Pete Hamill - Piecework

MacKinnon and Dworkin allow no room for such questions. Pornography, as they define it, is everywhere around them, the defining presence in American society. They write:

Pornographers’ consumers make decisions every day over women’s employment and educational opportunities. They decide how women will be hired, advanced, what we are worth being paid, what our grades are, whether to give us credit, whether to publish our work.…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.

If that torrid vision were true, you would be forced to lose all hope for the nation; there would be almost nobody left who is not part of the pornographic lodge. But common sense tells us that the assertion is not true. It is an almost clinically paranoid view of reality (try substituting “communists” or “Jews” for “pornographer’s consumers”). Perhaps more important, it is based on a profound ignorance of men.

Like most men I know, I haven’t seen or read much hard-core pornography. I gave up after 90 pages of The 120 Days of Sodom, the alleged masterpiece by the Marquis de Sade. I found the anonymous Victorian chronicle My Secret Life as repetitive in its sexual scorekeeping as a sports autobiography. Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones held my attention more than the average Doris Day movie ever did, but I thought Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee was far more erotic. That’s me. One person.

But in a lifetime as a man, growing up in a Brooklyn slum, as a sailor in the Navy, as a student in Mexico, as a reporter who moved among cops and criminals, schoolteachers and preachers, musicians and athletes, drunks and bartenders, I have never heard anyone celebrate pornography as defined by MacKinnon and Dworkin. Men talk about sex, of course; though the men who talk the most are usually getting the least. And they talk about women, too; but not so often as women think they do. Most S&M books (and acts) are dismissed by most men as freak shows. Even by the bad guys. Every criminal I’ve known (there are many) has told me that in prison the rapist is the most loathed of all prisoners, except, perhaps, those jailed for abusing children. Pornography simply wasn’t central to their lives and usually wasn’t even marginal.

I’m hardly an innocent about the realities of sexual violence. As a reporter for more than three decades, I’ve seen more brutalized bodies of men and women than most people. But their degradation certainly does nothing at all for my penis. I don’t think there is any such animal as a “typical” man. But most men I’ve known are like me: They have no interest in this junk.

My own lack of interest in the hard-core is based on another critique: The people are not people, they are abstractions. In all pornography, men and women are reduced to their genitals.

Oddly enough, that is precisely the way MacKinnon, Dworkin and most of the New Victorians see human beings: as abstractions. They speak of generalized women who are given names and faces only when they are victims. And over and over again, MacKinnon speaks about men as if they all behaved in the same way and were sexually excited by the same imagery. But which men are they talking about? Read this chilly prose and you are asked to believe that Seamus Heaney and Michael Jordan, Sean Connery and François Mitterrand, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Arnold Schwarzenegger, along with auto mechanics, bread-truck drivers, carpenters and guitar players, are all fully covered by the same word, respond to the same stimuli and are equally dedicated to the subordination of women. That is absurd.

But this sectarian narrowness does help define their vision of human life in this world. That vision is descended from a basic Victorian assumption: All men are beasts and all women are innocents. Women fall into vice or degradation only at the hands of cruel, unscrupulous, power-obsessed men. They have no free will and never choose their own loss of grace. Men only see women the way they are presented in pornography and use pornography as a kind of male instruction manual to maintain all forms of supremacy. Women are never brutal, corrupt or evil and they never truly choose to make porno films, dance topless, pose for centerfolds, work as secretaries or, worst of all, get married. Original sin was the fault of men. Eve was framed.

These women claim to know what billions of other women were never smart enough, or enlightened enough, to understand: Sexual intercourse is the essential act of male domination, created by a sinister male cabal to hurt and humiliate all women and thus maintain power over them forever. As Maureen Mullarkey has written in The Nation: “In the Dworkin-MacKinnon pornotopia, there are only the fuckers and the fuckees. The sooner the fuckers’ books are burned, the better.” She doesn’t exaggerate. According to Dworkin, all women are “force-fucked,” either directly through the crime of rape or by the male power of mass media, by male economic power or by the male version of the law.

It doesn’t matter to the New Victorians that the vast majority of women, even many proud feminists, don’t see the world the way they do. With the same amazing knowledge of the entire human race that allows her to speak so glibly about men, MacKinnon dismisses their viewpoints as well.

At a 1987 conference organized by Women Against Pornography, MacKinnon was blunt about the pro-sex feminists who had formed the Feminists Against Censorship Taskforce. That group included such women as Betty Friedan, Adrienne Rich and Rita Mae Brown. “The labor movement had its scabs, the slavery movement had its Uncle Toms,” MacKinnon said, “and we have FACT.” In another enlightening speech she simply dismissed her feminist opponents as “house niggers who sided with the masters.”

Today, absolutely certain of their rectitude, totally free of doubt, equipped with an understanding of human beings that has eluded all previous generations, MacKinnon, Dworkin and their allies have been shaping a Victorian solution to their Victorian nightmares. That solution is, pardon the expression, paternalistic. As MacKinnon writes: “Some of the same reasons children are granted some specific legal avenues for redress …also hold true for the social position of women compared to men.” Since women are, in the MacKinnon view, essentially children, they must be shielded from harm, corruption and filthy thoughts. The savage impulses of the male must be caged. And women must be alerted to the true nature of the beast.

“If we live in a world that pornography creates through the power of men in a male-dominated situation,” MacKinnon writes, “the issue is not what the harm of pornography is but how that harm is to become visible.”

That’s it: Simply make harm visible and we shall live happily ever after. Common sense and wide experience count for nothing. They know that men are loathsome and are clear about how to tame them. Once tamed, they can be subverted, their powers over women will vanish and the grand Utopia of complete equality will arrive for all. That bleak vision of human nature has its own escalating logic, just as Lenin’s sentimental abstraction of the proletariat led inevitably to the gulag. In her bizarre 257-page book Intercourse, Dworkin repeats the theory that MacKinnon and other academic feminists accept as proven: Gender is a mere “social construct,” enforced, in Dworkin’s elegant phrase, by “vagina-specific fucking.”

Once more, the Victorian sense of sexual horror permeates the discussion. If men are the source of all savagery to women, then sexual intercourse with men is itself a savage act. Women who claim to enjoy heterosexual lovemaking are, says Dworkin, “collaborators, more base in their collaboration than other collaborators have ever been, experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority, calling intercourse freedom.”