Pete Hamill - Piecework

The bill is officially called the Pornography Victims’ Compensation Act, and it would allow victims of sex crimes to sue producers and distributors of sexual material if the victims can prove the material incited the crimes. The legislation has been nicknamed the Bundy Bill, after mass killer Ted Bundy, who claimed on the eve of his execution that pornography made him do it. If it passes and is upheld in the current right-wing Supreme Court, Bundy’s final victim will surely be the First Amendment.

MacKinnon believes that in America the law is the essential tool of social change. In a narrow sense, this is certainly true. The civil rights of blacks, for example, were more radically altered by Brown vs. Board of Education than by many years of prayer, argument and human suffering. But she goes on to insist that the law is not neutral but male, conceived by men to serve the interests of male power. Today, MacKinnon insists, the law serves the interests of male supremacy. And to change the present power arrangements in the United States, the law must be used against itself.

“Our law is designed to … help make sex equality real,” MacKinnon has written. “Pornography is a practice of discrimination on the basis of sex, on one level because of its role in creating and maintaining sex as a basis for discrimination. It harms many women one at a time and helps keep all women in an inferior status by defining our subordination as our sexuality and equating that with gender.”

Surely, that assigns far more power to pornography than it could ever have. But even if you agree with its claims, the question is whether more laws are needed. MacKinnon knows that if a woman is coerced into making a porno film, the people who abused her are subject to a variety of charges, including kidnapping, assault, imprisonment and invasion of privacy. But MacKinnon and Dworkin insist the present laws are not enough. In a discussion of Minneapolis’ proposed antiporn ordinance, they said of pornographic acts: “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.” In other words, because the present laws don’t work, add another law. Maybe that will work.

The world as MacKinnon sees it is now “a pornographic place” and, as a result, women are being held down, tied up and destroyed. “Men treat women as who they see women as being,” MacKinnon writes. “Pornography constructs who that is. Men’s power over women means that the way men see women defines who women can be. Pornography is that way. … It is not a distortion, reflection, projection, expression, fantasy, representation or symbol, either. It is a sexual reality.”

Of course, common sense tells us otherwise. The vast majority of men simply don’t use pornography to “construct” women, because the vast majority of men don’t ever see much pornography. And the vast majority of men don’t spend their days and nights dreaming of inflicting cruelties on women and then carrying them out. If they did, Americans would be up to their rib cages in blood. There are violent men and there is violent pornography (estimated by one study at about five percent of the total produced in the United States). But MacKinnon isn’t attacking only the violence she says suffuses the “pornotopia”; she is after pornography itself, as she and her allies define it.

The word that names that concept, as Walter Kendrick points out in his 1987 history of the subject, The Secret Museum, can be traced back to the Greek pornographoi (“whore-painter”), apparently coined by the second-century writer Athenaeus and promptly forgotten. The word was revived, appropriately, during the Victorian era, and by 1975 the American Heritage Dictionary was defining it as “written, graphic, or other forms of communication intended to excite lascivious feelings.”

The inequality of women and men in this poor world goes back at least to the late Neolithic Period, long before the creation of pornography or its naming. But MacKinnon and the radical feminists insist that such inequality was “constructed” by pornography. And obviously, the current usage of the word was too mild to serve their purposes. They needed to make it more specific. In Pornography and Civil Rights, a 1988 pamphlet that MacKinnon wrote with Dworkin, it is defined as follows:

Pornography is the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words that also include one or more of the following: (i) women are presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things or commodities; or (ii) women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or (iii) 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 buttocks — are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or (vii) women are presented as whores by nature; or (viii) 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 acts cited in the paragraph] above is also pornography.

Obviously, in spite of the specifics, this is a great vague glob of a definition. MacKinnon would most certainly ban Playboy, which she says reduces women to mere objects for the use of men. But her definition of pornography limned in Pornography and Civil Rights could cover everything from the latest Madonna video to the novels of Henry Miller, Al Capp’s Moonbeam McSwine and Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo, acres of surrealist paintings, the Koran and James Cagney hitting Mae Clarke with that grapefruit. We would see the last of Black Bun Busters, but we could also lose Don Giovanni. The great flaw in the antiporn agitation is that it’s based on a mystery: the elusive nature of sexuality.

MacKinnon and Dworkin assume that descriptions of sexual cruelty incite men. They write: “Basically, for pornography to work sexually with its major market, which is heterosexual men, it must excite the penis.” And “to accomplish its end, it must show sex and subordinate a woman at the same time.”

And they follow with an immense leap of logic: “Subordination includes objectification, hierarchy, forced submission and violence.”

None of this elaboration solves the basic mystery of sexual excitement. Across the centuries, men have been excited by everything from high heels and nuns’ habits to veiled faces and the aroma of rose petals. Some find erotic inspiration in Rubens, others in Giacometti; in the complex mesh of sexuality, there are no rules. Some men may get excited at written or visual images of women being subordinated, others may see those images as appalling and many would be indifferent to them.

But to think that banning pornography will bring about the political goal of eliminating human inequalities or hierarchies is absurd. The world has always been composed of hierarchies: the strong over the weak, the smart above the dumb, the talented above the ordinary. MacKinnon may not like the existence of those hierarchies (nor the liberal project of protecting the weak, the dumb and the ordinary), but they are unlikely to be changed by a municipal ordinance banning Three-Way Girls. Some feminists would tell you that just being a wife is a condition of subordination. There have been hundreds of novels written by literature professors that relate sexual affairs between male teachers and female students; are such works automatically pornographic? The boss-worker equation has been examined in hundreds of thousands of novels, short stories, movies and cartoons. Does that mean that their relationships include “objectification, hierarchy, forced submission and violence”? And if, heaven forbid, they have sex, are they actors in pornography?