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

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

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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).

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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-

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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