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

are so meaningless they could mean almost anything. As a result, they have meant almost nothing, being (actually) dependent upon the viewpoint of the observer. This makes obscenity law less useful the more pornography is a problem, because

the more pornography is consumed, the more observers’

views are shaped by it, and the more the world it makes confirms that view. Privacy law has further institutionalized pornography by shielding the sexual sphere, where so much of pornography’s violence to women is done, including by outright guaranteeing the right to possess pornography in the home, the most violent place for women. Pornography has

also been legally institutionalized through decrying but permit ing pimping and prostitution (of which pornography is one form), making sure prostitutes are the ones who pay for

doing what the entire social system has given them, as women,

little choice but to do in one form or another.

The law has helped make pornography a social institution

more indirectly as wel . The law of rape makes the pornographic assumption that women may consent to forced sex.

The law of child custody applies the pornographic definition

of the female to mothers. Women who have sexual relations

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with a man or men not the father of their children have long

been considered loose women, hence not good mothers.

Lesbian mothers have found that a woman who is not being

sexually used by a man is considered an inadequate woman,

hence also not a good mother. The frequent failures of attempts under sex-discrimination law to get women the same pay as men when they do dif erent work of comparable value

permits job definitions and pay scales to continue based on

pornographic definitions of women’s proper role as men’s

hierarchical subordinates, as sexually pleasing to men visual y, and as servicers of male needs. It also keeps women so poor they need to sel sex to men to survive. The law of evidence pervasively permits a woman’s credibility to be based upon the pornographic standard that what a woman is sexual y and does sexually is the relevant measure of her word and her worth. If she has had sex, she is worthless as a human

being and can neither be violated nor believed. If she has not

had sex, she is worthless as a woman, hence is not worthy of

belief. Pervasively, whether by the collaboration of ineffective

or perverse action, or by the complicity of inaction, the legal

system has supported the existence and burgeoning of this industry and its social propriety as wel . Deep legal echos on al levels of the system support the existence of pornography in

the world and make it seem right that the legal system condones it. What the law does, the law must undo.

Law in the United States provides a forum for airing disputes recognized as legitimate and an avenue for redressing grievances and harms considered worth redressing for people

considered worth intervention. For individuals who are hurt

by other individuals, civil court promises dignity to conflict,

recognition to an arguable harm, some ground rules beyond

overt force, an opportunity to fight for one’s life, a chance for

vindication, and the possibility of relief... maybe even a little

change. Those whose harms the society takes seriously are

permit ed access to court; they are full citizens. Those whose

harms the law refuses even to allow into court are not; they

are victims, period. In this country, civil-rights law particularly has been an oppositional force for change. It has given 28

Pornography and Civil Rights

people, dignity, self-respect, and hope, without which people

cannot live. Ever since Black people demanded legal change

as one means to social change, civil rights has stood for the

principle that systematic social inequality—the legal and social institutionalization of group-based power and powerlessness—should and would be undone by law. Law would do this both because it had a shameful part in creating and maintaining social inequality and because it could do something about it. The fact that law had obscured or permit ed inequality, had

reflected and furthered it both, was seen not as a reason that

law should be disregarded but as a reason it had to be used.

This was not done out of political naivete or civics-class faith

in the legal system’s intrinsic justice. It was done out of determination to make this society’s normal everyday mechanisms work for normal everyday people—all of them. Civil rights is

a “Look, we live here, too” movement. It is not dedicated primarily to making the society more comfortable for outlaws or to lessening the stigma of marginality or to making powerlessness feel bet er. It is dedicated to changing basic norms so that what was outlaw and marginal and powerless no longer is. It

aims to alter the mainstream. For civil-rights movements,

then, the fact that law is an instrument of the powerful has

never been an inert fact to be met with complacency or

despair, far less a reason to leave its power in the hands of the

powerful. It has been a reason that the law cannot af ord to

be ignored. The law’s pretense at providing equal justice did

not provide an occasion for cynicism, but a hypocrisy to be

exposed and a promise to be delivered, not a radical reason

to do nothing. The law of sex discrimination, aimed at altering the inequality of women to men, at eliminating the subordination of women to men as a norm, has been a part of this tradition, at least to some of us.

The civil-rights approach to pornography is an application

of this tradition, this analysis, and this determination to the

emergency of pornography and the condition of women. Accordingly, the antipornography civil-rights law (“the Ordinance”) does not admonish or moralize or apologize or request. By making it possible for women who can prove harm Pornography and Civil Rights

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to sue pornographers, it draws a line by making action

possible. In so doing, it defines a standard that tells the pornographers and their consumers that women are human beings, meaning that when they are hurt, something can be

done about it. Unlike any prior approach to pornography,

this law is based on proof of a harm, not a judgment about the

permissibility of an idea. And, like al civil-rights legislation,

it addresses a harm that derives its meaning and sting from

group status.

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Pornography and Civil Rights