Scores of feminists, legal scholars and researchers this month called for restrictions on pornography, which they link to sexual violence against women.
In a Chicago conference on pornography and “hate speech,” participants argued that the effects of pornography show up in children as young as 14, and that pornography should not be accorded freedom-of-speech protection under the 1st Amendment.
More than 700 people, including feminist writer Andrea Dworkin and University of Michigan law professor Catharine MacKinnon, gathered at the University of Chicago School of Law for the conference, “Speech, Equality & Pornography: Feminist Legal Perspectives on Pornography and Hate Propaganda.”
“Men use sex to hurt us,” says Dworkin. “Pornographers use every attribute a woman has. They sexualize it, then they find a way to dehumanize it and they sell it. And they sell it to men who get off on it.”
While some in attendance said that 1st Amendment rights would be undermined by restricting pornography, evidence presented at the conference may bolster Dworkin’s assertion that sex leads to violence against women.
James Check of the psychology department at York University in Toronto, Canada, who has researched and written about pornography and sexual aggression, said that people who sell pornography are quick to claim that their customers are “adults only,” which may be true, but the material falls into the hands of minors all too easily.
Check’s research among Toronto teens shows that 90 percent of 14-year-old boys and 60 percent of 14-year-old girls have seen video pornography at least once, and that one-third of the boys but only 2 percent of the girls watch video pornography regularly-at least once a month.
He also said that 29 percent of boys indicated pornography was the most useful source of sex information, including school, parents, teachers and peers.
To find out what children were learning from the pornography, Check devised a questionnaire that asked under what circumstances “is it OK for a boy to hold a girl down and force her to have sexual intercourse.”
Check found that 43 percent of the boys and 16 percent of the girls said that holding a woman down and forcing sexual intercourse is at least “maybe OK if she gets him sexually excited.” Only 35 percent of the boys and 71 percent of the girls said it is “definitely not OK” to do so under those circumstances.
The boys who said it was OK watched pornography regularly and said they got the OK” to do so under those circumstances.
The boys who said it was OK watched pornography regularly and said they got the best sex information from pornographic material, Check said.
To stop what they consider porn-inspired violence against women, Dworkin and MacKinnon drafted an ordinance in the early 1980s that defines pornography as “the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words” and includes instances of women presented as “sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation” or “who experience pleasure in being raped.”
A version of the Dworkin-MacKinnon ordinance was adopted in Indianapolis but later was declared unconstitutional by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in August 1985, a ruling that was affirmed when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case in February 1986.
But several prominent legal scholars attending the conference disagreed with that ruling.
“The regulation of pornography is consistent with the 1st Amendment,” said University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, especially if pornography is defined as combining sex with violence.
“There’s enough evidence to show that pornography is associated with an increase in sexual violence,” he said.
“This is not to say that every man who reads sexually violent materials will commit sex crimes, nor is it to say that sex crimes will be eliminated; but it is to say that pornography is associated with sex crimes.”
Sunstein noted that many kinds of harmful speech, such as perjury, slander and libel, already are regulated under the 1st Amendment.
In the case of pornography, said Diane L. Rosenfeld, executive assistant to Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris and an adjunct professor at De Paul University School of Law, “The basic difference between feminist legal theory and the obscenity standard approach is that feminists want pornography to be recognized in terms of harm toward women, whereas obscenity standards are based on morality.”
But Leanne Katz, the executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, said the Dworkin-MacKinnon ordinance infringes on the 1st Amendment and is tantamount to censorship.
“Many women who identify themselves as feminists are angry at the suggestion that censorship can help them,” said Katz, who attended the conference and charged that feminists with opposing views such as herself were not invited to speak.
“We think it won’t help them. We think it won’t stop violence, and we think that censorship has historically been very bad for women.
“As an oppressed group, women need the strongest possible system of free expression so that we can make our grievances known,” Katz said.
According to Judith Kegan Gardiner, a professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a member of the anti-censorship coalition, “It’s probably true to most feminists that much of what passes for pornography is images that degrade women, but it’s a field that’s so murky that the question of who gets to decide which images are bad for whom is a troubled one.
“Leaving that up to someone who can pass a law that says `we know which images will cause harm’ is something that we find troubling.”
