a definition. But they
do show that, in the world, a lot of people know the difference
between pornography on the one hand and art, literature,
mainstream media, advertisements, and sex education on the
other. This remains the case even though al these materials
are definitely part of a world that one might call pornographic in the political sense: a world in which women are visual objects for sexual use. Such materials are not pornography—
and, frankly, everyone knows they are not. The definitional
task is merely to capture in words something that is commonly
known and acted upon but not already totally defined in the
world. This is hardly a unique problem in legal definitions.
Basical y, for pornography to work sexually with its major
market, which is heterosexual men, it must excite the penis.
From the evidence of the material itself, its common denominator is the use or abuse of a woman in an expressly sexual way. To accomplish its end, it must show sex and subordinate
a woman at the same time. Other people are sometimes used
in similar ways, sometimes in exactly the ways women are, but
always exploiting their gender. This is the reason that the definition covers everyone regardless of sex, yet covers each person as a member of their sex: that is the way the pornographers use them.
Under the Ordinance, pornography is what pornography
does. What it does is subordinate women, usual y, through sexual y explicit pictures and words. Of al pictures and words, only sexually explicit pictures and words enter into sexual experience to become part of sexual reality on the deep and formative level where rapes are subliminally fantasized, planned, and executed; where violence is made into a form of sex; where
women are reduced to subhuman dimension to the point where
they cannot be perceived as ful y human. But not al sexually
explicit pictures and words do this in the same way. For this reason, the Ordinance restricts its definition only to those sexually explicit pictures and words that actually can be proven to sub38
Pornography and Civil Rights
ordinate women in their making or use. Too, many materials
show women being subordinated, sometimes violently, including much mainstream media and feminist critique of violence against women. Some of this is sexually explicit, some is not.
Not even al sexually explicit material that shows women being
subordinated is itself a vehicle for the subordination of women;
some of it, like the transcript of the Minneapolis hearings on
pornography, expressly counters that subordination.
Subordination is an active practice of placing someone in an
unequal position or in a position of loss of power. To be a subordinate is the opposite of being an equal. Prisoner/guard, teacher/student, boss/worker define subordinate relations.
The simple notion on which the Ordinance is based, on account of which it has taken much criticism, is that man/woman not be such a relation, even though many people apparently
cannot imagine sex any other way. Subordination is at the core
of every systematic social inequality. It includes the practices
that enforce second-class status. Subordination includes objectification, hierarchy, forced submission, and violence. Anyone who brought a case under the Ordinance would have to prove that the challenged materials actually subordinated
women in their making or use in order to show that the materials were pornography. In other words, the fact that a legislature finds that pornography subordinates women enough to pass a law does not mean that al materials that someone might
think are pornography are automatically illegal. It only gives
women a chance to try to prove in court that specific materials are pornography because they actively subordinate women (and meet the other requirements), therefore fit the definition.
The definition is closed, concrete, and descriptive, not open-
ended, conceptual, or moral. It takes the risk that al damaging materials might not be covered in order to try to avoid misuse of the law as much as possible. Some of the enumerated
subparts specify presentations of women that show express violence; some focus on acts of submission, degradation, humiliation, and objectification that have been more difficult to see as violation because these acts are most distinctively done to
women and called sex. Most of the public debate on the
The Ordinance
39
enumerated subparts revolves around defenses of materials
that individuals enjoy and feel they can get away with defending in public. Few are willing to defend violent pornography in public, even though the nonviolent materials are also known
to be harmful, if in different ways—for instance, in their use
by rapists and child molesters, in increasing the acceptability
of forced sex, and in diminishing men’s vision of the desirability and possibility of sex equality. Ignoring these similarities, some would limit the definition of pornography to violent materials, saying pornography is violence but not sex. This is unrealistic because pornography practices violence as sex. It would be unrealistic to limit a definition of pornography to
conventional coital sex, since the pornographers do not, and
just as impractical to exonerate everything in pornography
that someone feels to be sex. Everything in pornography is sex
to someone, or it would not be there.
The Ordinance makes the society have to choose whether
some woman—usually poor and without options and formerly
abused if not overtly coerced or tricked into being there—
must be used or abused in these ways and bought and sold by
pimps so that some segment of the buying audience can have
its sex life the way it wants it. This is essentially what is at stake
in debates over which specific presentations of women should
be included on the list. What is not at stake is which sexual
acts one enjoys or practices or prefers or morally approves.
Whatever one’s moral judgments, the presentations in the
definition are there because there is material evidence that
they do harm, and the decision has been made that the harm
they do to some people is not worth the sexual pleasure they
give to other people—not because the people making the laws
do not like these acts sexually or disapprove of them morally.
The Indianapolis definition is restricted to sexual violence.
If violence occurs in the making or use of the material, the
material itself need not show violence. But violence must be
shown in the material itself for a traf icking claim to be made.
The Indianapolis definition allows a victim of coercion or assault to sue if the materials—in addition to being graphic, sexually explicit, and subordinating to women—present
40
Pornography and Civil Rights
women “as sexual objects for domination, conquest, violation,
exploitation, possession, or use, or through postures or positions of submission, servility, or display. ” Often, individuals are coerced through violence into sexually explicit and subordinating performances, but the coercion itself is not shown in the film. Often the gun at the head is off stage. When it
comes to the traf icking provision, however, this subpart of
the definition provides the so-called “Playboy defense, ” meaning that the Indianapolis legislature wished to exempt from traf icking actions materials that, in its view, did not actually
show violence. So, in this version of the Ordinance, materials
that show women as sexual objects for domination, conquest,
violation, exploitation, possession, or use, or through postures or positions of servility, submission, or display could be reached only by those who are coerced into them or assaulted
because of them, but not by women generally.
Causes of Action
People hurt other people in many ways that are not against
the law. To have a “cause of action” means that there is a law
against what happened, so one can sue. The victims do not
have to first fight about whether they are permit ed to sue or
not, the way women now, without the Ordinance, have to fight
when they want to stop being hurt by pornography. With a
cause of action, one only has to prove that what the law
provides for has happened to you. The Ordinance provides
five such possibilities for suit: for coercion into pornography,
for having pornography forced on you, for being assaulted because of particular pornography, for defamation through pornography, and for traf icking in pornography.
Coercion
Coercion into pornography: It shall be sex discrimination
to coerce, intimidate, or fraudulently induce (hereafter, “coerce”) any person, including transsexual, into performing for pornography, which injury may
date from any appearance or sale of any product(s) of
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41
such performance(s). The maker(s), seller(s), exhibitor^), and/or distributor(s) of said pornography may be sued for damages and for an injunction, including
to eliminate the product(s) of the performance(s) from
the public view.
None of the following facts shall, without more, negate a finding of coercion: (i) the person is a woman; or (i ) the person is or has been a prostitute; or (i i) the
person has attained the age of majority; or (iv) the person is connected by blood or marriage to anyone involved in or related to the making of the pornography; or (v) the person has previously had, or been thought to have had, sexual relations with anyone, including anyone involved in or related to the making of the pornography; or (vi) the person has previously
posed for sexually explicit pictures with or for anyone, including anyone involved in or related to the pornography at issue; or (vi ) anyone else, including
a spouse or other relative, has given or purported to
give permission on the person’s behalf; or (vi i) the
person actually consented to a use of a performance
that is later changed into pornography; or (ix) the person knew that the purpose of the acts or events in question was to make pornography; or (x) the person showed no resistance or appeared to cooperate actively in the photographic sessions or in the events that produced the pornography; or (xi) the person signed
a contract, or made statements af irming a willingness
to cooperate in the production of pornography; or
(xi ) no physical force, threats, or weapons were used
in the making of the pornography; or (xi i) the person was paid or otherwise compensated.
The first victims of pornography are those in it. Pornography indelibly makes those it uses into its presentation of them, so that no mat er who they are or what they say about
how they really felt, to those who have seen them in pornography, they are pornography for life. Pornography is not like 42
Pornography and Civil Rights
other forms of acting or modeling. The viewers have a sexual
stake in believing that the women in pornography are not
models or actors but truly feel and want what the script cal s
for. That they are having a wonderful time seems essential to
the sexual pleasure of the largest segment of the audience, although for many it is pleasurable to believe that the woman is being forced. Either way, the consumer believes that the
woman in the material belongs there, that she is fulfilled in her
nature by the acts performed on her. This is the bedrock to
the scepticism that women are coerced into pornography.
Pornographers promote an image of free consent because it
is good for business. But most women in pornography are
poor, were sexually abused as children, and have reached the
end of this society’s options for them, options that were biased
against them as women in the first place. This alone does not
make them coerced for purposes of the Ordinance; but the fact
that some women may “choose” pornography from a stacked
deck of life pursuits (if you call a loaded choice a choice, like
the “choice” of those with brown skin to pick cabbages or the
“choice” of those with black skin to clean toilets) and the fact
that some women in pornography say they made a free choice
do not mean that women who are coerced into pornography
are not coerced. Pimps roam bus stations to entrap young girls
who left incestuous homes thinking nothing could be worse.
Pornographers advertise for lingerie or art or acting models
they then bind, assault, and photograph, demanding a smile
as the price for sparing their life. Men roam the highways with
penises and cameras in hand, raping women with both at once.
Husbands force their wives to pose as part of coerced sex, often
enforced by threats to the lives of their children. Women are
abducted by pimps from shopping centers and streets at random, sometimes never to return. Young women are tricked or pressured into posing for boyfriends and told that the pictures
are just “for us, ” only to find themselves in this month’s Hustler.
Girls are enticed into posing for the photographer next
door, confused at their feelings of uncomfortableness, shame,
and af irmation. He makes them feel beautiful, with his approval, admiration, solicitude, presents, molestation. Fathers The Ordinance
43
sel pictures of sex acts with their own children to international
pornography rings. Aspiring actresses and models are fraudulently induced into posing for nude or seminude shots, told the genitals wil not show or it wil be a silhouette or they wil
not be recognized—until they see themselves fully exposed
and fully identified in Penthouse. Or they are told it wil be
their ticket to the top, only to find that most legitimate avenues
are then closed to them because they appeared nude, so it is
their ticket to the bottom. Until women are socially equal to
men, it wil be impossible to know whether any women are in
pornography freely. And until women can bring an effective
action for coercion into pornography, and get the product of
their abuse off the market, it wil be impossible even to begin
to know how many of them are coerced.
Law has an elaborate tradition of reasons for believing that
women lie about sexual force, reasons that duplicate pornography’s view of women. The Ordinance’s list of conditions that do not alone mean a woman is not coerced is a summary of
these reasons. One or several of these facts—for example, that
the woman signed a contract—may, with other circumstances,
lead a trier of fact (a judge or a jury) to believe that she was
not coerced. But the simple fact that a contract was signed may
not mean that the woman was not coerced. If a woman can be
coerced into having sex with a dog, she can be coerced into
signing a contract. The point of this provision in the Ordinance
is to prevent the mere fact of, say, a contract existing from being
used to preclude inquiry into the coercion that may have produced it. This list is also intended to sensitize courts to the kinds of facts routinely used to undermine women’s credibility.
Trafficking
Trafficking in pornography: It shall be sex discrimination to produce, sel , exhibit, or distribute pornography, including through private clubs.
(i) City, state, and federally funded public libraries
or private and public university and college libraries
in which pornography is available for study, including
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Pornography and Civil Rights
on open shelves but excluding special display presen-,
tations, shall not be construed to be traf icking in pornography.
(i ) Isolated passages or isolated parts shall not be
actionable under this section.
(i i) Any woman may file a complaint hereunder as
a woman acting against the subordination of women.
Any man, child, or transsexual who alleges injury
by pornography in the way women are injured by it
may also file a complaint.
The traf icking provision makes it possible for any woman
to bring a complaint against pornographers for subordinating
women. It is not necessary for an individual woman to show
that she has been harmed more than all other women have by
pornography. It is definitely necessary for her to prove that
the materials meet the definition of pornography, for which it
is necessary to prove that they do the harm of subordinating
women. A traf icking complaint would provide the opportunity for women to at empt to prove to the satisfaction of a trier of fact that there is a direct connection between the pornography and harm to women as a class. Such harm could include being targeted for rape, sexual harassment, battery, sexual
abuse as children, and forced prostitution. It would include
the harm of being seen and treated as a sexual thing rather
than as a human being—the harm of second-class citizenship
on the basis of gender. Sources of proof would be the same as
those used as the factual basis for passing the Ordinance: the
testimony of direct victims and other authorities and the materials themselves. The argument would be that pornography demonstrably makes women’s lives dangerous and second
class, that pornography sets the standard for the way any
woman can be treated, that so long as it is protected women
wil not be. So long as it can be done, it wil continue to be
done—to a woman. Which woman is only a mat er of roulet e.
Women in pornography are bound, bat ered, tortured,
harassed, raped, and sometimes killed. Or, in the glossy men’s
entertainment magazines, they are “merely” humiliated,
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45
molested, objectified, and used. In al pornography, they are
prostituted. This is done because it means sexual pleasure to
pornography’s consumers and profits to its providers. But to
the women and children who are exploited through its making
or use, it means being bound, bat ered, tortured, harassed,
raped, and sometimes killed, or merely humiliated, molested,
objectified, and used, because someone who has more power
than they do, someone who matters, someone with rights, a full
human being and a ful citizen, gets pleasure from seeing it, or
doing it, or seeing it as a form of doing it. In a case under the
Ordinance, it could be shown at trial that in the hundreds and
hundreds of magazines and pictures and films and videocassettes and so-called books now available in outlets from adult stores to corner groceries, women’s legs are splayed in postures
of sexual submission, display, and access. We are named after
men’s insults to parts of our bodies and mated with animals.
We are hung like meat. Children are presented as adult
women; adult women are presented as children, fusing the
vulnerability of a child with the sluttish eagerness to be fucked
said to be natural to the female of every age. Racial hatred is
sexualized by making every racial stereotype into a sexual
fetish. Asian women are presented so passive they cannot be
said to be alive, bound so they are not recognizably human,
hanging from trees and light fixtures and clothes hooks in
closets. Black women are presented as animalistic bitches,
bruised and bleeding, struggling against their bonds. Jewish
women orgasm in re-enactments of death-camp tortures. In
so-called lesbian pornography, women do what men imagine
women do when men are not around, so men can watch. Pregnant women and nursing mothers, amputees and other disabled or il women and retarded girls are used for sexual excitement. In some pornography called “snuff, ” women or
children are tortured to death, murdered, to make a sex film.
Through its production, pornography is a traffic in female
sexual slavery. Through its consumption, pornography
further institutionalizes a subhuman, victimized, second-class
status for women by conditioning orgasm to sex inequality.
When men use pornography, they experience in their bodies
46
Pornography and Civil Rights
that one-sided sex—sex between a person and a thing —is sex,
that sexual use is sex, sexual abuse is sex, sexual domination
is sex. This is the sexuality they then demand, practice, and
purchase. Pornography makes sexism sexy. It is a major way
that gender hierarchy is enjoyed and practiced. Pornography
is a sacred, secret codebook that has both obscured and determined women’s lives. There laid bare is misogyny’s cold heart: sexual violation enjoyed, power and powerlessness as
sex. Pornography links sexual use and abuse with gender
inequality by equating them: the inequality between women
and men is both what is sexy about pornography and what is
sex discriminatory about it.
In the hearings in Minneapolis, the harm of pornography
was extensively documented in proceedings one observer, a
member of the city’s Civil Rights Commission, likened to the
Nuremburg trials. Researchers and clinicians documented
what women know from life: pornography increases at itudes
and behaviors of aggression and other discrimination by men
against women. Women testified that pornography was used
to break their self-esteem, to train them to sexual submission,
to season them to forced sex, to intimidate them out of job opportunities, to blackmail them into prostitution and keep them there, to terrorize and humiliate them into sexual compliance,
and to silence their dissent. They told how it takes coercion to
make pornography, how pornography is forced on women and
children in ways that give them no choice about viewing the
pornography or performing the sex. They told how pornography stimulates and condones rape, battery, sexual harassment, sexual abuse of children, and forced prostitution. We learned from the testimony that the more pornography men
see, the more abusive and violent they want it to be; the more
abusive and violent it becomes, the more they enjoy it, the more
abusive and violent they become, and the less harm they see in
it. In other words, pornography’s consumers become unable
to see its harm because they are enjoying it sexually. Men often
think that they use pornography but do not do these things.
But the evidence makes clear that pornography makes it impossible for them to tell when sex is forced, that women are The Ordinance
47
human, and that rape is rape. Evidence of a direct cor elation
between the rate of reported rape and consumption figures of
major men's entertainment magazines supports this. Pornography makes men hostile and aggressive toward women, and it makes women silent. Anyone who does not believe this should
speak out against pornography in public some time.
Pornography also engenders sex discrimination. By
making a public spectacle and a public celebration of the
worthlessness of women, by valuing women as sluts, by defining women according to our availability for sexual use, pornography makes al women’s social worthlessness into a public standard. Do you think such a being is likely to become Chairman of the Board? Vice President of the United States?
Would you hire a “cunt” to represent you? Perform surgery
on you? Run your university? Edit your broadcast? Would
you promote one above a man? Pornography’s consumers
make decisions every day over women’s employment and educational opportunities. They decide how women wil be hired, advanced, what we are worth being paid, what our
grades are, whether to give us credit, whether to publish our
work. They also decide whether or not to sexually harass us,
and whether other pornography consumers have sexually
harassed us when we say they have. They raise and teach our
children and man our police forces and speak from our pulpits and write our news and our songs and our laws, telling us what women are and what girls can be. Pornography is their
Dr. Spock, their Bible, their Constitution. It is so basic it is a
habit, their standard for what they “know” without knowing
they know it. It simply makes up how they see the world, a
world in which women, in order to be treated as equals, must
try to convince them that we are exceptions among women,
that is, that we, although female, are just as human as they
are. In creating pervasive and invisible bigotry, in addition to
constituting sex discrimination in itself, pornography is utterly inconsistent with any real progress toward sex equality for women.
Although the social position of men, children, and transsexuals is not absolutely defined by pornography in the way 48
Pornography and Civil Rights
women’s is, they are often used in pornography in ways similar to the ways women are used. The Ordinance makes it possible for them to sue. The Ordinance also permits civil suits
against the use of children in pornography. Specific subgroups
of men, particularly gay men and Black men, would also have
strong potential cases. For both, their civil status is made lower
by their sexualization in pornography and in society. For both,
one can see a direct relation between their use in pornography
and their low social status. Gay men are often used literally in
the same ways women are in pornography; their status being
lowered to that of a woman is part of the sex. Abuse of gay men
is also eroticized in pornography, promoting self-hatred of an
oppressed group as its pleasure and identity. Black men in heterosexual pornography are presented through the same sexual stereotypes that have pervaded the racist use of the rape
charge and that have arguably increased the likelihood that
Blacks wil receive the death penalty when they commit a crime
against a white. Pornography sexualizes racism against them.
Black men are reduced to the racist view of their sex: the out-
sized rapist penis, the color of the colonized and the chain
gang. They are animalized, huge and promiscuous and amoral
and out of control. Black men are also shown in chains, in sexualized slavery. The connection between violence against such men in pornography and violence against them in the world
has not yet been fully documented, but would be possible to
at empt under the Ordinance.
Force
Forcing pornography on a person: It shall be sex discrimination to force pornography on a person, including child or transsexual, in any place of employment, education, home, or public place. Only the perpetrator of the force or institution responsible for the force may
be sued.
Pornography conditions the working environment of
countless of ices, construction sites, shipyards, hospitals, and
homes. It pervades hierarchical arrangements. Doctors use it
The Ordinance
49
on patients in therapy or in gynecologists* of ices; men use it
on wives and children in homes; teachers use it on students in
schools; males use it on females in factories, nursing homes,
day-care centers, everywhere. Sometimes the pornography is
“just there, ” but escape is impossible short of being deprived
of a job or a class. As is sometimes recognized in cases of sexual
harassment, being deprived of a setting you have a right to be
in can be a form of force in itself. Other times pornography
is overtly forced on victims by physical or psychological terrorism. The Ordinance is designed to make possible suits against those who force pornography on others, but not
against the pornographers themselves.
Assault
Assault or physical at ack due to pornography: It shall be
sex discrimination to assault, physically attack, or injure any person, including child or transsexual, in a way that is directly caused by specific pornography.
Complaint(s) may be made against the perpetrator of
the assault or attack and/or against the maker(s), distributor^), seller(s), and/or exhibitor(s) of the specific pornography.
The debate over the relationship between pornography and
violence against women has been haunted by a specter of absurdity: the man who rapes with a pornographic book in his back pocket. As it turns out, these specters are real. The assault
section of the Ordinance does not resolve the debate on the relationship between pornography and rape. It does make it possible for an individual woman to sue a man who rapes her
with a pornographic book in his back pocket—and its maker,
distributor, and seller too. It gives her a chance to try to prove
that there is a direct causal relationship between an act of violence against her and a specific piece of pornography.
Sometimes men rape or maim women sexually while telling
them that they know they like it because they saw women like
them in pornography who liked it. Sometimes they bring the
pornography and force the women to open their legs, position
50
Pornography and Civil Rights
their arms, adjust their facial expressions, and say the exact
words from the pornography. Sometimes they use specific pornography to decide what “type” of woman to rape, to get themselves ready for rape, to reduce their inhibitions to rape.
Sometimes young boys murder themselves accidentally by
strangulation because they are engaging in sexual play promoted in pornography. Under this provision, no one could sue pornographers for the general contribution pornography
makes to a rape culture, a culture that equates sex with death.
Specific pornographers could, however, be sued in an at empt
to prove the causal contribution of specific pornography to the
specific physical injury. Claims under this section would be
very difficult to prove, but anyone who could prove causality
by this standard should be able to keep the same pornography
from causing other injuries, as well as receive damages.
Defamation*
Defamation through pornography: It shall be sex discrimination to defame any person through the unauthorized use in pornography of their proper name, image, or recognizable personal likeness. For purposes
of this section, public figures shall be treated as private
persons. Authorization once given can be revoked in
writing at any time prior to any publication.
Some pornography simply turns individual women into
pornography against their wil , sexualizes them. A favorite
tactic of the pornographers is to reduce specific women who
are in the public eye to “cunt. ” Whatever else a woman may
have accomplished, whoever else she may be, particularly if
she is successful, self-respecting, and/or feminist, she can be
sold to any man for his personal sexual access and use for the
price of a monthly magazine. This practice is particularly common in the case of prominent movie stars, many of whom had to do nude modeling for some part of their life, and promi
* This provision was not proposed or included in either the Minneapolis or the Indianapolis Ordinance.
The Ordinance
51
nent feminists, especially those who oppose pornography,
whose heads are cut and spliced onto other women’s bodies
and genitals, or who are viciously caricatured in pornographic cartoons.
Al pornography defames women as a class by devaluing
them in the eyes of those who consume the material. It links
women’s reputation and women’s sexuality by degrading
both, and thus limits the possibilities for individual women.
But some pornography goes further against specific individuals by undermining their individual reputations and destroying their standing in the community and their work possibilities. Defamation through pornography is a form of public rape that multiplies humiliation as it broadcasts it, takes away
a woman’s integrity, violates her personal boundaries, shat ers
her own self-respect in the mirror of the world around her,
making an image of her that she walks into irrevocably whenever she walks down the street, suffocating her in her own bed at night. It undermines her authority. By lowering the floor
for acceptable treatment of her, it makes possible virtually anything to be said about her and targets her for physical abuse as wel . Those who are singled out for this exemplary form of
public hanging are selected because they are women who are
visibly self-possessed, effective, articulate, successful, feminist,
or beautiful in a way the pornographers must defile, use, own,
steal, sel .
Defenses
It shall not be a defense that the defendant in an action
under this law did not know or intend that the materials were pornography or sex discrimination, except that in an action for damages for trafficking and in an
action for damages against a publisher, sel er, exhibitor, or distributor for assault, it shall be a defense that the defendant did not know or have reason to know
that the materials were pornography.
Either pornography does harm or it does not. If it does, it
does not stop doing so because the pornographers do not know
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Pornography and Civil Rights
that it is pornography or that it does harm. But pornographers
know exactly what they are doing and to whom; they just do
not care. The problem is, the more they know what they are
doing, the more difficult, it becomes to prove that they know,
because they are far bet er at covering up what they do than
are those who act unconsciously or inadvertently. As a result,
requiring victims to prove that perpetrators like pornographers know or intend their acts against them is an invitation to cover-ups that would make the Ordinance a dead letter.
The main practical purposes of the Ordinance are to stop
the harm of pornography from continuing and to compensate direct victims in a way that both helps them and provides some deterrent to future abuse. In light of these purposes,
this provision recognizes the difference between major pornography distributors and the legitimate booksellers who sell an occasional item of pornography. Women and children are
not being bought and sold in this country so that legitimate
booksellers can sell the occasional copy of the Marquis de
Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. But women and children are being
raped because they are doing this. Therefore, they can be sued
for selling materials that cause assault. If they were sued for
damages for traf icking, they could argue that they did not
know or intend what they sold to be pornography. They might
win and they might not.
A big producer or distributor of pornography would have
a difficult time credibly denying that he knew or had reason
to know that he was in the pornography business. Often it is
so advertised. Plaintiffs could at empt to prove compensatory
damages against such big traf ickers for all the sexual assault,
forced prostitution, street harassment, and civil denigration
they arguably cause. Punitive damages (money paid to victims
to punish perpetrators) could be requested as well. But it
might wel be more difficult to show that a legitimate booksel er being sued for traf icking, or for assault due to specific pornography, knew or had reason to know he was selling pornography. This provision thus protects legitimate booksel ers from damages for truly inadvertent violations while retaining
the ability to stop all of them.
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53
Enforcement
Civil Action
Any person aggrieved by violations of this law may enforce its provisions by means of a civil action filed in a court of competent jurisdiction. No criminal penalties
shall attach for any violation of this law.
The evidence that supports the Ordinance might wel justify criminal penalties under existing legal standards, and some may be appropriate. In order to empower women,
however, the Ordinance as cur ently designed operates civil y.
This means that no police seize materials and impound them
while legal proceedings drag on. No prosecutors decide
whether or not a woman’s case is valid. While it might be
advantageous at some point to engage the help of the state apparatus against the pornographers, it is clear that the entire structure of state, federal, and local government, with al the
resources and power at its disposal, has not managed to do
anything significant about the pornography industry.
It is time to place the power to remedy the harm in the hands
of those who are hurt, rather than to enhance the power of those
who have done so little with so much for so long. Currently,
there are laws against rape, domestic battery, and sexual abuse
of children, and prosecutors and police do virtually nothing effective about these problems. Too, pornographers are in the pornography business largely to make money. After a rare conviction for obscenity, many continue to run their businesses from jail. They cannot, on our analysis, continue their business
without hurting women and children. Therefore, empowering
those that the pornographers must hurt to do business by
making it possible for their victims to target a reason the pornographers do that business seems like the most obvious, best, perhaps only chance of ultimately eliminating them.
Damages
Any person who has a cause of action, or their estate,
may seek nominal, compensatory and/or punitive
54
Pornography and Civil Rights
damages without limitation, including for loss, pain;
suf ering, reduced enjoyment of life, and special damages, as well as for reasonable costs, including at orneys’ fees and costs-of investigation.
In claims for traf icking or against traf ickers under
the assault provision, no damages or compensation for
losses shall be recoverable against maker(s) for pornography made, against distributor(s) for pornography distributed, against seller(s) for pornography sold, or against exhibitor(s) for pornography exhibited, prior to the effective date of this law.
The purpose of money damages in lawsuits is to compensate
the victim for the injury. While it is impossible truly to compensate anyone for the harm of pornography, it is also impossible truly to compensate for the injury of libel, wrongful death, dismemberment, medical malpractice, and most other personal injuries that are compensated al the time. The particular point of damages under this civil-rights law is twofold: to recognize
that something that belonged to the victim was wrongly taken
from her, and to provide restitution in the same terms that provided the pornographers with an incentive to take it in the first place. Pornographers are in the pornography business to make
money. As a mat er of policy, any scheme to stop them must recognize that a major motivation to abuse is financial.
Injunctions
Any person who violates this law may be enjoined, except that (a) no temporary or permanent injunction shall issue prior to a final judicial determination that
the challenged activities constitute a violation of this
law, and (b) no temporary or permanent injunction
shall extend beyond such materials that, having been
described with reasonable specificity by the injunction,
have been determined to be validly proscribed under
this law.
The civil-rights injunction is a recognized tool for relieving
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55
civil-rights abuses in schools, housing, employment, prisons,
mental-health facilities, and coundess other settings. Yet, applied to pornography, this provision is often mischaracterized as a “ban. ” It works the same way al civil-rights injunctions
work: once a practice is shown to injure its victims, a court can
issue an order to stop it. In a case of coercion, the court could
stop the coerced materials from being sold. In a case of force,
the court could stop the forcing of pornography from continuing. In a case of assault, the court could stop the material proven to have caused the assault from being distributed or sold further. In a case of trafficking, the court could stop materials
proven to subordinate on the basis of sex from being made, circulated, sold, or shown. None of these steps could be taken until al the appeals in the case were through, and it could be taken
only against materials that have been specifical y described.
Technicalities
Severability
Should any part(s) of this law be found legally invalid,
the remaining part(s) remain valid, if consistent with
the overall intent of this law.
Most laws have a provision that invites courts to uphold
some parts of the law even if it finds other parts of it invalid.
The Indianapolis Ordinance was particularly careful to permit a reviewing court to uphold the law against actual presentations of a woman being subordinated, even if other parts of the law were invalidated.
Limitation of Action
Complaints under this law must be filed within six
years of the discriminatory acts alleged.
Abuse through pornography often occurs over a long period of time, ending only when the victim can find the resources or means or self-respect to escape. The impact of the abusive process, coupled with the fact that the society protects
56
Pornography and Civil Rights
and defends the abuser and ignores and stigmatizes. the
abused, undermines the victim’s sense of personal ef icacy,
trust, belief in political action, and faith in the legal process.
By the time individuals recover sufficiently to act, the time period within which they must complain before the injury expires has long elapsed. Discrimination laws customarily allow a disgracefully and uniquely short several-month period within which to complain. The six-year period provided by the Ordinance is more like the usual period allowed for personal
injuries the law takes seriously. The time period would start
to run from the last date the injury was done, except when it
was argued that there was a good reason to start it later—for
example, because the victim was a child when the abuse ended,
or because an adult victim remained under duress or threat
although the forced pornographic performances had ended.
Civil Rights and Speech
The Ordinance takes power from some of the most powerful people in society—those who can buy and sel other human beings for intimate gratification—and gives it to some of the
most powerless people in society—those who, as a class, have
previously been intimately violated with impunity. Given the
way the law has framed the pornography question to benefit
the powerful, one could expect that the first judicial response
to this redistribution would be negative. It was. In 1985, in a
lawsuit brought by a media group (some pornographers, most
not) against the City of Indianapolis for passing the Ordinance, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit found that the Ordinance violated the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. The decision conceded that pornography does the harm we say it does, and the legislature said it did: contributing materially to rape and other sexual
violence, constituting a form of subordination in itself, and
being partly responsible for second-class citizenship in many
forms, including economic ones. But the decision held the
pornography was more important—indeed, that one could
tell how important the pornography was by the harm that it
did.Miscasting the Ordinance into obscenity’s old drama of
ideas, the decision assumed that the Ordinance restricted
ideas even though the Indianapolis Ordinance was confined
to four practices: coercion into pornography, forcing pornography on a person, assault due to specific pornography, and traf icking in materials that subordinate women. So far as the
Ordinance is concerned, al the ideas pornography expresses
can be expressed—so long as coercion, force, assault, or trafficking in subordination is not involved. These are acts, not viewpoints or ideas. Coercion is not a fantasy. Force is not a
symbol. Assault is not a representation. Trafficking in subordination is an activity two times over—once as traf icking and once as subordination—not just a mental event.
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Pornography and Civil Rights
Under United States law, speech interests are regularly found
les important than other interests when courts decide that pictures and words are false, obscene, indecent, racist, coercive, threatening, intrusive, or even inconvenient or inaesthetic.
Using a child to make sex pictures, or distributing or receiving
such pictures—whether or not the child is forced, whether or
not one knows that the child is a child, and whatever the sex
pictures show—is a crime for which one can be put in jail. Yet
the Seventh Circuit decision on the Ordinance tells women that
because pornography expresses a viewpoint about women, it
does not mat er if it is also coerced, assaultive, or discriminatory. Because a picture of a coerced woman might be artistic or scientific or educational, she is told she should have no action
for coercion that reaches the pictures. Because films of women
being raped and enjoying it express a point of view about
women and sex, the fact that they cause assaults of other
women—conceded by the court—is not legally important.
The Ordinance, a law against sex-based discrimination, was
thus itself held to be discrimination on the basis of “viewpoint. ” This was apparently because the Ordinance takes a stand for sex equality, not against it. This was because the
Ordinance is not neutral on the subject of sex-based exploitation, abuse, and discrimination. Every practice expresses a point of view; acts express ideas. Yet acts and practices are legally restricted anyway, and they do not have to be proven expressionless first. Segregation expresses the view that Blacks are inferior to whites and should be kept separate from them.
Segregation is often enforced with pure speech, like signs that
read “Whites Only. ” Segregation is not therefore protected
speech. Such a sign is not a defense to a civil-rights violation
but evidence of it. Laws against segregation are not discrimination on the basis of viewpoint, although they absolutely prohibit the view that Blacks should not mix with whites from being expressed in this way. This is true even though deinstitutionalizing segregation as a practice in the world does a great deal to undermine the point of view it expresses.
Indeed, most discrimination revolves around words, words
that are clear vehicles for an ideology of exclusion or access
Civil Rights and Speech
59
and use—words like “You’re fired, we have enough of your
kind around here, ” “Sleep with me and I’l give you an A, ” or
“Constituent interests dictate that the understudy to my administrative assistant be a man. ” Discrimination in employment or housing or through sexual harassment could not be addressed by law, far less be proven to have happened, if their
speech elements rendered the entire cycle of abuse protected
because the words so central to their actualization express a
point of view.
Lynching expresses a clear point of view about Blacks, one
it is difficult to express as effectively any other way. One point
of lynching is that other Blacks see the body. The idea expressed by the body being hung on view in public is that al Blacks belong in a subordinate position and should stay there
or they wil be hor ibly brutalized, maimed, and murdered
like this one was. Another point of lynching is that whites see
the body. Its display teaches them that they are superior and
this was done for them. Photographs were sometimes taken of
lynchings and made available for 50 cents apiece. Compare
such a photograph with a 1984 Penthouse spread in which
Asian women were bound, trussed, and hung from trees. One
cannot tell if they are dead or alive. In both cases, individuals
are hung from trees; often the genitals were displayed. In both
cases, they are people of color. In both cases, sexual humiliation is involved. But because the victim of the lynching is a man, the photograph is seen to document an atrocity against
him and an entire people, while, because the victim of the pornography is a woman, it is considered entertainment and experienced as sex and called speech and protected as a constitutional right.
If lynchings were done in order to make photographs, on a
ten-billion-dollar-a-year scale, would that make them protected speech? The issue here is not whether the acts of lynching are illegal or not. (As with the acts surrounding pornography, on paper they mostly were illegal, while in reality they mostly were not—not until a specific law, a civil-rights law, was
passed against them. ) The issue is also not whether lynchings
or sexual atrocities can be visually documented. The issue is
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Pornography and Civil Rights'
rather, given the fact that someone must be lynched to make
a picture of a lynching, how is a picture of a lynching regarded, socially and legally. If it takes a lynching to show a lynching, what is the social dif erence, really, between seeing
a lynching and seeing a picture of one? What would it say
about the seriousness with which society regards lynching if
actual lynching is illegal but pictures of actual lynching are
protected and highly profitable and defended as a form of
freedom and a constitutional right? What would it say about
the seriousness and effectiveness of laws against lynching if
people paid good money to see it and the law looked the other
way, so long as they saw it in mass-produced form? What
would it say about one’s status if the society permits one to be
hung from trees and calls it entertainment—cal s it what it is
to those who enjoy it, rather than what it is to those to whom
it is done?
Courts have often sided with those who would lose power
if equality were taken seriously. One way courts have done this
is by invalidating effective measures against discrimination by
calling them discrimination in reverse, or reverse discrimination. The Court of Appeals did exactly this in its decision in the legal chal enge to the Ordinance: it called legislative action against discrimination itself a form of discrimination. The court thus actively supported discrimination by blocking legal
action against it. In other words, the court acted as if state-
sanctioned sex inequality were state neutrality on the subject
by holding that allowing citizens to pursue sex equality was
state-sanctioned discrimination. In this way, acting against discrimination was made indistinguishable from discrimination itself, and inequality was made indistinguishable from equality
as a state policy goal. Although the court did not for a moment question that pornography is a form of sex discrimination, it seemed not to understand that in protecting the pornographers, the court embraced admitted sex discrimination as state policy. In perhaps its final conceptual perversity, the
Seventh Circuit elevated the law against obscenity—and obscenity is nothing but an idea that depends on moral and value judgments, which themselves depend entirely on point of
Civil Rights and Speech
61
view—as a standard by which to find the Ordinance, which
restricts bigoted acts, unconstitutional as a form of “thought
control. ”
Yes, pornography is propaganda; yes, it is an expression of
male ideology; yes, it is hate literature; yes, it is the documentation of a crime; yes, it is an argument for sexual fascism; yes, it is a symbol, a representation, an artifact, a symptom of male
dominance; yes, it conveys ideas as any systematic social practice does. It is also often immoral, tasteless, ugly, and boring.
But none of this is what pornography distinctively is, how it
works, what is particularly harmful about it, or why we have
to stop it. Was the evil of the Holocaust what it said about Jews?
Was ending it a form of thought control? If Dachau had been
required to make anti-Semitic propaganda, should it have
been protected speech? Pornography is a systematic act
against women on every level of its social existence. It takes a
rape culture to require and permit it. It takes acts against
women to make it; selling it is a series of acts (transactions)
that provide the incentive to make it and mass-produce the
abuse; consuming it is an act against women and spawns more
acts that make many more women’s actual lives dangerous,
meaningless, and unequal. It is therefore an act against
women to protect and defend it.
Women, it is said, should be loyal to pornography because
our freedom and equality depend on protecting it. This is because pornography, it is said, is freedom and equality, so doing anything about it is repression, fascism, and censorship. In
practice, this has meant that whatever the pornographers do
is “speech, ” and whatever those who oppose them do is censorship. Actually, this is a mat er of point of view. Whoever takes the point of view that pornography is “speech” takes the
of icially protected viewpoint, hence is ut ering “speech” that
is protected as such.
Whoever takes the point of view that pornography is a practice of censorship and silence and institutionalized deprivation of liberty is, in this view, practicing censorship, even if only words are used. This point of view can be silenced in the
name of speech. Women screaming in pain in a pornography
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Pornography and Civil Rights
film is “speech. ” Women screaming in the audiences to express their pain and dissent is breach of the peace and interferes with “speech. ” “Snuf ” is “speech. ” Demonstrators who use strong language to protest “Snuf ” are arrested for obscenity. When Penthouse hangs Asian women from trees, it is
“speech. ” When antipornography activist Nikki Craft leaflets
with the same photographs in protest, she is threatened with
arrest for public lewdness. When B. Dalton sells pornography
in a shopping mall displayed at a child’s eye level, that is
“speech. ” When Nikki Craft holds up the same pornography
in the same shopping mall in protest, she is detained in a back
room of B. Dalton’s by the police for contributing to the delinquency of minors. When pornographers make pornography of feminists, that is “speech. ” When publishers refuse to publish feminist work, saying that publishing Andrea Dworkin is bad for freedom of speech because of her opposition to pornography, that is the way freedom of “speech” is supposed to work. Nor could she get an article published discussing these
examples.
When the At orney General’s Commission on Pornography
wrote a let er to solicit information on pornography sales, the
Commission was sued by pornographers saying that these
words were intimidating, and a court enjoined publication of
the results. Now, the pornographers censor the government
in the name of freedom of speech, while those who speak of
women’s rights against pornographers are called censors for
trying to do something about it.
When the Seventh Circuit’s decision on the constitutionality of the Ordinance was appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court, a new kind of silence enveloped it: the silence of the powerful. The Court disposed of the case by a procedure called summary affirmance, meaning no writ en briefs, no oral arguments, and no reasons. This procedure, designed primarily for cases that prior law has clearly resolved, was highly unusual for the Court to use in this sort of case, one in which a federal Court of Appeals invalidated a local ordinance on a
U. S. constitutional ground on a theory the Supreme Court
had never heard before. The Supreme Court (with three dis-
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63
sents) summarily affirmed the Court of Appeals decision, bare
of supporting authority, presumably because there is none. In
this arrogant way, the Indianapolis Ordinance was in effect
found unconstitutional.
Technically, a summary affirmance upholds only the result
and whatever is essential to it; no view is expressed on the reasoning the court below used. So there is no way of knowing what the Supreme Court really thinks about the civil-rights
approach, because it said nothing about its reasons. The
Seventh Circuit’s decision remains a precedent until another
case on the Ordinance is heard. But the Supreme Court could
take another case on the Ordinance at any time without being
bound either by the logic of the Seventh Circuit decision or
by its own prior summary action. So the ultimate constitutionality of the civil-rights approach has not yet been determined.
The current barriers to its reenactment and use are political,
not legal—or, rather, they are politics disguised as law.
The truth is, a revised Ordinance taking the civil-rights approach could be passed today and ultimately receive new scrutiny before the Supreme Court. In a test of the constitutionality of such an Ordinance—perhaps in a real case brought by a victim of pornography, rather than by a media plaintif —
the role of the Seventh Circuit decision and the Supreme
Court’s summary affirmance would be one mat er to be argued. The summary affirmance would not mean that such an argument could not happen or that its outcome was already
decided in advance. If this was any problem other than pornography, any problem power wanted to solve—especially given the virtual invitation to try again provided by the three
Supreme Court dissents—state, local, and federal legislators
and their legal counsel would be falling al over themselves and
each other to be the first to devise an antipornography civil-
rights ordinance that would solve the problem yet be found
constitutional. Instead, in a capitulation to authority, it is
widely supposed that nothing more can be done. Media lies
have been widely believed that because of the summary affirmance, the civil-rights approach to pornography is constitutionally dead. As with slavery and segregation, which the U. S.
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Pornography and Civil Rights
Supreme Court once held constitutional, what the courts say
is accepted and the truth is not. And, as with the pornography
itself, what the media says is believed and the truth is not.
Where we stand now is that protecting and defending pornography is the official state position. The courts have decided that an entire class of women wil be treated in these ways so that
others can have what they call freedom of speech: freedom
meaning free access to women’s bodies, free use of women’s
lives, speech meaning women’s bodies as a medium for those
others’ expression. As Black people were once white men’s
property under the U. S. Constitution, women are now men’s
“speech. ” It seems that our pain, humiliation, torture, and use
is something they want to say.
The complicity of law with the harm of pornography to
women has now gone a full step beyond tacit inaction, bungling, waffling, evasion, ineptitude, deceptiveness, or lack of wil . Now, the law has expressly lined up on the side of the
pornographers; now, the law has affirmatively decided that
pornography is more important than the women admit edly
harmed. This the law has done. This the law can and must
undo.
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Pornography and Civil Rights
Questions and Answers
Q: What is the difference between hard-core and soft-core
pornography?
A: Before pornography became an above-ground industry,
the distinction was pret y simple. “Hard-core” was pornography in which an erect penis was shown. The penis could belong to a man or to an animal. For this reason, the pornography of bestiality, which usually showed a male animal penetrating a woman, was considered to be “hard-core. ” There was a real taboo against showing the erect penis on the screen or
in magazines. Police were more likely to make arrests and to
confiscate material if the erect penis was graphical y shown.
As pornography became more mainstream, with more legal
protection, people inside and outside the pornography industry began to obfuscate the meaning of “hard-core. ” People outside the pornography industry, many of whom were not
consumers of pornography but felt that they knew what was
in it, began to use “hard-core” to refer to explicitly debasing
or violent material and “soft-core” to refer to material they
thought was purely sexual. “Hard-core” came to mean the
worst pornography, “soft-core” the most benign.
Because Playboy and Penthouse, for instance, were the most available and most legitimate pornography, they became the standard for “soft-core, ” material that was supposedly purely sexual, not
misogynist or violent. Currently in popular usage, “soft-core” is
virtually a synonym for Playboy and Penthouse. In one sense, both magazines are “soft-core”: neither shows the erect penis; in fact,
with rare exception, neither shows nude men. But in a more important sense, “soft-core” is a misnomer, because both magazines show violent and violating uses of women’s bodies; both magazines include overtly violent material; both magazines have material that promotes rape and child sexual abuse.
As used by most people, the two terms are fairly meaningless. Most often, “soft-core” means pornography that some-Quesdons and Answers
67
one thinks is okay; “hard-core” is pornography that someone
thinks is the real stuff, dirty, mean, and at least a little abusive
and repulsive. “Hard-core” has the aura of breaking taboos
around it and pornographers use it in advertising as a point
of pride.
The terms tell us nothing about how women are used in
pornography and nothing about how the pornography itself
is then used on women or children.
Q: How can you object to Playboy?
A: Playboy is a bona fide part of the trade in women.
The format of Playboy was developed to protect the magazine from prosecution under obscenity law. Writing from recognized writers was published to meet a standard of worth that would get the magazine First Amendment protection.
The First Amendment was then used by Playboy to protect its
sexual exploitation of women. Playboy sel s women.
The use of women as objects in Playboy is part of how Playboy
helps to create second-class status for women. Women in
Playboy are dehumanized by being used as sexual objects and
commodities, their bodies fetishized and sold. The term
“bunny” is used to characterize the woman as less than
human—little animals that want sex al the time, animals that
are kept in hutches.
The women in Playboy are presented in postures of submission and sexual servility. Constant access to the throat, the anus, and the vagina is the purpose. of the ways in which the
women are posed.
Playboy has made a specialty of targeting women for sexual
harassment: working women, including nurses, police, and
military personnel; and presumptively educated women, including university students and lawyers.
Underlying al of Playboy's pictorials is the basic theme of
al pornography: that al women are whores by nature, born
wanting to be sexually accessible to all men at all times. Playboy
particularly centers on sexual display as what women naturally do to demonstrate this nature.
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Pornography and Civil Rights
Playboy, in both text and pictures, promotes rape.
Playboy, especially in its cartoons, promotes both rape and
child sexual abuse.
There is also some amount of overtly violent material in
Playboy. The text often enthusiastically promotes various acts
of violence against women, including gang-rape. The pictures
usually include some pictures that show sadomasochism:
women are hurt in them or are in some physical danger. (For
example, a woman is naked with acupuncture needles all over
her body, including in her breasts; or a woman is chained to
a pole and surrounded by laser beams. )
Hugh Hefner founded Playboy in 1953. An early issue used
an employee as a centerfold; as her employer, Hefner had sex
with her too. This has remained the pat ern, the women who
work for Playboy, especially the centerfolds, being Hefner’s own
primary preserve of women. As the Playboy empire has increased in power and wealth, Hefner’s personal use of the women in the magazine has continued and expanded. He uses
them and he sel s them. Now the women are brought to him by
lesser pimps; he need not do the recruiting himself. For instance, Linda Marchiano, known as Linda Lovelace in the pornographic film “Deep Throat, ” was pimped to Hefner by her then-husband, Chuck Traynor. Hefner sodomized her and
tried to have her have intercourse with a dog. Dorothy Strat-
ten, a Playboy centerfold who was sodomized, tortured,
murdered, then raped after she was dead by her pimp-husband,
Paul Snider, was tricked and intimidated into photo sessions by
Snider, who then sold the photos and access to Dorothy herself
to Hefner. Ms. Strat en said she was sexually molested by
Hefner. After her death, Hefner was made aware that Ms. Stratten had hated the pornography made of her and had hated posing for it. He responded by issuing more videotapes of Ms.
Strat en posing. Dorothy Strat en’s estate entered a brief in her
behalf in support of the Indianapolis Ordinance. The brief outlined how Ms. Strat en had been pressured into pornography.
The hope of her estate was that the Ordinance could be used
to recover and destroy videotapes and photographs (primarily
in back issues of Playboy) that are stil being trafficked in.
Questions and Answers
69
The women used by Hefner personally and in the magazine are rarely much over eighteen. Ms. Strat en was underage when she was initially pimped to Hefner.
The sexual exploitation of women is what the magazine is,
what it does, what it sel s, and how it is produced.
Q: Pornography is the fault of the women who pose for it.
Why don’t they just stop posing?
A: The women in pornography are most often victims of child
sexual abuse. Some studies show that 65 to 75 percent of the
current population of women in prostitution and pornography
(overlapping experiences for the same pool of women) have
been abused as children, usually in the home. People who work
with women who are in pornography and prostitution to provide social services or counselling, some of whom have been in pornography or prostitution themselves, believe the percentage
is much, much higher. Children run away from home, from the
sexual abuse, to cities where they are picked up by pimps, raped,
beaten, drugged, and forced into prostitution or pornography.
Women in pornography are poor women, usually uneducated.
Pornography exists in a society in which women are economical y
disadvantaged. The only professions in which women make more
money than men are modeling and prostitution—and in prostitution, the pimps keep most if not al of it. Women’s economic value is determined largely by sexual value: how much the
woman’s body is worth in the marketplace as a commodity.
Many women are forced into pornography as children by
fathers who sexually abuse them; pornography is made of
them as part of the sexual abuse they experience as children.
Many women are forced into pornography by husbands,
many of whom are violent (bat ery of married women being
the most commonly committed violent crime in the country).
Many women are photographed by lovers and find the photographs published as pornography in revenge or retaliation.
Aspiring actresses and models are photographed nude, almost
a trade practice, and find the photographs published against
their wil and without their knowledge in pornography.
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Pornography and Civil Rights
When a woman has been forced into pornography, the pornography itself is used to keep her in a life of sexual exploitation and abuse. Think of what happens when a bat ered wife asks for help. She is doing what society says women should do:
she is married, and the sustained bat ery is proof that she has
been loyal to her husband, she has stayed with him, the way
women are supposed to. She may be badly hurt over a period
of years. When she leaves home, she is often treated as a pariah, told the brutality is her own fault. Now think of the woman forced into prostitution. She is without the so-called
protections of a respectable life. She has been abandoned, if
not injured in the first place, by her family. Society has no
place for her and despises her for what she has been doing.
The photographs of her engaging in violating sex acts—violating of her—usually show her smiling, as if she enjoyed being used or hurt. Where can she turn? Where can she run?
Who wil believe her? Who wil help her? Will you? (If you
won’t, don’t assume anyone else will. )
The pimp or pornographer wil come after her. If he is her
husband or her father, he wil have a legal right to her. He
wil be violent toward her and toward anyone who tries to help
her. She wil be terribly hurt from the life she has been leading: she wil be injured from the pornography and prostitution; she may be addicted to many drugs; she wil be filled with anger and self-hate and despair.
Bat ered women’s shelters, of which there are not enough,
many of which are understaffed, wil probably not of er her
shelter. They are afraid of the pimps and they are afraid of
the host of antisocial behaviors that the woman herself may
demonstrate. Rape crisis centers do not have resources to of er
shelter at al but they are also not prepared to counsel prostitutes, even though most have been raped many times and suf er the trauma of multiple rape.
The women in pornography are the first victims of pornography. The pornographers, not the women they hurt, are responsible for pornography. The men who buy and use the pornography are responsible for pornography, not the
women who are violated to make the product they so enjoy.
Questions and Answers
71
And the society that protects the pornography is responsible
for pornography: the courts that value the so-called rights of
the pornographers over the humanity, the dignity, the civil
equality of women; the publishers and writers who keep protecting the trafficking in women as if the commercial violation of women were a basic right of publishing; the lawyers, the
politicians, the media, who congregate to chant self-righteous
litanies in worship of the Constitution while women are raped
for fun and profit under its protection.
Q: Isn’t pornography just a symptom, not a cause, of
misogyny? Pornography didn’t cause patriarchy, did it? It’s
not really important, is it?
A: An incredible double standard is always applied to thinking about or doing anything about pornography.
If pornography hurts women now, doesn’t something need
to be done about it? I f women are hurt in making pornography,
doesn’t something need to be done? If pornography is used to
choreograph and execute rape, incest, battery, and forcing
women into prostitution, doesn’t something need to be done?
If pornography actually creates attitudes and behaviors of
bigotry and aggression against women, as many laboratory studies demonstrate, doesn’t something need to be done? If pornography causes rape, or sexualized torture, or increases sadism against women, or plays a role in serial murders, or contributes substantially to legitimizing violence against women, isn’t it important to do something about pornography? If pornography spreads woman hating and rape as mass entertainment, how can feminists ignore or be indif erent to it as a political issue of equality? Think about the maxim “Equal pay for equal work. ” We understand that women are hurt by being
paid less than men for doing the same work. Lower pay keeps
us poorer, which debases the quality of our lives, and keeps us
dependent, which does the same. Pay discrimination did not
cause patriarchy. Pay discrimination is a symptom of women’s
lower status. It is a result of misogyny, not a cause. At the same
time, pay discrimination perpetuates women's lower status (by
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Pornography and Civil Rights
keeping us poor) and confirms men in their misogyny (the conviction that women are worth less than men). No one would suggest that feminists abandon the fight, including the legal
fight, for equal pay because it is “only a symptom, ” not a cause,
of patriarchy itself.
Now, in fact, feminists want equal pay for work of comparable worth. Because the job market is still highly sex-segregated and the jobs women do are economically devalued because women do them, feminists are proposing that men and women should be paid the same if their jobs, though different, have similar economic and social value. We have got en legislation passed in some places mandating equal pay for
comparable work. We have claimed economic equity as a right
and we want society to be reorganized so that we can realize
that right. The economic disparity between men and women
is a symptom of male supremacy, but, however symptomatic
it is, it injures women, so we want to stop it. In get ing rid of
this symptom of male supremacy, we also know that we would
make male supremacy a little less supreme.
Have you ever had a very high fever—104° or 105°—just the
symptom of a serious, underlying disease or infection? You had
bet er believe that the first order of business is to reduce the fever
because, even though it is a symptom, it may wel jeopardize your
life and on its own can irreparably damage your health. And you
wil feel very sick with the fever and less sick without it.
Some symptoms are pret y terrible, and it is important to
try to get rid of them.
With pornography, there is massive evidence that pornography is not only a symptom of misogyny but an active agent in generating woman-hating acts and second-class status for
women. Pornography sexualizes inequality and the hatred of
women so that men get sexual pleasure from hurting women
and put ing women down. It creates bigotry and aggression.
It desensitizes men to rape and other forms of sexual violence
against women so that they do not recognize the violence as
violence, or they believe the woman provoked and enjoyed it.
Pornography is used as a blueprint for sadism, rape, and torture. It is used to force women and children into prostitution.
Questions and Answers
73
It is used to coerce children into sex. Sex offenders use it to
plan their crimes and to prime themselves to commit their
crimes. It is implicated in the biographies of serial murderers
and in the commissions of the murders themselves. It is more
than a very high fever. It does as much damage as low pay.
How can we justify not doing something about it, whether it
is a symptom or a cause?
Some people claim that pornography is irrelevant to violence against women. They say that pornography is new and contemporary and that rape, battery, and prostitution are old.
They say that pornography cannot be a cause of violence
against women because violence against women existed long
before pornography.
This is not true, but suppose it were.
Even if pornography is a cause now, and never was before,
we would have to do something about it now. Think about environmental pollution. It causes various kinds of cancer (though those who make the pollution don’t think so). Cancer existed
long before the kinds of environmental pollution that come
from highly industrialized societies. But this does not mean that
pollution in our society does not cause cancer in our society.
In fact, pornography has a long history in Western civilization (and in Asian and other civilizations too). Its history is as long as the documented history of rape and prostitution (the socal ed oldest profession, the misogynist meaning being that as
long as there have been women, women have prostituted themselves). We can trace pornography without any dif iculty back as far as ancient Greece in the West. Pornography is a Greek
word. It means the graphic depiction of women as the lowest,
most vile whores. It refers to writing, etching, or drawing of
women who, in real life, were kept in female sexual slavery in
ancient Greece. Pornography has always, as far back as we can
go, had to do with exploiting, debasing, and violating women in
forced sex. Drawings, etchings, and writings were made of or
about the female sex slaves performing forced sex acts. Women
were used in brothels to create live pornography for men.
The invention of the camera changed the social reality of pornography. First, it created a bigger market for live women be-74
Pornography and Civil Rights
cause live women were required to make the photographs.
Someone could make a drawing out of his imagination or
memory. A photograph turned a living woman into an exploited
pornographic commodity. Pornography less and less existed in
the realm of drawing, contiguous with art and imagination, and
more and more it existed in the purposeful and exciting realm
of documented sexual violation. Photographs acquired commercial primacy, and this meant that pornography required the sexual exploitation and violation of real women to exist in a
world redefined by the camera. Second, mass means of producing the photographs democratized pornography. As writing, etching, or drawing, or as live shows in brothels, it had been
the domain of rich men, aristocrats. Now the technology made
it available to al men. Video has remarkably furthered this
trend, bringing pornography into the home, both the product
itself and the video camera that al ows the man to make his own
pornography of his wife or lover or child.
The role of writ en or drawn pornography in sexual abuse
before the invention of the camera was not studied. The rights
of women did not matter. The rights of women in brothels
were not an issue. Violence against women did not mat er. The
use of women in live pornographic scenarios or as models for
pornographic drawings did not mat er to the men who used
them or to the society that allowed these uses of women. If
writ en or drawn pornography was used in the sexual abuse
of women, prostitutes, or children, it did not mat er. None of
them had any legal rights of personhood.
The proliferation of pornography in our society, its use in
sexual assault, its widespread legitimacy, its legal impunity, its
accessibility, the need for real women to make the product in
a market constantly expanding in size and sadism, have presented the contemporary women’s movement with an emergency of staggering proportions: sexual sadism against women is mass entertainment; sexual exploitation of women
is protected as and widely understood to be a civil liberty of
men; the sexual violation of women in the pornography itself
is protected by the courts as “speech. ”
It’s a hell of a symptom, isn’t it?
Questions and Answers
75
Q: Okay, we try to dismiss pornography by saying it’s a symptom, not a cause, and we fight for pay equity even though low pay is a symptom. What other evidence is there of a double
standard?
A: In opposing pornography, feminists have been accused of
being essentially right-wing, or giving aid and comfort to the
political Right, or being in an alliance with the Right. These
charges were made long before the existence of the Ordinance. They were made as soon as feminists began to speak out about the woman hating in pornography and as soon as
feminists began to organize pickets and demonstrations to
protest the production and distribution of pornography. In
1970, feminists committed civil disobedience by sitting in at
the of ices of Grove Press to protest the publication of pornography there and the way Grove treated its women employees. The super-radical-leftist publisher/owner of Grove Press not only had the feminists arrested by the then very brutal New York City Police Department for criminal trespass on his private property—he also accused them of working for the
C. I. A. You can’t get a bigger charge of collusion than that one;
who cares that the man who made it was defending his profits, his pornography, his mistreatment of women workers (a/k/a “workers”)? Certainly, the Left saw him as a radical, not
as a capitalist. The Left continues to see pornographers as
radicals, not as capitalists. With the emergence of Jerry Fal-
wel on the national scene, feminists who opposed pornography were likened to Mr. Falwell, Feminist leaders were characterized as demagogues and puritanical opportunists in
ongoing campaigns of character assassination. Mr. Falwell
came to represent al that the Left detested in religion and
politics and feminists who opposed pornography were robbed
of their own political identities and convictions and caricatured as having his. Since Mr. Falwell had supported segregation in the 1960’s, had supported the Viet Nam War, currently does support the regime in South Africa and the militarism of Cold War anticommunism, opposes abortion
rights and gay rights, and since the feminist leaders of the an76
Pornography and Civil Rights
tipornography movement hold opposite views on each and
every issue, this was an extraordinary slander. But it was repeated as fact in mainstream newspaper articles and in the feminist press.
We don’t believe that this is done to people on other issues.
Take, for example, the often vituperative debate on the existence of the state of Israel. One of the women most active in calling feminists who oppose pornography right-wing has
writ en eloquently in behalf of the continued existence of the
state of Israel. Mr. Falwell also supports the continued existence of the state of Israel. We know that the reasons of this particular woman are different in kind and in quality from
Mr. Falwell’s reasons. Since Mr. Falwell’s expressions of support for Israel sometimes have an anti-Semitic edge and always have a Cold War rationale, it would be slanderous to say the same position, broadly construed, means the same politics,
or that her position does not exist independent of his. The New
York Times, which repeatedly denounces feminists who oppose
pornography and repeatedly links us with Mr. Falwell or his
Moral Majority, also supports the existence of the state of
Israel. We know their reasons are not Mr. Falwell’s. We know
their politics are not Mr. Falwell’s. We do not liken Nobel
Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel to Mr. F alwell because both
support the state of Israel, or Natan Sharansky, or Jacobo
Timmerman. The New Jewish Agenda, a leftist group, supports the existence of the state of Israel, but its politics are opposed to, not the same as, Mr. Falwell’s.
Specious analogizing is ludicrous, no less on pornography
than on Israel. It is fair to say that there are many issues that
can be articulated broadly enough—pro or con—so that a
strange spectrum of folks seem to be on the same side.
Supporting Israel is one; opposing pornography is another.
But this has only been done to those of us who oppose pornography from a feminist perspective of radical equality. We have had to try to survive in an environment saturated with
this kind of intellectual lie and political slander. We never expected feminist media to fall for this propagandistic nonsense, but they did, repeating it over a period of years. We never ex-Questions and Answers
77
pected the Left to descend to this gut er level of intellectual
corruption but they did, apparently without a second thought
and with no remorse. Ultimately the effect was to erase our
political identities. Women, of course, are used to being erased
from political dialogue and history but not by folks who apply
the word feminist to themselves.
The double standard was also alive and wel when feminists
who opposed pornography were told to shut up to protect free
speech. Again, from the very beginning, before feminists
created or endorsed any legal strategies against pornography,
we were told repeatedly that anything we said or did against
pornography would endanger free speech. For instance, when
we were protesting the film “Snuf * in New York City in February 1976, one civil-liberties stalwart wrote in his regular newspaper column that we should stop picketing the film because our picketing endangered free speech. His reasoning was that in response to the pickets a theater manager might
decide not to show “Snuff” This was the danger our picketing
created. Picketing, of course, is a quintessential exercise of free
speech. The whole idea of free speech is that someone might
change their mind and their behavior. At least, this is the whole
idea of picketing. Picketing is not usually friendly and compliant and supportive speech. Usually it is speech in opposition to what is going on, and it is speech that wants results. This
civil libertarian believed that the showing of “Snuff’ was vital
to free speech and our picketing was not. Over a period of
years, in newspaper articles, on editorial pages, in debates, we
were told, usually with polite condescension, sometimes in a
holy rage, that we were endangering free speech by talking
about pornography: that is, by articulating a political opposition to it. A New York Times reporter was told by a chief editor that The New York Times would no longer carry news stories
about the feminist political opposition to pornography. This
occurred in 1978, after the reporter had published a superb
news story objectively describing a major conference on pornography at New York University law School. The chief editor said that such news stories created a feeling against pornography that threatened the First Amendment. The New York 78
Pornography and Civil Rights
Times itself published an editorial denouncing the feminists reported on in the news story, characterizing our positions as
“shril ” and “hysterical. ” News stories disappeared from those
pages for many years. When impossible to suppress, such stories have been carried, usually slanted against us. Feminist authors writing on pornography have been repeatedly told
that such books would not be published because they endangered First Amendment rights. Magazine editors have rejected numerous articles by feminist authors opposing pornography on the same grounds: that to publish the articles would jeopardize the First Amendment. The same people who say the
pornographers must be protected because everything must be
published and protected are the first to say that feminist work
opposing pornography must not be published in order to protect free speech.
The feminist version of this pernicious nonsense has been the
insistence on having a propornography side represented whenever antipornography politics are expressed, in published or spoken forums. There are feminist right-to-life activists, but no
one in the women’s movement has been insisting that they get
equal time, let alone that they speak wherever and whenever
prochoice politics are expressed. These feminist right-to-life
groups began on the radical Left, in fact, in the nonviolence
movement. Now there are also more politically moderate feminists who are prolife and at the same time for the Equal Rights Amendment and the rest of the feminist agenda. Not only is
their participation not required at feminist events; they are not
allowed in the door. It is only on the issue of pornography that
those who support the pornography industry in the name of
what they cal feminism must speak whenever those who oppose pornography speak. Since pornography is a distillation of woman hating, linked in women’s experience to rape, battery,
incest, and forced prostitution, it is impossible to understand
how the moral and political imperative developed to have so-
called feminists speak in behalf of pornography. This can only
be understood as the feminist version of shut up.
The mainstream says: shut up to protect free speech. Feminists say shut up because if you speak we wil have other women Questions and Answers
79
here calling themselves feminists to defend this exploitation of
women. In this way, we wil wipe out what you have said. We
don’t do this to anyone else who stands up for the rights of
women, but we wil do this to you because we want you to shut
up. You make us feel bad. We can’t stand up to the pornographers. They are too mean, too real, and too powerful. We want to celebrate women. We don’t want to have to face how
powerless we are in the face of organized, profit-making male
cruelty. It has been hard enough for us to face rape, incest, and
battery. So we are having these women in here who say they
are feminists but enjoy calling themselves “girls, ” and they
want us to have fun having sex now, and they say pornography
is just part of liberated sex, and if they say so it must be true
for them so you aren’t even right when you say pornography
hurts women because it doesn’t hurt al women (it doesn’t hurt
these “gnT’-women), and if we listen to them we don’t have to
listen to you, which means, shut up.
And that is the sad consequence of yet another double standard. Large numbers of feminists listened with serious and honorable attention to women who exposed rape, incest, and
battery; but not as many feminists have listened with serious
and honorable attention to women who have been exploited
in pornography or raped or tortured or violated because of it.
Final y, feminist lawyers are responsible for yet another double
standard, this one cynical in the extreme. Feminist lawyers especial y seem not to want to do anything real about pornography.
They tel audiences of feminists that law isn’t the answer, that law
can do nothing, and that women should not go to the male state.
These women spend their lives and make their livings (substantial for women) going to the male state. These women take other sex-discrimination issues to the male state. These feminists have
clients who must think the law is some of the answer. These feminists who appear on behalf of their clients in court must have empirical proof that law can do something. They win sometimes.
It is not just that they oppose a specific legal remedy—for instance, the Ordinance. It is that they say as political truth that law is useless and make women feel like fools for doing something as ridiculous as contemplating “going to the male state. ”
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Pornography and Civil Rights
Either these women lie to their clients or they lie to their
audiences. If they are lawyers and they practice sex-discrimina-
tion law and they go into court, how dare they tell other feminists it is sil y to do any of the above? They have used these broad and basical y indefensible arguments to undercut support for
the Ordinance in particular, but they do not have the courage
to say that (1) they use male law, (2) they use sex-discrimination
law, (3) they make money practicing law in the male courts, (4)
law is essential to social change, which is partly why they practice it; but they do not believe that women hurt by pornography should have legal remedies. Instead they breeze through debates
speaking as lawyers making anarchist arguments and speaking
as female functionaries of the male courts making separatist arguments. What they say and what they do never meet on the plane of reality. They are especially dishonorable in the double
standard they apply to pornography because they are specially
qualified to help women who have been hurt by it.
Al of these various applications of a double standard to pornography happen sometimes, not all the time. Small numbers of people, their voices and arguments enhanced by the purposeful support of the pornographers, manipulate everyone’s sense of reality or sense of justice.
Most women hate pornography; all pornography hates
women; and the masses of feminists here and in other countries are not confounded by these strategic uses of the double standard in defense of pornography. We note when a double
standard is used and try to understand how it works political y. The acceptance of a double standard for pornography is particularly painful when it happens within the scope of the
women’s movement. But the real political damage is done
when a double-standard tactic is used by those who have real
power: media, politicians, lawyers, publishers.
Q: Why are you dividing the women’s movement? The pornography issue is too divisive.
A: There have been many angry splits in the women’s movement over the years. The arguments and antagonisms have Questions and Answers
81
been aired, often in what seems like perpetuity, in the feminist press. What is dif erent about pornography is that the pornographers have used the so-called feminists who defend
pornography to defend it in mainstream forums and in mainstream media. Feminists who oppose pornography are under constant attack from the pornographers, who have their own
magazines, of course, and also tremendous influence with
newspapers, other periodicals, and radio and television producers. Women who defend pornography are picked up by the pornographers and spotlighted. Often, they find that
their careers, including academic careers, are advanced. They
suddenly have available to them many public forums in which
to express propornography politics usefully (for the pornographers) disguised as a mutation of feminism. Some of them take the vast sums of money the pornographers offer and publish attacks on feminists fighting pornography in the pornography itself. They attack feminists opposing pornography for the pornographers in forums opened up to them by the pornographers. They have allowed themselves to become the chicks-up-front through choices they have made.
There are hundreds of thousands of us, only a tiny number
of them. But the tiny number of them tend to be privileged
and well-placed: lawyers, academics, journalists. The
hundreds of thousands of us are women in al walks of life, but
not particularly well-placed. We tend to be poorer. Some of
us have been prostitutes or in pornography or have suf ered
some other form of egregious sexual violation.
We wish that they would stop, of course. One reason is that
the pornographers get so much political mileage out of them.
But another reason is that we feel ashamed for them. They
dishonor women.
The so-cal ed feminist split on pornography would have the
quality of a tempest in a teapot if not for the media exposure
choreographed by the pornographers. We fight the pornographers. Propornography women, calling themselves “feminists, ”
fight us. In and of itself, this is suspect as a practice of feminism.
Since 1968, feminists have been fighting the way the male
world objectifies women and turns women into sexual com82
Pornography and Civil Rights
modities. Since 1970, we have been fighting pornography.
There is no viable propornography feminism. Our legitimate
differences center on how to fight pornography. Without the
active interference of the pornographers, we would have been
able to resolve these differences—or we might have agreed to
let a thousand flowers bloom. Because of the complicity of the
propornography women with the pornographers, feminism
itself stands in danger of being irrevocably compromised and
the rights of women being hurt by pornography taking second place to public spectacles of what appears to be internecine conflict. The pornographers love it.
Q: What is the role of the American Civil Liberties Union?
A: The ACLU has been very active in defending the pornographers in the media. The ACLU has been very active in defending pornography as a genre of expression that must
have absolute constitutional protection: this they have done
in the courts.
The ACLU has taken money for a long time from the pornographers. Some money has been raised by showing pornography. The ACLU’s economic ties with the pornographers take many different forms, ranging from taking money from the
Playboy Foundation to being housed for a nominal rent ($1
per year) in a building owned by pornographers. Sometimes
lawyers represent the ACLU in public debate and as individuals work for pornographers in private. Their personal incomes, then, are largely dependent on being retained by the pornographers. In public they are spokesmen for high-and-mighty principles; in private, they do whatever the pornographers need done. For instance, one such lawyer represented the ACLU in many debates with feminists on pornography. He
talked about the importance of free speech with serious elegance and would brook no exceptions to what must be protected because, he said repeatedly, if any exceptions were made, “feminist and gay” speech would suffer. Then, as the
private lawyer for a pornographer, he sued Women Against
Pornography for libel because on television a member de
Questions and Answers
83
nounced the pornographer for publishing cartoons that por-
nographized children. This is one way the ACLU helps pornographers wage war on feminists: high-toned in public; political destruction in private by use of money, power, and
ACLU lawyers. The ACLU itself also has a record of defending child pornography by opposing any laws against it as constitutionally prohibited incursions on free speech.
The ACLU has also provided money and of ice space for
FACT, a group that cal s itself feminist, opposes the Ordinance,
and defends pornography as a significant expression of women’s
free sexuality. One ACLU staff person was instrumental in
founding FACT and often represents FACT in public while continuing to rise on the ACLU staf . Perhaps the most telling detail, a picture to hold in your mind, is this one: ACLU men and FACT
women sat with representatives of Penthouse at a meeting of the
Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography in New York
City in 1986. Al three factions together heckled a feminist
speaker whose subject was the sexual abuse of women.
The ACLU’s stated commitment is to protect the Bil of
Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, not pornography as such, though it’s hard to tell sometimes. Without a commitment to real equality of the same magnitude as its
commitment to those first ten amendments, the ACLU
defends power, not rights. No mat er how notorious the exploitation, as for instance in child pornography, the ACLU
ends up substantively defending those who exploit the powerless. The ACLU demands a literal reading of those first ten amendments, especially the First Amendment, especially its
speech provision. This is an exceptionally conservative position both philosophically and politically and it has a conservative political outcome: it keeps already established pat erns of inequality intact.
The ACLU has refused to consider the role of sexual abuse
in keeping women silent, or how poverty keeps women,
Blacks, and other minorities from having access to the means
of communication. The ACLU refuses to accept responsibility
for the fact that in the United States speech has to be paid for
in money. The ACLU defends the power of corporations who
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Pornography and Civil Rights
own and control the means of speech against the aspirations
of dissidents who have been excluded from the circle of protected speech by sex or race.
We also frankly abhor the ACLU’s defenses of Klan and
Nazi groups. The ACLU has a long history of protecting the
most virulent racism. In protecting pornography, this purposeful policy continues. Pornography sexualizes racist hatred. It uses racially motivated violation, torture, and
murder as sex acts that lead to orgasm. We believe that racist
pornography is one source of the violence against Blacks and
other minorities that is ongoing in this society. We believe that
it is a dynamic source of racist violence.
The pornographers rank with Nazis and Klansmen in promoting hatred and violence. Their targets are always sex-based and sometimes race-based. Like the Nazis and the
Klansmen, they commit the acts of violence they promote.
They conduct a war against women that spreads terror.
We have asked the ACLU repeatedly over many years to
protect the rights enumerated in the Bil of Rights by taking
the cases of powerless or disenfranchised people, not exploiters, abusers, or purveyors of genocide. The ACLU has remained indifferent to this idea.
Q: But, under the Ordinance, won’t gay and lesbian materials be the first to go?
A: In some places, under obscenity laws, graphic sexually explicit materials presenting homosexual sex acts are made illegal perse. The Ordinance does not do this. The Ordinance requires proof of actual harm before any materials can be found illegal. The harm cannot be a moral one—say, that someone
is of ended by the materials or believes they are not proper
family entertainment or finds that they violate their religious
beliefs. The harm proven must be a harm of coercion, assault,
defamation, or traf icking in sex-based subordination. The
fact that the participants in the sex acts shown are of the same
sex is not itself a form of sex-based subordination. Only materials that can be proven harmful can be reached, and only by Questions and Answers
85
their victims, not by the government. The particular question
of lesbian and gay materials under the Ordinance then becomes: if any lesbian or gay material can be proven to do harm to direct victims, is there a good reason that it ought to be exempt under the Ordinance simply because the materials show gay or lesbian sex?
Al pornography, from Playboy to “Snuff, ” is part of somebody’s sexuality, their authentic sexuality as they understand it. Their pornography is a sexual experience; it is sex to them.
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