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

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

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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.

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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.