Girls just wanna have fun. About 15 of them are standing on the stage of the University of Chicago Law School auditorium, gleefully shredding pages from Madonna’s best-selling book, “Sex,” into clouds of confetti.
Rip, rip, rip go the famous bee-stung lips, the signature beauty mark, the expertly arched eyebrows, and the much-photographed, personally trained, voluptuous physique that a makeup artist reportedly coated in Chanel foundation for each day’s shoot. Rip, rip, rip go each of Madonna’s fantasy lovers-male, female, animal, vegetable, whatever.
The women, who’ve come from all over the country to attend an anti-pornography conference, are egged on by Nikki Craft of Rancho Cordova, Calif. Craft said she has had 49 arrests for what she calls “creative direct actions against institutions that oppress women,” and recently tried to disrupt an ACLU fundraising dinner. She calls Madonna’s book “the nastiest mainstream stuff that I’ve seen in a long time.”
Craft is part of a grass-roots feminist movement that has been battling with little success for at least 15 years to do away with pornography-or at least convince the public that it is a serious crime against women, as they have with sexual harassment and rape.
They see it as the last frontier, the ultimate obstacle to change, encapsulating images of male violence and dominance that are beamed throughout society.
“This is the most important feminist issue because it has everything to do about how we get sex education in this society,” says Laura J. Lederer, whose 1980 anthology, “Take Back the Night,” has been the bible of the feminist anti-pornography movement.
Compared with the struggle for abortion rights, pornography has been on the back burner. But that may be changing. More than 1,000 people attended the recent conference, held at the U. of C. but independently funded and organized. It brought together law professors, social science researchers, and activists in the area of pornography, domestic violence, rape and prostitution.
Unlike a lot of academic symposiums, the point was not to debate the need for regulation but to figure out ways to do it legally. One of those who came to play what might have been called “Honey, I Shrunk the 1st Amendment” was Catherine MacKinnon, one of the founders of feminist legal theory, who devised a scheme with writer Andrea Dworkin to treat pornography as a civil rights violation. After unsuccessful attempts to have it enacted in Minneapolis, their ordinance was adopted by Indianapolis, then overturned by a federal court of appeals in 1985.
Another participant was a University of Colorado law professor, Richard Delgado, author of the University of Wisconsin’s controversial hate speech code, which a federal District Court ruled unconstitutional.
Finding connections between hate speech and pornography is a new initiative of the anti-pornography movement, says Lederer, one of the conference’s organizers and now a second-year law student at De Paul University. An early organizing effort was a 1978 “Take Back the Night” march in which 5,000 women held a nocturnal vigil in San Francisco.
“Up to then you had conservatives saying, `Sex is bad,’ and liberals saying, `Sex is good, so anything goes,’ ” she says. “Our message was that sex may be good, but pornography is definitely not good for women and children.”
In those days, a popular slogan was “Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice,” says Amy Elman, an assistant professor of political science at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. “Now, we have a much greater understanding of pornography as an industry and an institution. We believe that it’s not theoretical, that pornography is pictures of prostitution.” Taking it one step further is Margaret Baldwin, a law professor at Florida State University: “I used to see pictures. Now I only see evidence.”
Similarly, many women said the conference made them look-some for the first time-at the effect pornography had had on their lives, Lederer says. At times, the gathering took on the tone of a revival meeting, with women stepping up to the mike to testify.
“It attempted to work on three levels-as a pep rally, encounter group and intellectual exchange,” says Northwestern University law professor Gary Lawson, a political conservative who came at the urging of his sister, a feminist literature professor.
“It changed my view of pornography, but I’m not sure yet how much,” says Deanne Wilcox, a second-year student at the University of Chicago Law School. “I’ve started to see it less as a question of speech and more as a question of action, of documentation of a process of exploitation. It’s sort of like sausage. When you think about how it’s made, you don’t want to consume it.”
One woman, who asked not to be identified, said the conference stirred memories of incest and other abuse she endured while growing up. “It made me understand why my father could live with himself. Pornography is about power and control. My father refused to believe he had done anything wrong, because he was the king of his castle.”
A new look at free speech
A distressed Jane Whicher, staff attorney at the Chicago chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said she was “shocked at the eagerness with which people seem willing to forfeit precious 1st Amendment rights. There also seemed to be ignorance of the historical uses of censorship to silence women.”
Others on the Left have seen the 1st Amendment as an insurmountable barrier to any regulation. “People who are friends to us on other issues have not been with us on this one,” Lederer muses.
“This is not a 1st Amendment issue,” an obviously exasperated MacKinnon told the conference audience. “It makes me feel dumb to have to keep saying it. Pornography is not speech, it’s an aid to masturbation.”
“Until MacKinnon came along, the 1st Amendment was a trump to any discussion of regulating pornography,” says Ronald Collins, who teaches law at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “What she did was bring something new to the table.”
Arguing that pornography makes women second-class citizens, MacKinnon maintained that the need for free expression ought to be balanced by the 14th Amendment interest in equal treatment under the law.
MacKinnon and a group of leftist legal scholars known as the “Critical Race Theorists” also attacked traditional notions of the 1st Amendment. They contend that there is no such thing as free speech: Racial epithets and pornography flourish at the cost of intimidating minorities and women into silence. If libel, sexual harassment, criminal threats and other words can be considered outside 1st Amendment protection, why not this? they asked.
MacKinnon’s argument for balancing competing interests fared better with Canada’s Supreme Court, which in 1992 agreed to allow restrictions on violent and degrading pornography, while leaving the category of “erotica” untouched. “But one of the first things they did under the act was raid a lesbian and gay bookstore,” notes Nadine Strossen, president of the ACLU.
Attempts at regulation are “classic viewpoint discrimination,” says the ACLU’s Whicher. “Pornography is in the eye of the beholder. If I like it, it’s erotica. If you like it, it’s pornography.”
What research says
Victim compensation laws are no more likely to pass constitutional muster than outright prohibitions, says Strossen, whose organization came out against the proposed federal Pornography Victim’s Compensation Act of 1992, which never made it to a vote in Congress. “It’s a specious distinction. Everyone knows the chilling effect of having to defend a lawsuit.”
While Illinois passed a law of this type in 1990, thus far no suits have been filed, says Morrison Torrey, a professor of law at De Paul.
Even if the constitutional problems can be overcome, victims must prove that pornography caused their injury before they can get their day in court. Whicher states emphatically that “there is no scientific proof that looking at images causes certain behavior,” but few researchers will go that far.
“It’s true there’s no one-to-one, linear relationship,” says University of Michigan psychology professor Neil Malamuth, who has done research on the relationship between violent pornography and sexually aggressive behavior. He says that other factors, such as cultural context, also are important. “A naked ankle means something different to one brought up in Saudi Arabia than to someone brought up in a nudist colony.”
Some research suggests that watching pornography may not drive men to rape, but that it will affect how they feel about it. A study Malamuth did in the early 1980s showed that men who viewed violent pornography became more accepting of sexual violence. More recently, Malamuth has been looking at how pornography consumption can be used to identify men at risk of acting in sexually aggressive ways, including rape. It’s not an accurate predictor alone, he says, but can be valuable when combined with other personality traits.
Research during the last decade has divided pornography into three broad categories, says Wendy Stock, a sex therapist and assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M University. They are violent pornography, which frequently involves rape fantasies and accounts for 15 percent of the market; “dehumanizing and degrading” material, which places women in a submissive position and makes up 70 percent of the market; and erotica, which shows partners as equals and accounts for the remaining 15 percent.
Stock says that both violent and so-called dehumanizing pornography has has been associated with an increased callousness toward rape.
She surveyed 125 freshman women during the last two years and found that 20 percent had experienced some sort of sexual pressure or discomfort that was related to pornography.
No research, however, has shown that erotica has any negative effects on behavior, Stock says.
Feminists against regulation
What about feminists who don’t think pornography should be regulated or even discouraged? A group called the Feminists for Free Expression, founded in January 1992, sent a letter to the Senate protesting the proposed federal victim’s compensation legislation. The letter was signed by authors Erica Jong, Adrienne Rich, Susan Isaacs, Nora Ephron, Jamaica Kincade and Betty Friedan, notes Catherine Siemann, a member of the organization’s executive committee.
“We believe that when you begin to suppress certain views when you’re not happy with them, you open the door to suppress all views,” Siemann says. “If the real issue is that men are raping and battering women, then focusing on pornography seems beside the point.”
“I’m sympathetic with the goal of eradicating sexism but not with the means,” Whicher says. Strossen adds that “I think boycotts, demonstrations, leafleting, sidewalk tables and educational conferences are the most appropriate and effective way for them to express their feelings about pornography. The irony is that they are some of the most effective utilizers of the very free speech they are trying to destroy for others.”
Carol Leigh, a San Francisco performance artist who works as a prostitute and who demonstrated against the conference, believes that the anti-pornography movement infringes on the rights of “sex workers” who enjoy their occupation.
That has not been the experience of Patty Norum, who worked for 10 years as a prostitute, stripper and pornography model, and two years ago decided to go straight. Norum, 28, is now working with PRIDE, or From Prostitution to Independence, Dignity and Equality, a private Minneapolis agency that helps prostitutes in transition.
“When you’re in it, you tell yourself you’re in control, but that’s just a defense,” Norum says. “The notion is that you’re somehow empowered by receiving money. How much money do you have to get to make it OK for a stranger to put his hand between your legs?”
“Just because you choose your chains,” MacKinnon says, “doesn’t mean they’re not chains.”
