What Future for Social Policy?: Not Pornography!
Rosen, Ruth
For more than four decades, the cold war chilled political debate about what women and American families need for their well-being. The family was sacrificed to cold war hysteria and...
...Wife beating, arranged marriages, genital mutilation, dowry deaths, and other "local customs" must now be regarded as violations of human rights...
...The problem with the campaign against pornography is that its sensational nature obscures women's more urgent needs for economic equality and protection from (actual, not literary or cinematic) violence...
...But sexual and domestic violence and pornography are not the same thing...
...American women glue together the nation's fragile families and communities...
...In her recent book Only Words, MacKin non goes even further, arguing that pornography is not merely speech with certain known effects, but is itself a hostile act that must be banned as a violation of women's civil rights...
...To begin, we need: • Quality child care for working parents...
...The truth is that so-called "women's issues" really address human concerns—the well-being of men and children as well...
...Yes, it does, though in truth I worry more about the images of women that assault us daily through popular and commercial culture than about pornographic representations...
...How many women would identify pornography as the source of their misery...
...In 1992, MacKinnon's arguments or arguments like hers led the Canadian Supreme Court to permit censorship of pornography whenever it portrays "women as a class as objects for sexual exploitation...
...Americans are obsessed with sex, and often with sex of a debased, misogynistic sort...
...It's not...
...I worry that no one sees pictures of ordinary women—competent workers and loving partners...
...If feminists are to reach a new generation, they must address concretely the precarious lives of contemporary women—at home and in the workplace...
...According to the U.S...
...Feminists have clashed over pornography ever since the 1970s...
...We need a legislative program that will support American families and protect women's rights...
...The situation in Canada is a case in point...
...And the American welfare state plays patriarchal father to its welfare mothers, treating them as undeserving inferiors...
...Some have closed their eyes, held their noses, committed to the principle of free speech...
...Partly as a result of high unemployment and a "downsizing" economy, more women slip into poverty each year...
...When the country ensures the welfare of its women—whether they are patients or doctors, professionals or domestic workers, homemakers or the homeless, agricultural workers or computer assemblers, suburban matrons or welfare mothers—it addresses the needs of all its citizens...
...In some Scandinavian countries, welfare is provided to all citizens, not only mothers, who require support...
...Without paid family leave, many working mothers must choose between economic survival and the well-being of their babies...
...and • Federally mandated comparable worth programs in both the private and public sectors...
...The resolution included a commitment to eliminate violence against women in public and private life...
...MacKinnon and her followers have played a decisive role in turning the feminist movement away from women's most urgent problems...
...Go to a poor neighborhood polluted by toxic waste and ask the mothers there if pornography is what most threatens the health of their families...
...What then should be the core of a new domestic feminist agenda in the wake of the cold war and the abortion wars...
...We're under attack and fighting back" became the slogan of the movement...
...Consider instead what does affect women's daily lives...
...So it is not surprising that many American feminists have focused on pornography...
...To judge from the media, however, you would think that pornography is the greatest obstacle facing American women today...
...Ask a battered wife...
...SUMMER • 1994 • 345...
...Protection of reproductive choice, including public funding of abortion and contraception and the availability of RU486...
...I worry about young men who learn on the street and from rap music, not from pornography, that it's cool to hit their women...
...True, pornography reinforces degraded images of women...
...it is especially dangerous for groups committed to radical social change...
...In May 1992, over four hundred women from across the country gathered in Oakland, California, at the National Survival Summit/Poor Women's Convention...
...In Spring 1993, at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, feminists fought for and won a resolution that "the human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral, and individual part of universal human rights...
...Serious public education about the difference between consensual sexual relations and the abuse of power that constitutes harassment and "date rape...
...Without a drastic change in the terms of the social contract, women can't walk the streets or relax at home without fearing sexual or domestic violence...
...Economic justice, for these women, is the highest priority...
...We need to extend [the program] to the national level...
...Chipping away at the First Amendment, moreover, is never a good idea...
...Ask a single mother raising her children on the minimum wage if pornography is her greatest problem...
...Now that the cold war is over and the abortion wars have subsided, we are entitled to an intellectual dividend...
...Uninformed and confused customs officials have also seized books written SUMMER • 1994 • 343 Pornography by Oscar Wilde, Audre Lorde, Marguerite Duras, and Jean Genet...
...The emergence of a new women's movement," says Ethel Long-Scott, WEAP's executive director, "led by poor women, represents the beginning of an effort to bring new electoral leadership to the county...
...MacKinnon's argument that sexual violence violates women's civil rights is certainly right...
...Real obscenity, it seems to me, is a hungry child, a hopeless teenager, a homeless family, a battered wife, or the permanently unemployed victim of capital flight...
...Even the National Organization for Women (NOW), under the leadership of Patricia Ireland, has adopted a resolution defining poverty as a feminist issue...
...Her argument is seductively clever: if pornography is a hostile act, then protecting women from violence takes precedence over any defense of smut as free speech...
...Rape is a terrorist act that reinforces women's inequality...
...For her, words are literally the same as acts...
...Poverty and violence, not pornography, are the pressing feminist issues of the 1990s...
...Federal action against environmental policies that pollute the communities of the poor and minorities...
...Watching or reading pornography is not raping or beating women...
...Nor are they the worst of obscenities...
...Visit an illegal sweatshop and ask immigrant women if pornography is the cause of their degraded existence...
...like sticks and stones, they break your bones...
...Domestic violence, too, in my view, is an act of terrorism against women...
...A higher minimum wage...
...Bans against handguns and assault weapons...
...Family-friendly work policies that honor women's childbearing and parents' childrearing responsibilities...
...This is a struggle about survival, and as in the decade-old Movement for Environmental Justice, it is poor women who have assumed the leadership of relatively new grass-roots organizations...
...In Oakland, again, the Women's Economic Action Project (WEAP), an advocacy and lobbying group, trains low-income women to fight for economic and social reform...
...Nonpunitive welfare reform that offers government training, educational support, and jobs to any citizen in need, not just welfare mothers...
...Others, like MacKinnon, have argued that since pornography actually causes sexual violence against women—a claim hotly contested by many social scientists—it should be banned...
...For more than four decades, the cold war chilled political debate about what women and American families need for their well-being...
...Not surprisingly, censors first targeted gay and lesbian bookstores...
...Censorship, the historical record reveals, is more likely to be used to silence leftists and feminists than pornographers who profit from the sale of sexual fantasies...
...Without accessible quality child care, women can't work—or get off welfare...
...Ask a mother who daily shields her children from stray bullets in the inner city...
...Without an adequate minimum wage, women can't feed their families...
...Paid family leave to care for new or adopted infants and elderly parents...
...I worry about the cumulative impact of watching women depicted as idiotic bimbos or castrating careerists...
...Compared to this work, the anti-pornography crusade just doesn't measure up...
...I worry about the women who see the same corrupting images and, if they can afford it, run to a cosmetic surgeon in search of an unreachable ideal of ageless beauty...
...census, 63.2 percent of those living below the poverty line are women...
...Without economic equality, women can't leave violent husbands...
...In most of Northern Europe, paid parental leave, child care, and health care are supported by the state...
...Nonetheless, neither popular culture nor pornography are crimes...
...Every day, more men are exposed to degrading images of women on network television or in Hollywood films than in pornography...
...The family was sacrificed to cold war hysteria and military over-investment...
...In contrast, Americans flounder about in search of private or market solutions to what should be viewed as common social concerns...
...Feminism will cease to be marginal, not when women adopt 344 • DISSENT Pornography MacKinnon's antipornography platform, but when they recognize that housing discrimination and toxic pollution are also "women's issues...
...Today, every industrialized democracy—with the exception of the United States and South Africa— has extensive national policies designed to protect the family...
...National health programs and child care looked too much like "what they did in the communist bloc...
...The list could go on...
...But if pornography is, as many feminist scholars and activists contend, and as I believe, a symptom rather than a cause of American society's misogyny, then MacKinnon's effort to pit free speech against women's equality creates a bogus choice...
...The greatest indecency anywhere on the planet is not pornography but poverty in the midst of plenty...
...While the media focus on pornography, the cutting edge of feminist activism has been taken over by grass-roots women in poor communities and by global activists who are reformulating women's rights as human rights...
...And it is these women who are redefining quality food, jobs, education, and safety as feminist issues...
...Someone should explain this to Catharine MacKinnon, the charismatic feminist legal scholar who has waged a passionate campaign against pornography in the United States...
...Delegates from across the globe joined together to challenge the cultural relativism that reinforces patriarchal domination of women...
...Then the abortion wars of the 1980s channeled feminists' energy and resources into fighting "pro-life" attacks on women's reproductive rights...
...At long last, old preoccupations can be replaced by a practical focus on urgent social and economic needs...
...Reinventing Feminism In fact, the women's movement is reinventing itself...
...While grass-roots activists redefine poverty as a feminist issue, global activists are reformulating women's rights...
...The time is ripe to forge a new feminist agenda that can cross class and race lines and have some impact on the lives of ordinary women and their families...
...Expanded judicial and educational programs that redefine domestic violence as terrorism against women...
...Without a ban on guns and assault weapons, women can't protect their children...
...MacKinnonites might ask: Doesn't pornography bother you at all...
...it is a diversion...
...I worry about a culture that glamorizes contempt for women...
Vol. 41 • July 1994 • No. 3
