ART WHERE YOU ARE
Goldbard, Don Adams and Arlene
THE VICTIM SYNDROME troubling turn in feminism BY JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN Consider these five assertions: 1. Violence against women is dramatically on the rise. 2. The rape rate shows a steady...
...Consider, then, the following claims made by Joseph Sobran, the right-wing syndicated columnist: Sobran attacks the new movies which, though not exactly pornographic, are grue-somely and explicitly violent...
...This hysteria is reflected in Robin Morgan's repeated and accepted insistence that pornography is "promulgating rape, mutilation, and even murder as average sexual acts" (emphasis added...
...Human motivation is stripped of complexity and seen either as a desire for reward or as a fear of punishment...
...and goes on to insist that "the nut who hates women" can find legitimacy for his hatred and "for any hasty act he may commit" in such films as Dressed to Kill...
...There is no doubt that the use of human beings for pornographic profit is an offensive instance of the entrepreneurial spirit...
...Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics tell a different story...
...The legitimacy of these concerns is not in dispute...
...hence "much of what passes as normal heterosexual intercourse" is seen as tantamount to rape, and therefore punishable...
...public nuisance statutes to control the display and dissemination of pornography, allowing women to sue for damages if they are, even inadvertently, exposed to pornographic material...
...Even some sophisticated treatments by feminists—an essay by Helen E. Longino, for example—veer off into problematic solutions...
...Needless to say, banning material as obscene under Miller is a cumbersome process that is open to abuse...
...Pornography tends to homogenize our images—to make them crass, public, shameless—and hence to diminish the area of rich and exciting taboo which, to be rich and exciting, must remain taboo...
...But the chief targets of male crime are other males—not women...
...Minimally, feminists must re-think their response to the decline of traditional institutions...
...She concedes that pornography is not simply the representation of "degrading and abusive sexual encounters," but entails "implicit, if not explicit, approval and recommendation of sexual behavior that is immoral, i.e., that physically or psychologically violates the personhood of one of the participants...
...Andrea Dworkin's anti-pornography polemic begins by claiming that "men love death...
...The sexual victimization of males is much more common than most people acknowledge, but it is talked about less, being more of a taboo topic than the victimization of females...
...Blame, however, is not the issue here: Susceptibility to distorted perceptions of oneself and one's "group" is...
...that women are not, in fact, the chief victims of crime...
...The chief difference between adolescent male and female reactions to sexual assault is the deeper despondency and higher suicide rate among young male victims...
...You cannot consistently have it both ways in the matter of what is to count as private, what public, depending on whose ox is being gored...
...But this becomes casuistry when one has previously redefined pornographic material as a form of violence perse...
...What solutions are proffered to the "clear and present danger" anti-pornography activists believe is posed to all women everywhere...
...Appalling as these figures are, they constitute less than 1 per cent of the Crime Index total and about 6 per cent of violent crimes...
...Any man who involves himself must first somehow be absolved of his sexist taint, must exculpate his own rapist and pornographic proclivities and errors...
...WAP's present official position does not embrace censorship...
...At this point, concerns for civil liberties give way altogether and the language of open tyranny takes over...
...I want to state clearly that many feminist concerns about pornography are important and serious: the possible relationship between pornography and violence against women...
...When the Brooke Shields ads for Calvin Klein jeans, tasteless as they may be, are called violent pornography, it becomes easier to understand why films that portray women's physical humiliation or mutilation are called genocide, a Holocaust...
...These tests are notoriously vague but, in their own way, pluralistic in the sense that they recognize no single, uniform standard...
...Robin Yeamans complains bitterly that police will, in the name of free speech, protect Nazis who hold a public rally, but will not lift a finger to help battered women...
...But even if one could achieve consensus on that question (and one cannot even if one adopts Brenda Feigen Fasteau's suggestion that women alone should set community standards of obscenity), the problem of a "cure" remains intractable for a variety of complex reasons, of which the threat to civil liberties is but one...
...Rejecting the so-called "catharsis model" of the relation of pornography to behavior—that is, the fairly simple-minded notion that availability of previously forbidden material serves as a safety-valve, and thus actually deters sex crime—anti-pornography feminists turned to their own simplistic model, a crude environmentalist argument that the individual is totally a social product...
...Before I move to consideration of proposed solutions to the pornography problem, one additional aspect must be addressed...
...No attempt is made to distinguish between brutal rape and the intricacies of male and female sexual intrigue and interplay...
...In a 1980 article in Mother Jones, "The Politics of Porn," Deirdre English quoted one WAP officer as saying, "We were for censorship but there was such an outcry that we dropped it...
...In their essay, "Assessing the Impact of Victimization," Berg and Johnson came up with no compelling explanation of the special susceptibility of women to what they called the "victim orientation...
...In this ideology, politics as force roams everywhere, permeating the social fabric...
...In the latter volume, Phyllis Chesler links pornography to anti-Semitism and racism...
...It is argued that although many men do not engage in bullying or domineering or violent action toward women, they may still harbor fantasies in which they subjugate women, and these fantasies may, one day, cause them to act brutishly...
...But there is persuasive proof that violence against women is not on a precipitous upsurge as compared with other crimes, and Jean Bethke Elshtain is a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton...
...But they did alert us to the complex problem of "victimology," a topic avoided these days by most social commentators for fear they will be denounced for "blaming the victim...
...the degrading reduction of women to objects of humiliation and abuse in much pornography (though WAP does mention children, it rarely refers to the treatment of men as demeaned objects, particularly in the homosexual pornography industry...
...is a massive conspiracy to rationalize" male nature...
...However, most of the militant anti-pornographers seem to favor a "comprehensive national obscenity statute that would prohibit violent pornography"— something that must give pause to anyone who considers the loose way "violent" is defined (as in Brooke Shields ads...
...In its most extreme form this leads Andrea Dworkin to insist that sex between a woman and a man is acceptable so long as his penis is not erect...
...Pornography becomes "that which is violent and/or degrading to women," a definition which immediately blurs the distinction between violent and non-violent sexual material...
...As Sally O'Driscoll pointed out in a recent review in The Village Voice, the new anti-pornographers have a high stake in maintaining a patronizing view of women's passivity: "Women as victims have no complicity in porn" so they "don't clutter up" the "thesis that porn...
...Sally O'Driscoll is right to see in the picture of men as monsters a device for exploiting guilt "not for the purpose of liberating them but to proselytize for their own [the anti-pornographers'] idea of the 'right view of female sexuality.' " Though they must still confront the willing participation of adult women in pornographic films and activities, the anti-pornographers dispose of the problem by stripping these women of choice and regarding them as helpless dupes...
...They push an atomistic vision of the social world: my body, my self, my freedom, my success, my right to abortion on demand...
...A moldering old Victorianism gets dusted off in feminist guise: Women are seen as pawns manipulated by men or victims coerced by them...
...neither does it reject censorship outright...
...By losing all of the complexities of real victimization, it recasts women as helpless prey for male lust...
...There is more...
...There is no doubt that women are afraid: They see themselves as the potential and likely victims of violent assault, particularly rape...
...Each year, there are about thirty-five rapes per 100,000 inhabitants of the United States— an estimated 75,989 in 1979 and 82,088 in 1980...
...For just as all men are seen as closet rapists, all are covert pornographers...
...Rape becomes but an extension of the "normal" male socialization process, not an aberration of it...
...They show little overall change in the rate of reported forcible rapes, as compared with the crime rate in general, from 1973 to 1978...
...The issue, they insist, is violence, not free speech...
...Yet the evidence points to a gap between the real likelihood of victimization and women's perceptions of themselves as victims...
...What is the basis for all of this heavy slogging...
...that accepts as human our sexual fantasies...
...In the annals of sexual fascism, Bat-Ada finds a triumvirate composed of "Hugh Hefner, Bob Guiccione, and Larry Flynt—who are every bit as dangerous as Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, the political fascist triumvirate of World War II...
...Though there are certainly connections in the case of violent sex offenders between their fantasies and their actions, what a democratic society can and must do is to punish the actions, not try to eradicate the fantasies...
...The possibility for some vision of political life as a form of shared, public activity by citizens is lost...
...In a statement that hopelessly conflates public-political speech with intimate incidents of violence, she insists that "the police decision not to protect battered women and to protect Nazis is a political one...
...Consistently, the most victimized group is young men...
...Most of the direct efforts to study cause and effect have been carried out in highly artificial experimental settings relying on debatable techniques...
...Here is a representative sampling of assertions drawn from two important sources: Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, a collection of essays described by Adrienne Rich in an "Afterword" as "a microcosm of American feminism at the beginning of the 1980s," and a symposium on pornography published in the New York University Review of Law and Social Change...
...The anti-pornography campaign reflects, in a sense, the Hobbesian conviction that every aspect of life is riddled with power as both end and means...
...This question goes unanswered as the drumbeat of rhetorical excess thumps ever louder...
...There is no doubt that violent images that invite identification with the perpetrator rather than empathy with the victim must be countered along critical, moral, and aesthetic lines...
...Women, not yet accustomed to free expression of sexual desire, remain more susceptible to guilt and shame...
...We know sex criminals read it, are clearly influenced by it...
...First, and plausibly, they cite the power of the visual image, the ability of images to "get inside us" and influence our daydreams and fantasies...
...Once again, a visible segment of the feminist movement has been shoved into a moralistic fervor that allies it with reactionary forces and sets up women as the sole arbiters of social morality and architects of social decency...
...There may be compelling force in the argument against privacy, but it has implications the anti-pornography spokeswomen refuse to acknowledge...
...They feel totally helpless, they are continually fearful and they often have nightmares...
...Sexuality is eliminated by fiat...
...Currently pornography falls under the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Miller \. California, in which the Court developed a three-part test for obscenity: 1) whether an average person, applying "contemporary community standards," would find the work in question prurient...
...Next, I want to discuss the raging conflict between the organized forces of anti-pornographic feminism and assorted "others," including wary civil libertarians...
...The closer you get to family controls the lower the crime rate seems to be...
...Some three out of fifty-nine rapists, or 5 per cent, said they had been "inspired or motivated to commit rape as a result of something they had seen on TV...
...There has even been talk of unmasking potential rapists by their "fantasies...
...When the focus shifts to pornography it, too, is defined "in terms of power, instead of sex and prurience...
...THE VICTIM SYNDROME troubling turn in feminism BY JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN Consider these five assertions: 1. Violence against women is dramatically on the rise...
...In each instance, an image of the person as an atom cut off from social ties is central...
...private nuisance laws that would permit women to collect for the "mental anguish" pornography causes them, and a case-by-case campaign to have material declared obscene...
...Longino offers a subtle notion of what makes a work pornographic, avoiding the cliches of the anti-pornography movement...
...The theory of human mind and motivation which underlies the causal argument tends toward crude behaviorism...
...And yet, having examined the grave perils in the approach of the militant anti-pornographers, pornography troubles...
...In this sense, all men are barely controlled rapists...
...A Bureau of Justice Statistics bulletin for March 1981 shows that the percentage of households touched by rape from 1975 to 1980 held at two-tenths of 1 per cent...
...The nerve center of this effort is the New York City branch of Women Against Pornography (WAP...
...2) whether the work is a "patently offensive" depiction of sexual conduct specifically proscribed by state law, and 3) whether the work, taken as a whole, "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value...
...My point here is not that human sexuality, in some inevitable way, must take on those forms of expression evident in the most gross examples of sadistic pornography— though surely pornography will always be with us—but that in exploring and criticizing the particular forms pornography takes, and assessing how to respond, we must not eliminate the messy reality of human sexuality, including that of women...
...that moves toward a vision of the social world that would help truly reciprocal human relations to flourish...
...Some have called for a method to "identify" potential rapists so that even before any crime is committed, such persons can be preventively detained...
...Next, they claim that pornography itself is violence against women, whether or not it precipitates actual assaults by particular men against particular women...
...Pornography may well be, in Steiner's words, a "new servitude...
...Hoover's concerns surely involved a priggish desire to control "deviance" fused to a genuine concern about violent crime, and his motivations may differ from those of WAP...
...It is taken for granted that such fears are well founded...
...The evidence is scattered, contradictory, often rather trivial, and problematic...
...For example, habitual television viewers, male and female, believe they have a fifty-fifty chance each week of being victims of a violent crime—an absurd figure...
...most victims of violent crime are males of similar age and race as the perpetrators...
...Strong but resilient family ties are necessary for this purpose...
...The first three of these claims are so widely accepted that hardly anyone challenges them any more...
...Yet, on the best and most recent evidence, each appears to be false...
...Women think of themselves as likely crime victims, and they have assumed a victim ideology that is startlingly out of proportion to the actual threat...
...pornography as a "growth" industry...
...4. Pornography, thinly veiled as an expression of untamed human sexuality, is actually a graphic and horrible expression of an ideology of male dominance...
...It would be tendentious to condemn feminist anti-pornography efforts just because they bear on a keen concern of the political Right...
...The Playboy philosophy is termed "sexual fascism" or "the fascist mentality applied to our sexuality...
...Their proposals vary but include, in the most moderate versions, zoning restrictions to confine the sale or exhibition of pornography to certain areas...
...2. The rape rate shows a steady upward swing...
...Everything else follows: All women are the prey...
...Obviously, rape as a highly charged act that induces generalized fear is a much more serious problem for women...
...Diana E.H...
...We can explore this question by taking a look at the fourth and fifth assertions above and at the attack on pornography currently being mounted by some feminists who charge that it is a conscious, conspiratorial, and direct attempt to keep women in their place through threats of violence...
...What are the assumptions that underlie this struggle, and what are the stakes in the outcome...
...that pornography invades the inner citadels of creativity by substituting a cheap and blunt reality...
...To me, it is like a Jew discussing reasonably Hitler's Mein Kampf, or a black person talking reasonably about some Ku Klux Klan manifesto...
...The cleavage in feminist thinking on pornography can best be accounted for by looking at how anti-pornography activists wish to have it both ways...
...Freda Adler, professor of criminal justice at Rutgers University: "From what we can see so far, those countries with strong social controls, such as religion, family, factory or commune, appear to have lower crime rates...
...The problem is the way some organized feminist anti-pornographers have chosen to respond, and the beliefs which undergird their response...
...She is the author of "Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought" (Princeton University Press, 1981), and editor of "The Family in Political Thought" (University of Massachusetts Press, 1982...
...5. Pornography causes violence against women...
...She finds it difficult to speak "about pornography in a reasonable tone...
...To deal with pornography in a noncoercive way requires a defense of erotic intimacy between men and women that does not, contemptuously and cynically, brush aside the difference between robust hetero-sexuality and brutal rape...
...There is no doubt that such pornography reflects a debased view of all human beings...
...all of life becomes subject to feminist political redefinition, since it is already politically defined anyhow...
...2) pornography is a form of violence against women, punishable as if it were physical violence since it does emotional and psychic damage...
...WAP would concur with the late J. Edgar Hoover's claim that we can no longer wait for hard evidence on the anti-social effects of pornography...
...Rosi Ullendorff, coordinator of the rape crisis program in the department of community medicine at St...
...Their assumptions can be summed up this way: 1) Pornography causes violence against women...
...She says healthy sex requires an end to pornography as "part of an international slave traffic in women that operates as a multinational corporation...
...But this is too simple, too convenient...
...There is no doubt that the particular subjection of women to cruel treatment in violent pornography says something about the dehumanizing forms sexual imagery may take...
...In a statement issued under the aegis of 'Women Against Pornography, Wendy Kaminer indicates that WAP wants to "change the definition of obscenity so that it focuses on violence, not sex...
...fear that wider dissemination and public acceptance of pornography will desensitize individuals to abusive treatment of women...
...Similarly, a WAP spokeswoman claims that pornography "is a powerful agent of socialization that degrades women and conveys the notion that women are appropriate and deserving targets for sexual violence...
...To hope to create a world in which male—and female— fantasies have been sanitized of any content that might contain violent imagery, however fleetingly, is to embrace a moralistic stance that easily turns repressive...
...Juveniles are linked to 23 per cent of violent crimes, with people under eighteen committing 8.2 per cent of rapes though they constitute 14.6 per cent of the population...
...Feminists are not opposed to all forms of explicit sexual expression, she states...
...But the convergence of concern does raise doubts about the feminist claim that pornography is a direct and conscious anti-feminist backlash...
...For abortion on demand (as one example), involving the radical extension of the individualistic view and the right to privacy, is wholly consistent with the promulgation of pornography as every individual's right to see, hear, read what he or she wants, and as the promotion of a view of sex without any ensuing responsibility...
...Susan Brownmiller, in Against Our Will, terms pornography the "undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda" and goes on to assail "the very same liberals" who spoke out against Hitlerian propaganda for justifying the "hatred and contempt for women" found in pornography as "a valid extension of freedom of speech that must be preserved as a constitutional right...
...Certainly sexuality and modes of dominance, for homosexuals too, can be intertwined in various ways...
...There is a contradiction here: The loosening of old restrictions, celebrated by many feminists as an important element in freeing women from the constraints of family and community, has also contributed to what is certainly a pornographic epidemic of sorts...
...Reiterating the belief that "rape, battery, sexual harassment" are on the rise, she concludes that pornography legitimates these crimes...
...I say appears to be because it can plausibly be argued that rape is underreported even in this era of raised consciousness...
...Charlotte Bunch calls America a "pornographic patriarchy...
...In this formulation, men and women are reduced, like B.F...
...Deirdre English correctly observes that this has been one way—at a time, paradoxically, when women have become freer to explore their sexuality—that the responsibility for sexual motivation has once again been removed from their shoulders...
...Robert J. Stoller, in a provocative article, "Pornography and Perversion," argues that normal human development necessarily involves frustration and hostility— it must in order for infants to work up the gumption to separate from their parents...
...If this is so, why wouldn't those who are in the forefront of that backlash (the groups for whom Sobran is a spokesman) support pornography as a way to "keep women in their place...
...It goes downhill from there...
...Brownmiller's Against Our Will is suffused with stereotypes of male lust and female innocence, particularly in her discussion of relations between black males and white females in the Jim Crow South...
...Playboy, remember, is frequently singled out for special attack by anti-pornography activists as the most insidious journal of them all, the chief promoter of "sexual fascism," because, through its so-called soft core, it has softened up the male public for the harder stuff...
...Immersion in images of crime seems to be a contributing factor to the perception that one will be a victim...
...Though anti-pornography feminists may not see a conflict here, there surely is one...
...This leads me back to the deep rift in the anti-pornography ideology...
...I believe George Steiner is correct when he suggests that sadistic pornography robs us of the power of subjective sources of the imagination by eroding and cheapening taboos...
...3) pornography is a weapon in the sex war, part of an overall pattern and strategy for the maintenance of male dominance...
...Vincent's Hospital in New York City, notes that "rape trauma," often seen as a female problem, is "the same for both sexes...
...Indeed, one could say that the wife is often being beaten because of her 'free speech...
...To accept this view makes it difficult to figure out why men ever made laws making rape a crime, or why rapists are ever convicted and sent to prison...
...FBI statistics as well as those available from the U.S...
...No distinction is drawn between personal and political activities, relations, or notions...
...He asks: "Can it be accidental that we read more and more accounts of grisly murders in our newspaper...
...Finally, I want to explore how the feminist commitment to the total liberation of women relates to the commitment to the smashing of pornography...
...The erosion of the distinction between soft-core and hard-core and violent pornography is one of the most troubling aspects of the new anti-pornography campaign, for despite all the disclaimers, it seems to bode ill for distinguishing between the work or a Mailer, a Miller, and a Lawrence (three frequently condemned writers), and a tawdry snuff film...
...Deirdre English, in her Mother Jones article, recognized in feminist insistence that pornography causes male violence an instance of stimulus/response, "the triumph of behaviorist psychology in American liberal thought, particularly among feminists...
...5) pornography is essentially a political problem which demands political remedies, just as rape itself is a political act...
...If Helen Longino is correct when she argues that "once the activity becomes public—i.e., once it involves others—it is no longer protected by the same rights that protect activities in the private sphere," she explicitly erodes the grounds for the 1973 pro-abortion decision in Roe v. Wade...
...Something else is going on here, a hidden issue, the serpent in the Garden of Eden for many leading anti-pornography feminists: heterosexual sexuality itself...
...The feminist language of victimization describes women in passive terms...
...The "fear of crime" syndrome is highest in those two groups, according to William E. Berg and Robert Johnson...
...For anti-porn feminists, the process is blatantly insufficient...
...WAP's flyer, Six Questions About Pornography, "affirms . . . the principle of free speech" but urges that it "must be balanced against another," namely the WAP contention that pornography "constitutes a threat to our physical safety and emotional well being.'" This certainly leaves a wide swath for future inroads into First Amendment guarantees...
...Men especially love murder...
...Nonetheless, current estimates indicate that 20 per cent of sexual abuse cases involve males...
...In the most thoughtful discussions of the topic, anti-pornographers attempt to assuage the fear that control of pornography is a threat to constitutional guarantees by claiming that the issue is violence, not speech...
...But woman's exercise of speech is not regarded as 'free speech,' and it is not protected by the police before injury...
...Though one must suspend judgment on direct causal links between pornography and acts of violence, the lack of convincing proof does not deter the militant anti-pornographers...
...3. Women of all ages are the principal victims of crime, and men are the principal perpetrators...
...Skinner's hapless rats, to the sum total of their responses to external stimuli...
...Yet victimization seems to have a greater impact for females and for the elderly as a set of beliefs tied, in turn, to an entire world-view...
...in fact, pornography is violence against women...
...But what is curious about this particular rendering is the way the woman is turned into a helpless wimp...
...That most of them come from splintered or nonexistent homes and fragmented communities should not surprise us...
...It seems clear, as one wades through the literature of the anti-pornographers, that those already predisposed to see women as victims find in contemporary pornographic excess the perfect proof of their world-view...
...Still, popular perception holds otherwise...
...To unpack the complex themes imbedded in the WAP position, we must consider the arguable assumptions that underlie claims that pornography directly causes violence against women...
...Judith Bat-Ada finds Playboy's support of abortion on demand and its pro-ERA stance wholly manipulative—attempts to steal women's issues...
...pornography as the proclaimed symptom of an anti-feminist backlash...
...Sobran also goes after Playboy and the objectification of female bodies...
...Others call pornography "genocide," a "holocaust...
...The late FBI chief said, "What we do know is that in an overwhelmingly large number of cases sex crime is associated with pornography...
...There is evidence that rapists and sex offenders tend to have low frustration thresholds...
...Even with respect to the crime of rape, the situation is more complex than feminist crusaders against pornography admit...
...In examining these complex and controversial issues, I want to focus first on the impression that women are the principal victims of violent crime...
...The language of anti-pornography feminists often turns out to be the rhetorical equivalent of nuclear war...
...Bat-Ada dismisses the Playboy Foundation's funding of feminist pro-abortion organizations and its pro-ERA efforts as an insidious attempt to gain control of women's issues...
...The convergence of concern should be explained, not merely dismissed with the notion that right-wing anti-pornography is sexually reactionary while feminist anti-pornography efforts are socially progressive...
...This is hardly compelling evidence...
...One cannot further support this rendering of family ties and parental authority, on the one hand (by seeing as inherently authoritarian, for example, the stipulation that parents of young people eighteen or under seeking prescription birth-control devices and drugs from Government-funded clinics must be informed) and on the other hand condemn the consequences (the flight of overstimula-ted youngsters to cities, their subsequent hapless involvement in pornography, prostitution, drugs, and all the rest...
...Their overinflated words, in turn, enhance women's fears that they, too, will be victims or already are...
...The sort of society that could "cope with" pornography and sadism is one they explicitly reject...
...But this hostility, in turn, must be "bound," formed, shaped, surmounted...
...The feminists who campaign against pornography make implicit reference—for they say they oppose outright coercion—to a way of life they have otherwise repudiated, a way of life threaded through and through with ties of communal and social restraint...
...Last fall, an international convocation of criminologists and professors of criminal justice was held under the auspices of the United Nations...
...All males, say the anti-pornographers, have a "proclivity to rape," so all males benefit, somehow, from the rapes committed by others...
...By the same process, rape is defined by Robin Morgan as "any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman out of her own genuine affection and desire," regardless of whether or not there is compulsion on the part of the male...
...These feminists contend, indeed, that pornography is itself a form of psychic, emotional violence against women which, in turn, causes actual physical assaults by power-mad males who "act out" the ideology shared by every member of their sex...
...If, as I have claimed, the available evidence is at odds with popular perception, how great is the gap...
...Yet, as Richard J. Meislin reported in The New York Times in January of this year, "Although rape statistics in the city have remained relatively stable over the past several years, women have become increasingly conscious of their personal safety...
...Then, presumably, the man is shorn of power, is "effeminized," and heterosexual sex takes on a different—and approved— character...
...Feminist anti-pornographers must deal with what they must surely regard as unwelcome evidence— the evidence that suggests that the commercialization of sex and the over-eroticization of children have grown apace with the breakdown of traditional ties of social cohesion, familial and communal...
...What Carol Polsgrove recently termed the "rising hysteria" of feminist discourse points again to the historic link between women's suffrage and feminism on the one hand, and various moral purity movements, including eugenics, anti-smut, and anti-liquor campaigns on the other...
...But it is coupled with a demand for control over what individuals may see, hear, or read...
...This poses the question: Does the feminist anti-pornography movement serve to counter women's fears or to contribute to them...
...The holding in that case promulgated a radically privatized notion of the person that stripped the woman of her social relations in order to guarantee her the right to an abortion...
...Yet the figures on this score are remarkably consistent: Most perpetrators of violent crimes are males...
...Russell, for example, cites a study in Take Back the Night in which prison inmates were asked whether or not their criminal activities had ever been influenced by what they saw on television...
...That is quite different from providing public protection of political speech by dissident groups— including feminists...
...Laura Lederer, editor of Take Back the Night, calls pornography "the ideology of a culture which promotes and condones rape, women battering, and other crimes of violence against women...
...all are somehow assaulted...
...There is no doubt that sadistic pornography invites repudiation, disgust, horror...
...Pornography, then, is verbal or pictorial material which represents or describes sexual behavior that is degrading or abusive to one or more of the participants in such a way as to endorse the degradation...
...they tend to be deeply hostile, and devoid of mutuality, trust, and empathy...
...Men have it, women don't, so most sexual encounters between men and women amount to rape...
...This cannot come about if one first sets up a brutal enemy—the predatory male "other"—as the implacable foe...
...The sobering conclusion would seem to be that we are paying an increasingly heavy price for the breakdown of traditional social forms...
...There can be only one reply: It is not the business of feminist politics to expunge fantasy, nor to make sure all of us go about with decent and clean thoughts in our heads...
...Political remedies boil down to who has power to impose his or her will on others...
...I believe pornography is a major cause of sex violence...
...all are emotionally harmed—even those who never go to porn films or read porn books or associate with men who are porn consumers...
...This liberationistic ideology is celebrated as the freeing of women from the old constraints of patriarchy, norms, sex role stereotypes, all the rest...
...Their general conclusion was summed up by Dr...
...Dbegin with the perception of women as the victims of crime...
...This "victimization hypothesis" leads to the conviction that women are a particular target of all crimes—that they are, numerically and proportionately, this society's main crime victims...
...She does not find her analogy between New York's 42d Street and Nazi death camps extreme, but it is clear that such analogies raise the verbal ante and define pornography as the most urgent of all contemporary feminist concerns...
...The perception of "women as victims" goes beyond a deeply rooted belief that rape is skyrocketing: It holds that women are special targets of crime in general and violent crime in particular...
...They want a society to create virtuous people, but such a society would impose constraints that range far beyond restrictions on pornography, for there are no longer any shared, internalized moral rules, no ties of community, as there once were to make individuals self-policing and communities self-governing in these matters...
...Finally, she finds it necessary to deny women's sexual fantasies—as do many of the contributors to Take Back the Night—if those fantasies do not conform to her standard of what constitutes sexually "healthy" imagery, on the grounds that they are a "man-made iceberg" in women's minds...
...Of course, such protection would require vast expansion of the police power of the state, including stationing of a police officer in every home...
...Proposed solutions to the pornographic upsurge range from slow legal change to moral suasion to outright immediate suppression...
...Consistent overstatement of the problem and underplaying of the repressive potential in suggested solutions characterize much of the literature generated by the anti-pornography crusade...
...This is an arguable way to go about sifting the pornographic from the erotic...
...Judith Bat-Ada, in an interview with Lederer in Take Back the Night, calls Playboy the most dangerous magazine of them all...
...The claims are impossible to prove, despite the assertion by WAP's Wendy Kaminer that pornography is "fascistic, misogynistic propaganda that fosters acts of violence against women...
...But the feminist anti-pornography campaign has gone astray in its analysis of the problem...
...More extreme and blatantly authoritarian solutions include compulsory "reeducation" for sex offenders or likely offenders...
...This fusion, in turn, converts pornography, rape—all sexual issues, in fact—into political problems with political solutions, for by "political" anti-pornography feminists mean "characterized by relations of power, dominance, submission...
...that pornography is not simply a private activity but a public one, a commercial venture, and hence protected neither under the right to privacy nor under the right to free expression...
...But several paragraphs later, she says, "The message of porn is clear: Sex is power," rendering her earlier definition moot by collapsing sex and power into one another...
...Heterosexual sex is reduced to a power play...
...4) pornography is a problem exclusively of, by, and for women, who are cast as unfortunate victims or manipulated dupes...
...Re-enter Playboy and Hugh Hefner's hack philosophy...
Vol. 46 • June 1982 • No. 6
