Hegel & pornography

...Though the Minneapolis measure was apiece of legal extremism, tamer and constitutionally more defensible anti-pornography acts will no doubt emerge in the months to come...

...The Minneapolis act, though eventually — and wisely — vetoed by the mayor on the grounds that it was a constitutionally impermissible infringement on free expression, was hailed by many feminists, and has led to the introduction of further anti-pornography legislation elsewhere in the nation...

...Those who opposed it were bluenoses, religious fanatics, and/or crypto-fascists bent on laying mines under the First Amendment...

...On the other hand, no one, not even the most dialectically minded Marxist, has outdone feminists in insisting that everything in the social world is connected with everything else...

...It is wrong instead, we are told, because it objectifies and dehumanizes women, representing them as mere sex objects, demeaned, humiliated, and even brutalized...

...back to the vast machinery of oppression — so vast that it's difficult to see up close...

...Hence they have insisted on the rights of abortion, of easy divorce, of entering sexual relationships as they see fit, etc...

...Pornography, however, is not wrong for the puritanical reasons that used to be given, e.g., that it stimulates "prurient" or "impure" interests...

...Great stress is laid on the distinction between pornography and erotica...

...But in recent years the women's movement has had sober second thoughts about pornography, concluding that women's disgust with it may signify not so much an archaic prejudice as an upto-date insight...

...But pornography is wicked because it is both a sign and an instrument of the social subordination of women to men, a kind of unholy sacrament...

...The latter, say the propounders of the distinction, is O.K., because it serves to arouse and explore a variety of legitimate sexual interests, compatible with social equality between the sexes...

...Many feminists, it was true, in their capacity as private individuals, found themselves revolted by pornography...

...Given this rule, "The Rape of the Lock," suitably construed, might, I suppose, provide a justification for discussing the split currently opening up in the feminist community in the United States over the explosive issue of women, pornography, and the law...

...Give any historical movement enough time to evolve the implications of its underlying idea, says Hegel, and that idea will reveal inner contradictions, splitting the movement into two or more mutually hostile sections...

...On the one hand, feminists have been highly libertarian and individualistic...

...But another sector of the feminist community is up in arms against this sort of thing, denouncing it as contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment...

...Thus your true feminist, snuffing male chauvinism on every tainted breeze, can trace the smallest movements (the wrong genderspecific noun or pronoun, the little girl's doll, the little boy's gun, etc...

...But they recognized that reaction for what it was: at best, a matter of personal taste...

...In other words, egalitarian dirty pictures are just fine, but patriarchal dirty pictures have to go...

...Erotica, si...

...In other words, an antipornography crusade will produce precisely the result the crusaders wish to eradicate...

...This anti-pornography earthquake reveals a hitherto concealed San Andreas Fault separating two very different kinds of philosophical foundations which underlie American feminism...

...at worst, an unfortunate residuum from a pre-liberation upbringing...

...Either there is a sphere of absolute privacy — and then my tastes in pornography, no matter how demeaning to women, are nobody's business but my own...

...While not carrying a brief for pornography as such, they argue that in practice — especially in legal practice — it is often difficult to draw a line of distinction between pornography and erotica...

...In Minneapolis last year the city council passed an anti-pornography ordinance, drafted by lawyer Catherine A. MacKinnon and largely inspired by the work of Andrea Dworkin, whose book, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, has done much to bring about the new feminist attitude on the subject...

...Time was, in the heyday of the sexual revolution (that is, before herpes, AIDS, and Ronald Reagan), when pornography was good clean fun (or at all events, good / November 1985: 599 dirty fun), a lighthearted badge of liberation and advanced thought...

...They have vigorously rejected the idea that women must abide by rules (other than rules necessary for public order) or remain in statuses to which they don't freely give consent...

...DAVID R. CARUN, JR...

...But my masculine intuition tells me I'd better stick with the ponderous German on this one...

...Commonweal: 600...

...HEGEL & PORNOGRAPHY THE LIMITS OF PERSONAL TASTE ONE OF MY great rules in life is that if neither Hegel nor Alexander Pope had anything to say about it, then the thing (whatever it may be) is probably not worth talking about...

...Pass such laws, they argue, and the laws will be used to repress erotica, which will lead in turn to a repression of female sexuality, which in its turn will reinforce the social subordination of women...

...Pornography, no...

...Departing from the customary approach, which makes obscenity (a sloppy legal category, says the feminist analysis, since it embraces both pornography and erotica) a criminal offense, the Minneapolis act makes pornography a cause for civil action by a wide range of offended private parties — including virtually any woman who chooses to take offense at a particular representation...

...Worse still, it portrays them as collaborating in their own sexual degradation, as though abasement were their secret heart's desire...

...The bottom line of this theory is that there is no sexist action or expression that qualifies as essentially private and therefore not guilty...

...Obviously you can't have it both ways (though in fact, and in defiance of good logic, feminists have had it both ways until now, preaching radical individualism and total connectedness at the same time...

...or there is no such sphere — and then the law, in an attempt to protect the dignity and good name of one half the human race, has, at least in principle, the right to interfere with trade in pornography...

...This theory's bottom line is that there exists, and by right ought to exist, a sphere of absolute individual privacy, where what I choose to do is nobody's business but my own...

...The feminist battle against pornography, I suspect, may be bringing the American women's movement to such a Hegelian parting of the ways...