Catharine Dworkin - Pornography and Civil Rights - A New Day for Women's Equality

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-

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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

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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.

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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