XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography (13 page)

THE DECLINE OF FEMINISM

In 1973, feminism won a tremendous victory when the Supreme Court's decision on
Roe v. Wade
[4] ensured legal access to abortion. For years, mainstream feminists had focused on the abortion crusade with a single-minded determination. Now, this goal was achieved. The movement needed another issue around which to organize, through which to be galvanized. They found it: a renewed effort to pass a federal Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

In 1972, forty-nine years after its introduction in Congress, the ERA had passed the House of Representatives and the Senate. But before it could become law, the ERA needed to be ratified by two-thirds of the states. This seemed so easy that some considered it to be a technicality. The deadline of 1979 was seen as ample time.

In March 1978, one hundred thousand demonstrators marched on Washington, D.C., to express their determined support for ratification. A year later, on the streets of Chicago, ninety thousand women marched in support. The ERA began to dominate NOW and the other mainstream vehicles of feminism. But the votes necessary to ratify remained elusive. 1979 came and went; the ERA obtained an extension to June 30, 1982. After another extension, the measure was again brought to Congress. It was 1984.

The defeat of the ERA crushed the spirit of mainstream feminists. They felt discouraged, tired, and betrayed. Women seemed to turn inward and away from politics. They focused on their careers and personal lives. A flood of self-help books told women how to dress for success, how to keep their men, and how to listen to their inner voices. Politically, mainstream feminism faltered.

Radical feminism had never rushed to embrace the ERA. It had viewed the measure as a Band-Aid remedy for the terminal disease of sexual injustice. Moreover, radical feminists had been shunned by NOW, which had been the main engine behind the ERA drive.

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Instead, radical feminists had been busy evolving a new political theory based on gender oppression. This is the contention that men as a class oppress women as a class: All men oppress all women. Collectively, male dominance is known as patriarchy, which is a combination of white male culture and capitalism. Only through revolution, only by destroying the present political, social, and cultural structures, can women become free.

Radical feminism presented an integrated philosophy of gender-including a reinterpretation of history, politics, and science. Gradually, the ideology of gender began to dominate the movement. It filled the vacuum left by the ERA debacle.

Perhaps the pivotal book in the development of radical feminism was Kate Millett's
Sexual
Politics
(1970), which argued that women had been "confined to the cultural level of animal life"

by men who used them as sexual objects and breeding stock.

A series of works expanded upon Millett's theories. In Psycho
analysis and Feminism
(1974)
,
Juliet Mitchell dovetailed feminism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Linda Gordon's anthology,
Woman's Body, Woman's Right
(1976), provided a history of birth control and placed this issue within a radical, socialist context. Through her tremendously influential book,
Against Our
Will, Susan Brownmiller "gave rape its history"-a history that portrayed men as natural rapists.

Throughout the seventies radical feminists did the backbreaking labor of creating a new political philosophy.

Elsewhere within feminism, discontent grew. As the eighties dragged on, women became disillusioned with the movement, which they felt no longer addressed their needs. Affirmative action had promised to remedy the twin economic evils: sex segregation in the workplace, and the wage gap, by which women earned far less than men. Both problems remained. No-fault divorce had failed to rescue women from living below the poverty line. Women had not even been liberated from domesticity. Studies showed that modern men did no more housework than their fathers had before them.

The ERA had been a dismal failure. Even abortion was no longer safe under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who was openly hostile to the procedure. As one of his last acts before leaving office, Reagan filed a "friend of the court" brief that encouraged the Supreme Court to review a challenge to
Roe v. Wade.
The Supreme Court complied.

To many women, it looked as though equality had not worked. The apparent rise of domestic violence seemed to prove this. Although FBI crime records (as indicated by the murder rate) did not indicate that violence against women was increasing more than the population growth or the general crime rate, women
felt
less safe.

Suddenly, reports of sexual terror were everywhere in the media: sexual harassment, coercion into pornography, domestic violence, date rape, wife abuse, and child abuse. The euphoria of freedom was overshadowed by the paranoia of failure.

Women had fought so hard and had progressed so little. No achievements seemed to endure, and feminists were not in the mood to celebrate past glories. The politics of liberation had failed; it was time for politics of rage.

THE RISE OF RADICAL FEMINISM

To discouraged women, radical feminists offered an analysis of the movement's failure. More importantly, they offered a solution: Reform can never produce justice for women, they maintained. The problems are rooted too deeply for halfway measures to address them adequately. Salvation lay in revolution-a revolution so profound that it extended beyond politics into human sexuality itself.

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According to radical feminists, only a fundamental difference between the sexes could explain the perpetual oppression of women. Only an unbreachable schism between the sexes could explain why men constantly victimize women.

As to how the gender oppression was maintained-pornography became the primary culprit for radical feminists, who pointed to graphic depictions of bound or abused women in order to explain the incredible staying power of the male power structure.

Pornography offered radical feminists a clear target for their rage, complete with clear moral categories: Men were villains, women were victims. There was a brotherhood of oppressors, a sisterhood of victims. Pornography became the symbol of man's supposedly unquenchable hatred of women.

Meanwhile, in mainstream society, pornography had already fallen on hard times. Without the freewheeling spirit of the sixties, sexual liberation had come under attack. In its 1973 ruling on
Miller v. California,
the Supreme Court found: [W]e now confine the permissible scope of such regulation to works which depict or describe sexual conduct. That conduct must be specifically defined by the applicable state law, as written or authoritatively construed. A state offense must also be limited to works, which, taken as a whole, appeal to the prurient interest in sex, which portray sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and which, taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific values. [5]

This became the new standard for judging what was pornography.

Taking advantage of today's growing intolerance and sexual paranoia, radical feminism is using pornography to revive the battle of the sexes. This time it is all-out war, with no prisoners taken.

The rallying point of pornography came at a fortunate moment for radical feminists. They desperately needed a cause to galvanize the movement in much the same manner as abortion had in the sixties. Radical feminists needed a holy crusade around which to rally alienated and angry women. And pornography was perfectly suited. It provided a clear target. It commanded the instant attention of the media, who love to use sex to boost their ratings or circulation. Attacking pornography allowed the media to titillate viewers while remaining socially responsible.

Pornography fits in perfectly with the politics of revenge and the ideology of rage.

THE IDEOLOGY OF RADICAL FEMINISM

A basic tenet of radical feminism's theory of gender oppression is the idea that sex is a social construct. Radical feminists reject what they call "sexual essentialism"-the notion that sex is a natural force. They reject the idea that sex is based on biology or that women have certain natural tendencies.

Even deeply felt sexual preferences, such as heterosexuality, are not matters of biology. They spring from ideology. To argue otherwise, they insist, is to take the side of conservative antifeminists. It is to accept that biology makes women weaker than men, and slates them for domesticity. Anyone who claims women's sexuality comes from biology is blaming the victims for their own oppression.

The "nature or nurture" argument may be intrinsically interesting, but the most important political question for this debate is rarely voiced. That question is: What difference does it make?

To feminists who advocate "a woman's body, a woman's right," there are no political implications to taking a nature or a nurture stand. Whether a woman's sexuality is formed by genetics, by culture, or by some combination of the two, it is still
her
body and the political significance of this remains unchanged. She is free to do with it whatever she chooses.

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Consider a parallel: Everyone's intellect is formed by a combination of biology and cultural influences-including parents, school, books, television, and peer pressure. Yet few people would argue that a woman should not be allowed to think for herself and reach her own conclusions, simply because she has been influenced by her environment. Indeed, a woman's ability to reason and to control her own actions may be her only defense against hostile surroundings. But, to antipornography feminists, the idea that sex is a social construct is good news. If sex has been constructed, it also can be deconstructed and put back together correctly.

The key to deconstructing women's sexuality lies in rejecting all of the male institutions that have defined and oppressed women for centuries. The institutions of marriage and the family are prime targets. Marriage is seen as domestic servitude, designed to ensure that men are fed and pampered, and have a steady supply of sex. Families are the training grounds of patriarchy, which produce the next generation of oppressors and victims-otherwise known as sons and daughters.

Critics of radical feminism point out that there is no need to deconstruct marriage and the family, since these institutions are breaking down on their own. In the fifties, a typical family consisted of a husband who worked nine-to-five and a wife who stayed at home to raise two or, three children. Today, there seem to be no typical families left. Divorce, single motherhood, homosexual adoptions, lesbian couples and cohabitation have rewritten all the rules.

Yet radical feminists claim to see a common denominator: namely, the oppression of all female members. This is said to be true even of a family made up entirely of females. Why? Because their relationships are formed by external patriarchal pressures.

To radical feminists, the root of the problem lies in the male character, almost in male biology itself. In the watershed book
Against Our Will,
Susan Brownmiller traces the inevitability of rape back to Neanderthal times, when men began to use their penises as weapons. Brownmiller writes: "From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which
all men keep all women
in a state of fear. [6] (Emphasis in original.)

How she acquired this amazing knowledge of prehistoric sexual customs is not known.

Heterosexuality as gender oppression is a continuing theme of antipornography feminists. From Dworkin's book
Intercourse
(1987) to MacKinnon's statement "Heterosexuality ...

institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission" in
Toward a Feminist
Theory of the State
(1989), [7] one thing is clear: The male sex drive is a political yoke imposed on women.

Having established to their satisfaction the horrors of heterosexuality, radical feminists turn their intellectual guns on another aspect of patriarchy: capitalism. After all, pornography can almost be defined as commercialized sex. Their attack on capitalism lays the final groundwork for a full-out assault on porn. As Catharine MacKinnon observes in
Only Words:
"The sex is not chosen for the sex. Money is the medium of force and provides the cover of consent." [8]

Women's oppression is considered to stem from the twin evils of patriarchy and capitalism: sex and commercialism.

Armed with the battering ram of rage, radical feminists are making a frontal assault on the very symbol of heterosexuality and capitalism: pornography.

THE HISTORY OF THE-ANTI-PORN FEMINIST CRUSADE

The seventies were the heydays of pornography, which flourished in an atmosphere of legal tolerance. In the early eighties, however, a parade of proposed legislation, based on radical feminist assumptions, aimed at suppressing pornography.

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The first significant proposed legislation was the Minneapolis AntiPornography Ordinance.

Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon were hired as consultants by the conservative city legislators who wished to shut down the pornography shops. Previous attempts to close the shops under zoning laws had failed. Dworkin and MacKinnon prepared an ordinance that redefined pornography as sex discrimination.

Drafted as a civil rights law, the ordinance would have given individual women, or groups of women, the right to take producers or distributors of pornography to civil court for damages. The charge would have been "coercing the plaintiff(s) into pornography"-that is, forcing a woman to participate in pornography without her consent.

The ordinance listed thirteen conditions that were not considered to be evidence of a woman's consent. Under the ordinance, a woman who had posed for pornographic pictures could have subsequently sued a magazine for publishing them even though she was of age, she had full knowledge of the purpose of the pictures, she signed a contract and a release, she was under no threat, there were witnesses to her cooperation, she showed no resistance, and she was fully paid.