Questions of Pornography

...The findingsofthel970 Commission he calls "a definitive statement of utter confusion," while the 1986 report was even worse, "an unbelievably fatuous document...

...So broadly written are WAP'S bills—imposing penalities, for example, on material showing women "in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility or display"—that it is difficult to see how any judge could do otherwise...

...Straight forward erotica such as nude photos and representations of lovemaking, they note, does not appear to induce aggression against or heighten callousness toward women...

...What does make the book interesting, however, is the care the authors take in drawing distinctions...

...They have tried to shift the dispute from morality to civil rights, arguing that pornography reinforces women's traditional secondary status by dehumanizing them...

...In the early 1980s WAP and its sympathizers were proposing nondiscrimination legislation and meeting with positive responses in a few Midwestern cities, where their most enthusiastic allies (such is politics) have been anti-feminist conservatives...

...ridicule from those who eat raw fish and frequent movies with subtitles...

...Similarly, Donnerstein, Linz and Penrod declare: "It is quite appropriate to generalize from the results of a laboratory experiment on aggression to real-world aggression if we can be sure that persons inside and outside the laboratory assign the same meaning to events around them...

...Their responses do not inspire inordinate confidence...

...Nonsense...

...Pornography" derives from the Greek pornographos, "writing about prostitutes...

...Forster observed about democracy, free speech deserves two cheers, not three...

...A century of legal wrangling has brought us no closer to a coherent definition, in his view, because the effort was futile to begin with...

...They do not urge the banning of anything...

...Only violent pornography has these effects...

...They advise more education through public service announcements and other such efforts—an unexceptional idea, certainly, if not bland to the point of meaninglessness...

...The 19th century's "historical amnesia," Kendrick states, allowed it to borrow the word for its own awakened concern with obscenity, and since that time the history of pornography has consisted of "a long, often painful process of winnowing out," differentiating the erotic from the obscene, the scientific from the prurient, art from trash...

...It was twice vetoed by Mayor Donald Fraser...

...Pursuing the logic of his position, Kendrick is not disturbed by the prospect of unrestricted speech because he believes words and pictures have no genuine impact on people's lives and habits...

...The most well-documented finding in the social science literature is that all sexually violent material in our society, whether sexually explicit or not, tends to promote aggression against women...

...Are children to be treated no differently from adults...

...Stepping stones along this path have included the trial of Madame Bovary, the dismissal of charges against Margaret Sanger for disseminating birth control information, and the famous 1933 decision by Judge John M. Woolsey in the Ulysses case...

...In this it has certainly succeeded...

...Hucksters and demagogues running rampant through the marketplace of ideas can cause considerable damage...

...To the complaint that most of the research has been performed with a small section of the population, primarily male college students between the ages of 18-22, they reply that no age group is more susceptible to committing violent crime...

...The question is why anyone should assume a college student in a carefully controlled laboratory situation would "assign the same meaning to events" as the potential rapist lurking in a dark alley...

...Donnerstein, Linz and Penrod do not urge the banning of sexual violence in the media...

...They may be overzealous in their reliance on behavioral research, but they are the picture of caution when it comes to offering policy recommendations...

...Walter Kendrick, a professor of English and senior editor at the Village Voice, has had enough of the entire debate...

...urbanized, literacy spread, novels increased in popularity, Victorian morality took hold, and writers began challenging accepted standards of behavior...

...A similar measure enacted by the Indianapolis City Council in 1984 was declared unconstitutional in Federal court...

...An absolutist in his support of free speech—"no censorship of any kind, any time, anywhere"—he has written The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (Viking, 28 8 pp., $ 18.95) to teach the past to anyone tempted by the Attorney General or Women Against Pornography to repeat it...

...Indeed, they are somewhat defensive, attempting to pre-empt criticism by answering some of the more commonly voiced objections in their opening chapter...

...Others will not be happy with the way the three authors arrived at these conclusions...

...The latest exhibit in an argument that seems much older than it actually is, the Final Report of the 1986 Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, called for tighter controls and met with a predictable response: praise from those who still have words like "drat," "heck" and "darn" in their vocabularies...

...The claim by critics that most laboratory findings are applicable only to a narrow segment of the population is problematic only if we wish to generalize the research findings on violent pornography to persons outside the age range of the typical subject used in these experiments...

...Given that the 1970 Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, the previous government body to look into the question, recommended an easing of censorship, the Reagan Administration's primary objective may have been to renew the quarrel by evening the terms of the battle...

...It arose as Europe and the U.S...

...The term was first associated not with obscenity per se but with two highly esoteric fields of inquiry, the study of Pompeii's erotic art and the investigation of modern prostitution...

...Now each side possesses a weighty official document to lob into the trenches of the other...

...Age is only one factor in an equation that includes economic status, education, ethnicity, family composition, experience with violence, and so forth...

...They maintain that violent pornography increases aggressive tendencies and reduces sympathy toward victims...

...It also suggests a bushy-tailed cheeriness about human nature that is rather hard to swallow...

...And while aspiring censors of violence would face the same possibly irresolvable problem of distinguishing art from trash that is the subject of The Secret Museum, it would surely be satisfying to see them barking up the right tree for a change...

...Agreed...

...The burden is on the researchers to demonstrate how the reactions of a white male University of Wisconsin undergraduate to a rape scene have any predictive value with regard to an unemployed 18-year-old from a broken home in the South Bronx...

...Although The Secret Museum is a readable and instructive survey, it leaves one wanting more answers than Kendrick has provided, especially concerning his commitment to total free speech...

...This is a wildly extreme stance (Kendrick concedes that it compels us "to reexamine the very bases of our entire religious, educational and political systems"), contrary to common sense and unlikely to win much attention outside the editorial offices of the Village Voice...

...Free speech absolutists like Kendrick will not be happy with the conclusions of Edward Donnerstein, Daniel Linz and Steven Penrod in The Question of Pornography: Research Findings and Policy Implications (Free Press, 267 pp., $24.95...

...The script never changes, only the actors, mouthing the same old lines about freedom of speech, corruptionof theyoung, the public good, individual choice, and the like...

...Violence, not sex, should be the focus of our concern, not simply to prevent rape and insensitivity to victims, I would say, but also to discourage the might-makes-right mentality fostered by so many muscle-bound movies today...

...More significantly, experiments suggest it is the violence and not the sex that is the key component: Sadistic rapists, itseems, are drawn more to the covers of crime magazines than to Playboy centerfolds...

...As of now, the civil rights angle is a nonstarter, though WAP is still out there trying...

...As experimental psychologists, they seek to draw generalizations about human behavior from studies conducted in laboratories...

...The public, we unfortunately know, does not inevitably choose truth over lies, or virtue over vice...

...Yet the thing itself, says Kendrick, continues to elude us...

...Yet The Question of Pornography does indicate a useful direction...

...Granted, the roof would not fall in if American TV began showing pubic hair (as European television has been doing for y ears), y et what about a steady diet of Rambolike violence, or nightly commentaries explaining why blacks are inferior and Jewish money rules the world...

...This is the kind of social science that can give laymen screaming fits...

...The skeptic and the pessimist, recognizing this fact, support free speech with reservation because the alternatives seem much worse, and will consider the insouciant tone of The Secret Museum particularly inappropriate...

...Donnerstein, Linz and Penrod acknowledge shortcomings in their methodology...

...By the 1960s, "art" and "science" had won complete license to say and depict anything at all, and the notion of pornography had been reduced, " like some fleshy fruit with an indigestible stone at its heart,' to the "hard core...

...The one attempt at a new wrinkle has come from a number of feminists, banded together since 1976 in Women Against Pornography (WAP...

...As E.M...

...If the twisted history of 'pornography' shows nothing else, it shows forgetfulness of history is the chief weapon in the armory of those who would forbid us to see and know.' Our concept of pornography did not even exist in the 18th century...

...In December 1983 and again a few months later, the Minneapolis City Council narrowly passed a WAPinspired amendment to its civil rights ordinance...