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BANNING PORNOGRAPHY ENDANGERS WOMEN
Since the mid 1980s, a strange sight has been on the political horizon. Feminists are standing alongside their arch-enemies, conservatives and religious fundamentalists, to call for anti-pornography laws.
This phenomenon threatens the well-being of women in at least three important ways:
1. Feminism is no longer a stronghold of freedom of speech;
2. Women’s unacceptable sexual choices are now under new attack;
3. It involves rejecting the principle „a woman’s body, a woman’s right.“Gender Violence?
At the root of this threat is a new definition of pornography, which has emerged from the extreme feminism, known as radical feminism. It states that pornography is gender violence that violates the civil rights of women. Anti-porn activist Catherine MacKinnon once explained, „We are proposing a statutory scheme that will situate pornography as a central practice in the subordination of women. …“ Radical feminists call for civil, as well as criminal, proceedings because this avoids sticky constitutional issues, such as the First Amendment. Civil courts also have lower standards of evidence and no presumption of innocence.
But why is pornography viewed as violence in the first place, and not merely words or images? This view was well embodied in the much-cited Minneapolis anti-porn ordinance of 1983. The ordinance stated that all women who worked in porn were coerced, and could bring a civil lawsuit against producers and distributors. Coercion was deemed to be present even if the woman was of age, she fully understood the nature of the performance, she signed a contract and release, there were witnesses, she was under no threat, and she was fully paid.
Women and Consent
Consent by the woman was rendered impossible. The author of the Ordinance, MacKinnon, later explained that „in the context of unequal power (between the sexes), one needs to think about the meaning of consent – whether it is a meaningful concept at all.“ A male-controlled society made it impossible for women to consent. Women who thought they agreed were so damaged by male society that they were not able to give true consent.
In over a decade of defending pornography against such attacks, I have avoided First Amendment arguments and preferred to challenge the anti-porn zealots on their own terms. The key questions became: Are women coerced into pornography? and How does porn relate to general societal violence against women? A secondary – but essential – question was whether pornography provided any benefit to women.
Regarding the first question, I appealed directly to women who were involved in the production of hard-core pornography such as S/M, where it seemed most likely that violence would occur. In the hundreds of such adult women I spoke with, every single one said they had not been coerced into performing pornography, nor did they know of a woman who had been. I decided to take the articulate voices of these adult women seriously and not dismiss them, as anti-porn feminists were doing.
To such evidence, radical feminists routinely answer that no „healthy“ woman would consent to pornography. Therefore, such women were damaged by a male culture and incapable of rendering consent. The Minneapolis ordinance had argued that women, like children, needed special protection under the law: „Children are incapable of consenting to engage in pornographic conduct, even absent physical coercion, and therefore require special protection. By the same token, the physical and psychological well-being of women ought to be afforded comparable protection. …“
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