Porn - Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink (21 page)

Anti-Porn Feminists, or the Best Answer to Bad Speech is Less Speech

When it comes to reasons for censoring, prohibiting, or otherwise suppressing pornographic material there are various rationales. Some claim that pornography leads to sexual violence or other forms of deviance. Ultimately, these accounts are only as successful as the connection between the two is strong. This connection is contentious at best, and some maintain that these arguments are doomed to failure insofar as they fail to show a causal connection between porn and violence.
¹⁸
Others, with whom the rest of this section will be concerned, claim that pornography promotes inequality by depicting women in an unflattering light, perpetuating harmful stereotypes, and ultimately discriminating against them.Thus, instead of the classic and problematic argument that porn harms society by leading to criminal behavior, namely that porn should be proscribed since it may lead to bad tendencies in some consumers, these theorists argue that pornography is a civil rights issue.Two of the most vocal and well-known proponents of this view are Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.

MacKinnon and Dworkin’s basic claim is that pornography “eroticizes hierarchy, it sexualizes inequality. . . . It institutionalizes the sexuality of male supremacy, fusing the eroticization of dominance and submission with the social construction of male and female.”
¹⁹
As a practice, pornography reinforces a hierarchy of inequality and perpetuates a culture that excuses and rationalizes sexual aggression and male dominance. Pornography thus bolsters sexual discrimination. Some have made the additional claim that the mere existence of pornography is discriminatory insofar as it presents as authoritative a ranking of women as inferior.
²⁰

MacKinnon’s case is simple: women’s right to equality is hampered by the culture promoted through pornography and thus women have a right against the consumers, producers, and distributors of pornography. Thus, women’s Fourteenth Amendment protections to equal protection under the law take priority over anyone else’s right to pornography.
²¹
MacKinnon has used this line of reasoning to pursue a legal attack on pornography.

In 1983, MacKinnon and Dworkin drafted an amendment to the Minneapolis Civil Rights ordinance that would construe pornography as discrimination.Then in 1984 the Indianapolis City and County Council adopted a similar law. It was quickly challenged in court and ruled unconstitutional by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.The ordinance in question contained prohibitions on trafficking pornography, coercing others into performances, and forcing porn on anyone. In order to be applied, the ordinance thus needed a working definition of pornography, and I think the reader knows where this is going.

Pornography was defined as:

The graphic sexually explicit subordination of women, whether in pictures or in words, that also includes one or more of the following: (1) women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or (2) women are presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or (3) women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt, or as dismembered or truncated or fragmented or severed into body parts; or (4) women are presented as being penetrated by objects or animals; or (5) women are presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, abasement, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual; or (6) women are presented as sexual objects from domination, conquest, violation, exploitation, possession, or use, or through postures or positions of servility or submission or display.
²²

You have to love lawyers! This law was clearly directed at more than obscene speech as defined by the Supreme Court, and it left out the restraints adopted by the court, such as considering a work as a whole, not just a part, and weighing its merits against its contribution to political, artistic, literary, or scientific discourse. The language in this law is broader. A work may be considered just in part, and its other redeeming values are irrelevant. But as with obscenity laws in general, the most problematic element of this law is the use of vague evaluative criteria. Consider the definition of pornography: “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women.” This standard is faulted with the same interpretative problems of which previous obscenity laws were guilty. Who determines if a representation is “subordinating”? Whether or not a depiction represents an inappropriate power relation is very much open to debate and one’s conclusion ultimately rests on one’s views of sexuality and interpersonal relationships. To illustrate the problem this standard raises, consider MacKinnon and Dworkin’s own view on the matter. Dworkin and MacKinnon each hold a view of sex that is particularly jaded. Dworkin has claimed, “It’s very hard to look at a picture of a woman’s body and not see it with the perception that her body is being exploited.”
²³
It is not a stretch to conclude that the definition above – if interpreted in light of Dworkin’s own perceptions of female sexuality – would determine all sexually explicit material to be porn. Likewise, “MacKinnon has condemned pornography specifically because it shows women ‘desire to be fucked.’. . . MacKinnon also echoes Dworkin’s thesis that women who believe they voluntarily engage in, and enjoy, heterosexual sex are victims of ‘false consciousness’.”
²⁴
This type of attitude brings me back to the wisdom of Justice Douglas and a quotation with which I opened this essay: “Censors are, of course, propelled by their own neuroses.”
²⁵
This view of sex is idiosyncratic to say the least, and to apply this standard to the law as the interpretative yard stick would have disastrous effects on free speech. In fact, in 1992 the Canadian Supreme Court in
Butler v.The Queen
interpreted Canadian anti-obscenity laws to apply to “degrading” and “dehumanizing” depictions of women, and although MacKinnon lauded the decision it led ironically to the seizure of Andrea Dworkin’s own work at the border.
²⁶
All laws as applied are applied by judges, and judges use their own judgment in adjudicating the meaning of the law. So we must rely on their interpretations and discretion, and in the case of anti-porn laws we must rely on their interpretation of “subordinating.” If the judge is as jaded as the authors of these laws, then a great deal of speech is going to be subject to prosecution.To author an insufferably vague law is to hand over great power to the judiciary. Vague laws are not problematic because a few erratic judges may abuse the indeterminacy, they are problematic because by their nature it is implied all applications are equally justifiable.The idea that any interpretation can be justified betrays the fact that there is then no actual standard by which to adjudicate matters. Thus, even though there are myriad problems that can be raised with this style of law, the fatal flaw is indeterminacy, the fact of which renders it impossible to predict how the law will be applied, since we cannot predict how the neuroses of the judges/censors will play out in each case.

Conclusion

Obscenity and anti-pornography laws attempt to either carve out an area of non-protected speech and thus suppress what is not protected, or limit our freedom of expression by bringing other interests to bear against the freedom to produce, distribute, and consume pornographic material.Yet all such attempts seem to possess the same fatal flaw: the wording of the statutes is necessarily vague given the nature of the material they seek to regulate, and the specification of the meaning of these vague terms is susceptible, in fact probably necessarily so, to competing equipollent interpretations.The fact that these laws are susceptible to varying and at times capricious interpretations means that no one can be given fair notice regarding the application of them.Thus, these laws are indeterminate, due to the material they proscribe, and because of this they lack the form of law demanded by a rule of law.

Our rights are protections against governmental power, as the history of the Bill of Rights attests. So we should be wary of giving government the power to circumvent the protections guaranteed by the First Amendment, or any other amendment for that matter, especially when the scope of the exceptions is left to the discretion of a few judges. If we allow courts to haphazardly determine what speech is and is not protected based on how valuable they deem it, as has been the case with obscenity laws, and if we allow the court to continually redefine obscenity and base that definition on indeterminate evaluative criteria, then our liberties are held hostage to the peccadilloes of a handful of judges. Regardless, whatever the rationale, whether that of the early Brennan or the anti-porn stance of MacKinnon and Dworkin, the fact is that these laws are impracticable.The only censor a mature adult needs is his or her own taste.

NOTES

1
“Amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America,” in
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America
(Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1998), p. 43.

2
Schenck v. US
, 249 US 47, 52 (1919) (Holmes, J.).

3
Roth v. United States
, 354 US 476, 484–7 (1957) (Brennan, J.).

4
Roth v. United States
, 354 US 476 (1957).

5
Ibid., p. 484.

6
Ibid.

7
Ibid., p. 477.

8
Ibid., pp. 477, 487.

9
Jacobellis v. Ohio
, 378 US 184 (1964).

10
Ginzburg v. United States
, 383 US 463, 490 (1966) (Douglas, J. dissenting).

11
Jacobellis v. Ohio
, 378 US 184, 197 (1964) (Stewart, J. concurring).

12
See
Memoirs v. Massachusetts
, 383 US 413, 428 (1966) (Douglas, J. concurring).

13
Ginzburg v. United States
, 383 US 463, 478 (1966) (Black, J. dissenting).

14
Pope v. Illinois
, 481 US 497, 504–5 (1987) (Scalia, J. concurring).

15
Miller v. California
, 413 US 15, 47 (1973) (Brennan, J. dissenting).

16
Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slayton
, 413 US 49, 84 (1973) (Brennan, J. dissenting).

17
Ibid., pp. 86–103 passim.

18
For a discussion of these issues, see Nadine Strossen,
Defending Pornography:Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights
(New York: New York University Press, 2000), chapter 12.

19
Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Frances Biddle’s Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech,” in Susan Dwyer (ed.)
The Problem of Pornography
(Belmont: Wadsworth, 1995), pp. 59–60.

20
For a good discussion on these points, see Rae Langton,
Sexual Solipsism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), chapters 1, 4, 8 passim.

21
MacKinnon does offer other arguments as well. Her full case against pornography covers issues from First Amendment rights and the claim that women are silenced by porn, to equal rights, to the claim that porn causes violence. I cannot deal with all of them here, so I am focusing on the case from equality. It is in my opinion the strongest case she can make, and it seems to motivate her legal case against porn, so it is the most relevant to the present discussion.

22
American Booksellers Association, Inc. v. William H. Hudnut, Mayor, City of Indianapolis
, 771 F.2d 323, 324 (7th Circuit, 1985).

23
Andrea Dworkin, “Where Do We Stand on Pornography?” Roundtable,
Ms
., Jan./Feb. 1994. Cited in Strossen,
Defending Pornography
, p. 23.

24
Strossen,
Defending Pornography
, p. 111.

25
Ginsburg v. New York
, 390 US 629, 655 (1968).

26
Strossen,
Defending Pornography
, p. 237.

MIMI MARINUCCI

CHAPTER 10

WHAT’S WRONG WITH PORN?

I have heard that women watch porn films through to the end (if we watch them at all) because we don’t want to miss the wedding. Funny or not, this familiar joke highlights a real or perceived mismatch between what women want from pornography and what it actually delivers. It seems clear that the vast majority of pornography fails the vast majority of women. After all, men, not women, are the primary consumers of porn. It seems less clear, however, that this failure should be attributed to the stereotype that women are interested in sex only as an expression of romantic love between monogamous life partners. If the problem with pornography is not marriage, or rather the apparent lack thereof, then what is the problem with pornography? To put it another way:
What’s wrong with porn?

Following a tradition that was framed by anti-pornography feminists, most notably Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, feminist analyses of porn tend to divide into two camps.
¹
In one camp, there are those who believe that pornography perpetuates (perhaps even creates) negative attitudes toward women, which in turn perpetuate (perhaps even create) the negative treatment of women, most notably in the form of sexual violence, particularly rape. Officially, both Dworkin and MacKinnon oppose censorship, but their equation between porn and rape transfers pornography from the realm of free speech to the realm of action. Thus, the Dworkin-MacKinnon thesis, if not Dworkin and MacKinnon themselves, justifies the censorship of pornography by blurring the boundary between thought and action. In the case of pornography, censorship is warranted in the interest of harm prevention. In the other camp, feminist advocates of free speech, particularly Nadine Strossen, remind us that, “In the free speech context, once the government is granted the power to censor one unpopular or controversial type of expression, it can and will grab the power to censor another.”
²
In other words, the censorship of unpopular or controversial expression in the case of pornography is equivalent, in some meaningful sense, to the censorship of unpopular or controversial expression in other cases, such as the expression of feminist ideals.

I am not unconcerned about the prevalence of hostile representations of and attitudes toward women, nor do I deny that pornography often presents such images and fosters such attitudes. Nevertheless, because my position as a feminist is consistent with and supportive of my stance against virtually all forms of censorship, I am picking up where the debate over censorship, itself a relic of the Dworkin-MacKinnon thesis, usually ends. The censorship debate creates a false division between those who would criticize pornography, either in general or in particular instances, and those who would defend the freedom to produce, distribute, and consume pornography. For those of us with feminist interests, as well as interests that are decidedly “prurient,” the problem of pornography is much more complex. I am taking for granted that the representations of women within pornography, like the representations of women within our culture more generally, often betray an underlying misogyny that warrants scrutiny and criticism. At the same time, I am also taking for granted, first, that censorship is not a viable response to this problem and, second, that this problem is neither unique to nor constitutive of pornography.

Pleasure as Power

Given that there are women for whom various forms of pornography represent a source of sexual pleasure, it is worth exploring the potential role of pornography in service of Audre Lorde’s notion of the erotic as power. Lorde regards the erotic as “a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.”
³
For Lorde, the erotic is the “measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings,” which permeates all aspects of existence:

The aim of each thing we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work [
sic
] becomes a conscious decision – a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.
⁴

“Of course, women so empowered are dangerous,”
⁵
and Lorde associates the suppression of female erotic power with patriarchal oppression. She differentiates pornography and eroticism as “two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual,”
⁶
however, and maintains that pornography bears only superficial resemblance to the erotic:

We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within Western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.
⁷

“Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling,” claims Lorde, and therefore stands in “direct denial of the power of the erotic.”
⁸
At the same time, she advances the casual assessment “It feels right to me” as a testament to the deep, inner knowledge that is born of the erotic:

Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, “It feels right to me,” acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what it means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. And understanding is a handmaiden which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply born. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest understanding.
⁹

It seems to me that Lorde should invite individual women to determine, in individual cases, whether and why pornography does or does not “feel right.” It seems to me that the unreflective dismissal of all instances of pornography, both actual and potential, serves only to diminish the power of the erotic that Lorde encourages us to explore and expand. While there is no denying that particular representations of sexuality through pornography do, indeed, feature “the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation”
¹⁰
with which Lorde equates all pornography, there is also no denying that pornography does, or at least could, at times, meet the “feels right” criterion that she associates with the erotic. In other words, while pornography and eroticism are by no means identical, they are not mutually exclusive, either.

Individual reactions to pornography are as idiosyncratic as the personal histories and corresponding sexualities by which those reactions are conditioned. I do not pretend that it would be possible or desirable to develop a universally normative distinction between pornography that is empowering, or potentially empowering, and pornography that is oppressive, or potentially oppressive, solely on the basis of what “feels right” to
me
– or to anyone
else
for that matter. I do acknowledge, however, that what “feels right” to me, from an explicitly feminist perspective, is an indispensable source of insight when addressing my own concerns at the intersection of feminism and pornography. Moreover, because I also acknowledge that my own sense of what “feels right” has been informed by insights from others, particularly other feminists, my disregard for universally normative feminist standards should not be mistaken for unmitigated relativism about the potential role of pornography as a source of sexual or erotic empowerment. For the sake of comparison, consider, for example, that despite the widespread agreement among feminists that sexual harassment of women by men is a real and pervasive problem, particular feminists would disagree about what does and does not “feel right,” and hence what does and does not constitute sexual harassment, in our day-to-day interactions with men. In the case of pornography, as in the case of sexual harassment, what “feels right to me” functions, not as the defining criterion, but as an entering wedge into an analysis that is simultaneously reflective of and relevant to our lived experiences.

A subtle but significant distinction can be drawn between what “feels right” in the context of pornography and what “feels right” in real life. Consider the possibility that the label “pornography” accurately applies only to sexually explicit material that strikes us, for lack of a better term, as “naughty.” This suggestion is captured quite effectively in the following passage from the futuristic fiction of Stanislaw Lem:

For pornography is not directly obscene: it excites only as long as there is a struggle within the viewer between lust and the angel of culture. When the devils carry off the angel; when, as a result of general tolerance, the weakness of sexual prohibitions – their complete helplessness – is laid bare; when prohibitions are laid on the rubbish heap, then how quickly pornography betrays its innocent (which here means ineffective) character, for it is a false promise of carnal bliss, an augury of something which does not in fact come true. It is the forbidden fruit, so there is as much temptation in it as there is power in the prohibition.
¹¹

Given this assessment, it comes as no surprise that we frequently are disinclined to participate in various activities that nevertheless “feel right” as pornography. This distinction is of critical importance. Pornography promises to promote the power of the erotic only insofar as it permits women to explore our most private fantasies without thereby committing or consenting to enact those fantasies. As Amber Hollibaugh notes, the prohibition on sexual fantasy is so powerful that many women have explored only a limited, and predominantly masculine, range of sexual possibilities.
¹²

Feminist Porn

Insight into the range of what some women deem “naughty” in a way that “feels right” can be obtained through an examination of the emerging designation of “feminist porn.” Even a cursory tour through this category will reveal intersections, first of all, between feminist porn and lesbian porn and, second of all, between feminist porn and couples porn. Although the connection between lesbian porn and feminist porn invites a discussion of why representations of lesbian sexuality, or at least some such representations, “feel right” from a feminist perspective, it would be a mistake to draw a hasty or straightforward equation between feminist and lesbian porn for at least two reasons. First, depictions of lesbian sexuality are readily available outside the fairly narrow domain of feminist porn. Often enough, the mainstream depiction of lesbian sexuality is virtually indistinguishable from the mainstream depiction of women’s heterosexuality. Second, drawing the hasty equation between lesbian sexuality and women’s empowerment, like drawing the hasty equation between heterosexuality and women’s oppression, means dismissing the erotic desires of heterosexual women, bisexual women, and even many queer women – including many feminists.

An alternative to the equation between feminist and lesbian porn can be found in the tendency to use the designations “couples porn” and “feminist porn” interchangeably. For example, Candida Royalle, who was motivated to create Femme Productions because she “wanted to make films that say we all have a right to our own pleasure, and that women, especially, have a right to our own pleasure,”
¹³
describes her films as pornography for couples to watch together. I have already rejected the equation between lesbian sexuality and feminism, thus acknowledging the possibility of particular expressions of heterosexuality, including pornographic expressions, that participate in the power of the erotic. Because I also acknowledge the possibility of pornographic expressions of lesbian sexuality that participate in the power of the erotic, and because the content of couples porn seems geared primarily, if not exclusively, to heterosexual couples, I am as reluctant to equate feminist porn with couples porn as I am to equate it with lesbian porn. Moreover, the characterization of feminist porn as porn for couples limits women’s sexuality by suggesting, albeit subtly, that women would not, or perhaps should not, have use for pornography outside of romantic relationships with men. In addition, either the equation between feminist porn and couples porn implies that a given example of pornography – be it a snuff film or one of Candida Royalle’s films – is empowering when viewed by a heterosexual couple and disempowering when viewed by an individual or a larger group, or it implies that pornography should be regarded as feminist, not in consideration of its content or style, but in consideration of its intended manner of use.