In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (52 page)

Andrea Dworkin, perceiving some ideological differences between her theories and the pragmatic approach of Women Against Pornography, had kept her distance from the storefront campaign, but she was happy to be included in WAP’s solidarity press conference for Linda Marchiano, formerly known as Linda Lovelace, the star of
Deep Throat
.
Dworkin invited her new friend Catharine MacKinnon, the author of
Sexual Harassment of Working Women
, to join her for the media event at
which Marchiano was to go public with the horrors of her life as a porn star. Andrea was chewing on an idea. Even as the press corps was asking its questions and snapping its pictures, she was querying the feminist lawyer about whether Marchiano might have a legal basis to sue the pornographers, pimps, and johns in her past starting with Chuck Traynor, her husband and manager, and proceeding right along to Hugh Hefner. MacKinnon reeled off the civil rights statutes she thought might apply.

Two weeks later Dworkin and Mackinnon met with Marchiano, who was intrigued by the idea of a lawsuit. So was Gloria Steinem, who had been tremendously moved by Marchiano’s story. In Dworkin’s recollection, “Kitty and I researched the thing into the ground for a year and a half,” before Gloria learned that the clock had run out under the statute of limitations, and Marchiano backed off. In the meantime the meeting of minds between Dworkin and MacKinnon had turned into an adhesive bond.

MacKinnon arranged for Dworkin to come to Minneapolis in the fall of 1983, for a one-semester appointment at the University of Minnesota. While Kitty lectured at the law school that autumn, and Andrea taught a class in literature to undergraduates in Women’s Studies, the lawyer and the writer jointly conducted an interdepartmental course on pornography that was open to community activists and students. Entry requirements included a brief written biography and a statement of purpose, Sharon Vaughan remembers. Vaughan, cofounder of the first battered women’s shelter in St. Paul, was one of sixty-six students admitted to the course, which unexpectedly gave way to a new form of activism within its first month.

“What happened,” says Dworkin, “is that people started calling us from a neighborhood group in South Minneapolis, asking us to go to a zoning committee meeting at City Hall. They’d been trying for years to get the city council to strengthen its zoning laws and do something about the porn shops encroaching on their community. We told them we weren’t for zoning, because zoning doesn’t address woman-hating. We said we had developed a different approach, pornography as a violation of civil rights.”

Charlee Hoyt, a liberal Republican and a frustrated zoner, persuaded
her fellow members on the city council to hire MacKinnon and Dworkin to draft legislation based on their civil rights angle. Ready by December, the bill they prepared
stated that pornography was “central in maintaining and creating inequality” and was a form of sex discrimination. It defined injured persons as those coerced into performing for pornographic pictures, those physically assaulted as a result of pornography, and those who had pornography “forced” on them in their homes, jobs, or public places, and it offered them the remedy of suing the makers, sellers, distributors, and exhibitors in civil court for damages, as well as for the “elimination of the products of the performances from public view.”

The Dworkin-MacKinnon ordinance was sponsored in the Minneapolis city council by Charlee Hoyt and Van White, a liberal black Democrat, who promptly called a public hearing—not on the bill’s merits (few had read it), but on the need to take action. A city with a can-do approach to governance, Minneapolis prided itself on its enlightened sexual-preference protections, its compassionate physical disability codes, and its tough antismoking laws. Supporters of the ordinance hoped their bill would take its place as yet another pioneering example of progressive social-policy legislation. Braving a snowstorm,
a score of local women filed into the chamber to tell how pornography had harmed their lives. Linda Marchiano was flown in to testify as a national expert, along with Ed Donnerstein, the pornography researcher from the University of Wisconsin, and Pauline Bart, a radical feminist professor of sociology at the University of Chicago.

Andrea mailed me a copy of the ordinance on December 29, the day before it passed by one vote in the city council. I hadn’t even known that she and MacKinnon were in Minneapolis and working on legislation, but on reading the bill I quickly concluded that it was unworkable—full of overblown rhetoric, overly broad and vague intentions, tricky and convoluted legal locutions. Any court in the land, I believed, would find it unconstitutional, an observation I offered in my usual blunt manner when Andrea called a few days later to get my endorsement.

I assured her I would not go public with my negative opinion. I still cared tremendously about the issue, and for all its flaws, I figured the
ordinance might be a valuable consciousness-raiser and organizing tool. In a bad lapse of political judgment, I failed to perceive how it would polarize an already divided feminist community by providing an even better organizing tool for the opposition. Not that what I thought mattered at that point. I had ceded leadership in antipornography work to those willing to carry it forward when I’d retreated to finish my book on femininity, just then reaching the bookstores after a very long haul.

Few people noticed my absence from the national list of ordinance supporters. Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, Phyllis Chesler, and the new leadership of Women Against Pornography had already sent Dworkin and MacKinnon their glowing commendations. “
I thought it was fucking brilliant,” Robin Morgan remembers, “just brilliant the way they circumvented the criminal statutes and obscenity codes identified with the right wing, and took a new path through the concept of harm and civil rights discrimination.” Robin, coiner of the slogan “Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice,” did not see any constitutional problem. “If I had,” she concedes, “I doubt that it would have affected my position.”

The ordinance was vetoed within days of its passage by Mayor Donald Fraser, who maintained that the city did not have the financial resources to defend the law’s constitutionality in court. Seven months later it came up before the council again, with minor modifications. This time around, pornography was defined only as a “contributory factor,” not “central” to the subordination of women. Dorchen Leidholdt flew to Minneapolis to help with a petition drive. Upon her return,
she persuaded
Women Against Pornography to contribute a few thousand dollars from its dwindling treasury to the effort.

The switch from a plucky, inventive campaign to educate the public about pornography’s dangers to the promotion of new legislation was a huge change in direction for WAP, although given the times, it was probably inevitable. Mehrhof and Alexander, the last of WAP’s original full-time organizers, had already resigned, needing a more reliable weekly paycheck than antipornography work could offer. Increasingly frustrated, the remaining activists had lost their faith in the powers of hand-cranked slide shows and hastily organized protest demonstrations to curb a phenomenal growth industry which was taking advantage
of the latest technologies (pre-Internet) to create a multibillion-dollar X-rated home video market, Dial-a-Porn, and public-access television channels.

Although WAP backed the ordinance, other antiporn groups were not so sanguine about it. In Washington, political scientist Janet Gornick recalls, the ordinance split her group, Feminists Against Pornography, right down the middle, and ultimately she resigned. “We were black and white, lesbian and straight, and almost every one of us had been a victim of sexual violence,” says Gornick, whose own activism had started six years earlier, after she was stabbed on the street, dragged twenty feet, and raped a block from the Harvard campus in a crime that was never solved. “FAP was doing very daring direct-action things in addition to the usual slide shows and Take Back the Nights,” she relates. “We were waging a small war against the Fourteenth Street porn strip north of the White House. But the minute I heard about Minneapolis, I knew that it was a strategic catastrophe. It broke my heart. Before then we’d always maintained that we weren’t for new legislation, that we weren’t trying to ban anything. Some of our younger members just couldn’t comprehend that very committed feminists—our elders, our leaders, who were pulling us along by their rhetoric—could make such a big mistake that would lead the movement astray.”

For a second time the Minneapolis ordinance passed, and for a second time it was vetoed by the mayor. In between the emotional roller coaster of the two tries and vetoes, Dworkin and MacKinnon were invited to
Indianapolis to work up a similar ordinance for that politically conservative city.

Indianapolis was a major tactical error for the two ambitious theorists intent on creating new law. Psychologist Ed Donnerstein, recalling how comfortable he felt when he testified in liberal Minneapolis, admits that he found the citizens’ coalition behind the Indianapolis ordinance “scary.” He says, “I remember thinking,
What am I doing here? What are Andrea and Catharine doing here?
One guy I spoke with, a prosecutor, told me he’d use the bill against
Our Bodies, Ourselves
. It was frightening to see the ordinance becoming an issue of explicit sex for the right wing, instead of a measure against violence.”

Sponsored by a conservative Republican opposed to abortion rights
and the ERA, the Dworkin-MacKinnon ordinance sailed through the Indianapolis city council by a wide margin and was signed into law on May 1, 1984, by William Hudnut, the Republican mayor, who was challenged in court that same day by the American Booksellers Association and a consortium of concerned interests, including
Playboy
. In a predictable chain of events, the ordinance was declared unconstitutional for its free-speech abridgments by the Indiana district court and the federal appeals court for the Seventh Circuit, the next rung up on the judicial ladder. The Supreme Court affirmed the lower courts’ rulings without comment.

Anti-anti-porn feminists, caught off guard by the first go-round in Minnesota, had gotten their act together for Indiana. Nan Hunter, an ACLU attorney with movement credentials, filed an amicus brief for the Seventh Circuit on behalf of FACT, the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force, an ad hoc coalition of East and West Coast activists, writers, and sexual libertarians put together by Carole Vance, Ann Snitow, and Lisa Duggan, among others, that had emerged in the wake of the clumsy, chaotic drama of the Barnard conference.

Written by Nan Hunter and Sylvia Law, an NYU law school professor, the brief for FACT ranged over a wide spectrum of sentiments and worries, expressing alarm that Lina Wertmüller’s movie
Swept Away
or Lois Gould’s novel
A Sea Change
might be banned under the ordinance for their powerful images of rape and submission; voicing concern that explicit scenes of lesbian sex, or erotica for any unconventional sexual minority “in a generally hostile world,” might be verboten. The brief articulated the right of all groups to express their sexual identities freely; affirmed the importance of a rich fantasy life and an untrammeled sexual imagination to artists and everyone else; and questioned the ability of censors to wield power wisely.

At the heart of the FACT brief lay the contention that violent sadomasochistic pornography could be a source of pleasure for some women, while its suppression “delegitimates and makes socially invisible women who find sexually explicit images of women in positions of display or penetrated by objects to be erotic, liberating, or educational.

“Women need the freedom and the socially recognized space to appropriate for themselves the robustness of what traditionally has been
male language,” the brief concluded. “Laws such as the one under challenge here could restrict that freedom.”

Among the seventy-five signatories were Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, and Adrienne Rich. The decision to ally herself with FACT and against the ordinance had come only after some tortured soul-searching by Rich, whose previous expressions of faith in Andrea Dworkin had attributed to her leadership “the
greatest depth and grasp.” In a special statement for
off our backs
, optimistically titled
“We Don’t Have to Come Apart over Pornography,” the activist poet wrote, “I am less sure than Dworkin and MacKinnon that this is a time when further powers of suppression should be turned over to the State.” The lawyer and writer Wendy Kaminer, another early WAP member,
went public with
her
opposition to the ordinance a year or so later.

People on both sides of the feminist pornography wars proved to be masters of harsh invective. Antiporn activists accused the FACT women of being pro-porn, as indeed many were. Conversely, the FACT women, taking a cue from the antiabortion movement’s devilishly clever “pro-life” slogan, claimed that they were the “pro-sex feminists,” thus implying that antiporn feminists were against sex per se, a difficult charge to refute if the rhetoric of Dworkin and MacKinnon was taken at face value.

I was glad to be out of the direct line of fire for once in my feminist career, although my duck-and-cover manueuvers were not entirely successful since I was not about to recant my antipornography beliefs. What I remember most about this unhappy time was the visceral recoil and emanations of pure hatred that accompanied chance meetings between pros and antis, and the stricken looks of those caught in the middle who still believed that pornography was not in women’s interests but had lost the resolve to continue the fight, because all of a sudden it seemed so illiberal.

Donnerstein and Malamuth, the leading researchers on pornography’s effects on aggression who’d sought me out so confidently in 1979, were caught in a similar crunch. Their laboratory studies were derided by one camp as proving nothing and put forward by the other side as incontrovertible proof of causative harm. The important distinction between violent porn and the explicit but nonviolent genre,
about which their newest findings and those of their colleagues were equivocal at best, got lost in the shuffle. Tugged at on all sides, the academics were having agonizing second thoughts about the wisdom of lending their names to the advocacy of social policy by the time the Meese Commmision held its anticlimactic hearings on pornography in 1985. “Frankly, I was glad when the whole debate died down,” Donnerstein admits.