Whip Me, Beat Me and While You're at it Cancel My NOW Membership
Currie, Art Levine and Kathleen
WHIP ME, BEAT ME AND WHILE YOU'RE AT IT CANCEL MY N.O.W. MEMBERSHIP Feminists war against each other over pornography by Art Levine and Kathleen Currie "T he anti-pornography...
...The prosex group derides the anti-porners as "sex cops" who threaten sexual minorities and free expression...
...What happens if a woman says to a man, `fuck me...
...the anti-porners shouted back...
...Her feminist credentials challenged, Ellen Willis, a Voice writer, furiously demanded of such critics: "Who are you to decide I don't belong in a movement I've helped create...
...In February, FACT published a major broadside aimed at the anti-porners that featured footnoted essays celebrating female sexual expression and opposing censorship, all liberally spiced with photos of leather-bound masochists and lesbian and ,gay sex that seem calculated to drive the antiporners into a rage...
...Leidholdt thundered, "Where do these sadistic fantasies come from...
...The ordinance, which stirred plenty of feminist infighting elsewhere, was struck down last year when the Supreme Court refused to review it...
...More than 20 women then trooped to the podium to call out their differences to the still-riveted crowd...
...Politically correct erotica The zealotry of both the anti-porners and the pro-sexers have made their clashes particularly bruising...
...The crowd applauded eagerly...
...Obscured in all this reasonableness, however, was the alliance of some FACT members and their allies with the kinkier fringes of lesbianism: the sadomasochists and pedophiles...
...The debate is taken so seriously that both sides have taken to picketing each other's meetings, passing resolutions and signing petitions condemning one another, and fighting each other in the courts and at legislative hearings...
...This is dividing a community...
...Amy Elman, a Women Against Pornography coordinator, said, "It shows that men treasure their right to orgasm over the pain and humiliation of women ." Some went even further, openly scorning the First Amendment...
...Do you really think that `tied-up' necessarily belongs there...
...The anti-pornography activists believe their feminist critics front for pimps and pornographers, as well as champion "politically incorrect" sex...
...She says the pro-sexers are being used by men who own publications like The Village Voice...
...In this system, denigration is sexual pleasure...
...I want to rape a woman....I want to be fucked every which way...
...They charged it distorted their political views, smeared individuals' personal lives, and smacked of fiftiesstyle red-baiting...
...Women who claim to enjoy the act of sexual intercourse are labeled "collaborators . " Betty Friedan, and Kate Millett to join as signatories of FACT's amici curiae brief opposing the ordinance...
...There's genuine merit at the core of each side's concerns—the degrading impact of pornography on women on the one hand, and the threat to personal freedom and free expression on the other— but it has been all but swamped by the overblown rhetoric, obsessions, and kooky agendas of both factions...
...In addition to writing books, their activism includes picketing against red-light districts...
...Spurred by the growing acceptance of the antiporn campaign, fueled by the Meese Commission Report on pornography, the Great Sex Wars engage the best and brightest of radical feminists in an intellectuals' version of mud-wrestling...
...To put these [anti-porn] laws on the books is such a diversion away from bread and justice and real empowerment...
...We must look to the culture in which they develop...
...she demanded angrily...
...Our bottom line is that porn goes!' She added, "We're going to win in the long term" To that end, they're planning to introduce a revised version of the original bill...
...They want to ban the sale of "sexist" material only, they claim, not all smut, and favor an ill-defined "erotica" marked by egalitarianism and mutual respect...
...Where are we going here...
...There are other people in this room who do not find it to be subordinating," she said...
...They're advocating the same kind of patriarchal sexuality that flourishes in our culture's mainstream, that is channeled into crimes of sexual violence against women, and that is institutionalized in pornography," their leaflet said...
...The pro-sexers aren't feminists, but sexual liberationists...
...I feel very strongly that simply because I am a sadomasochist, that doesn't mean that I can't be a feminist ." Nevertheless, she once wrote that as a sadist, she enjoys "leathersex, bondage, various forms of erotic torture, flagellation, and verbal humiliation ." Moreover, some of these pro-sex allies, who euphemistically call sex between adults and children "cross-generational" sex, are sympathetic to the North American Man-Boy Love Association and even argue that current age-ofconsent laws are discriminatory and repressive...
...She was greeted by the strongest applause of the day...
...MacKinnon derided Hunter as "speaking for the pornographers" and masquerading as a feminist...
...Why are women lawyers who identify as feminists trying to make sure that women are not going to matter...
...No, it is not worth it...
...Webster was representing the "pro-sex" side of the feminist debate over pornography and politically correct sex...
...NOW's current position reflects much of the anti-porn view: "NOW believes that pornography violates the civil rights of women and children . . . . NOW supports the recommendation that legislatures should consider legislation recognizing civil remedies for harm directly attributable to pornography...
...The anti-porners likened the Supreme Court decision to the Dred Scott ruling upholding slavery...
...Conference workshops focused on such topics as "butchfemme" lesbianism, "politically correct" sex, and "concepts for a radical politic of sex," the last offered by a. lesbian masochist anthropologist...
...The labor movement had its scabs, the slavery movement had its Uncle Toms," she said, "and the women's movement has FACT...
...Typically, she likened them to traitors...
...Most of the audience cheered...
...I couldn't go anywhere else today because finally I was sucked into this debate...
...One woman picked up a book with a crude sketch of a naked woman embracing a teen-age boy...
...They protested to the Barnard administration and leafletted on campus, attacking the conference organizers and speakers for promoting sadomasochism, unorthodox lesbian sex roles, sexual abuse of children, and pornography...
...They have pushed their case before city councils and in the courts—a strategy that has created some strange alliances...
...And 100,000 missing children are taken off the streets for the use of sex and to be photographed...
...Hunter asked, referring to the antiporn ordinance, which prohibited "sexually explicit subordination ." "Is that submission...
...Like the Reagan administration, the antiporners don't confine their efforts to public education...
...She received polite applause...
...Hunter then calmly analyzed the dangers of the anti-porn efforts to feminism...
...In one opening salvo, Pat Califia, co-founder of Samois, a pro-S&M group, denounced the anti-porners as "the new puritans" who were "siding with fascism ." Some feminists don't like the leather-and-whip contingent marching under the women's rights banner, and charge that lesbian S&M is violent and sexist...
...In Indianapolis in 1984, feminist activists drafted a "civil rights" anti-porn ordinance defining pornography as a form of sexual discrimination that "subordinates" women...
...cried the incest victim...
...A 257-page meditation on the subject, Intercourse, condemns coitus and those who practice it, especially women...
...Kinky fringes In reaction to the passage of the Indianapolis ordinance, a. number of feminist academics and activists formed the Feminists Against Censorship Taskforce (FACT...
...But these feminists' views of degradation can be very broad, sometimes including heterosexual intercourse, which has been defined by Women Against Pornography as "intimate imperialism ." This spring, feminist author and antipornography activist Andrea Dworkin published two new books calling for the abolition of not just pornographic displays of intercourse—but of intercourse itself...
...The overflowing crowd gave its rapt attention to an anti-porn statement from Gloria Steinem, read by her co-editor at Ms., Letty Pogrebin...
...What's the difference...
...of Lust, Hot Librarian, 100 Pregnant Misses...
...You're damned right...
...Then she warned, "We are going to be fighting against each other in court over the meaning of sexually explicit subordination, and I suggest this is a disaster...
...In 1983, for instance, 150 pro-sexers signed a petition defending these sexual minorities as "people making tentative forays into new realms of experience...
...They responded with their own petition: "Feminist discussion about sexuality cannot be carried on if one segment of the feminist movement uses McCarthyite tactics to silence other voices:' The confrontations elsewhere have been just as vituperative...
...Beulah Coughenour, an anti-ERA legislator, led the fight, and Phyllis Schlafly endorsed it...
...When it comes to pornography, she says, "what one woman abhors, another enjoys" In April, over 1,000 people attended Women Against Pornography's conference on "The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism," at New York University...
...There was a thunder of approval...
...Hunter paused...
...At one point, a black woman law student and a white incest victim confronted each other...
...Porn safaris Those in the anti-pornography camp contend that pornography is part of an "ideology of cultural sadism" that promotes violence against women, particularly rape, by casting women as sex objects to be degraded...
...The antiporners did try to distance themselves from the New Right by saying they opposed the commission's sex-is-dirty emphasis on stepped-up obscenity prosecutions...
...calling intercourse freedom ." Dworkin's other book, Ice and Fire, is a novel whose only sympathetic male character cannot-produce an erection...
...We're feminist because we're tired of having men tell us how we should feel and be sexual," said one woman, as she defiantly waved a strap-on dildo...
...Prostitutes Collective, it was defeated by one vote...
...They were angered that the ordinance, among other things, allowed women to sue for several types of alleged harm, including the presentation of women as "whores by nature" or in "postures of sexual submission, servility, or display...
...As Gayle Rubin argued in Feminist Studies, "The young should have full rights to have sexual contact with whomever they choose" —presumably a nine-year-old can give informed, uncoerced sexual consent...
...Califia denies that...
...one woman screamed...
...Is it not worth it...
...Is that begging, or is it demanding...
...The referendum lost, but garnered 42 percent of the vote...
...We're not anti-sex," she insisted...
...It went on to give intimate details of the fondness of some of the speakers and their groups for acts ranging from flagellation to dressing up as Nazis during sex...
...shouted the anti-porners in the audience...
...Porn pandemonium This sort of heat is typical of the porn debate...
...But the most rousing address came from Catherine MacKinnon who reiterated her opposition to FACT and the free-porn movement...
...At the 1985 National Women and the Law Conference in New York, for instance, MacKinnon and Hunter pulled no punches before a packed ballroom...
...Women who claim to enjoy that act are labeled "collaborators, more base in their collaboration than other collaborators have ever been: experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority...
...The bitter attacks and counterattacks have not abated—and aren't likely to anytime soon...
...Publications, primarily lesbian, like On Our Backs and Bad Attitude get attacked ." "B000...
...Something cold, mean, and unforgiving is being shoved down my throat by steely-eyed women who transmit a feeling of hysteria ." Portions of the audience that was packed into the room hissed and booed...
...Catherine MacKinnon, co-author of the ordinance, told us bluntly, "The bottom line of the First Amendment is that porn stays...
...This faction has become a key component of the pro-sex coalition...
...A former prostitute joined the argument with the law student...
...The local National Organization for Women chapter opposed it...
...If one iota of the intensity of this debate had gone into outlawing poverty in this society, maybe we'd be getting somewhere," said the law student...
...Last year in Washington D.C., for example, 15 young women and a few male companions were guided on a tour of this nether world by Feminists Against Pornography, one of several such safaris the group conducts each year...
...Marty Langelan, an economist with the federal government, led the group down the capital's 14th Street and into its bookstores...
...Last year NOW endorsed key elements of the Meese Commission report...
...Then, all over the room, the different factions began screaming at one another about porn and rape, bad feminists and lesbian erotica, The Village Voice and Jerry Falwell, their angry words barely distinguishable above the roar...
...Their goal, she says, is to return to the halcyon days of the sixties when "women were available to men at all times for anything...
...Two hundred women showed up at an off-campus speak-out on "politically incorrect" sex hosted by the Lesbian Sex Mafia, a support group for lesbians with unusual sexual tastes...
...If women and minorities are really empowered in our society, you will see a change, you will not see pornography," she continued...
...Now women are telling us...
...They also argued that the whole antiporn campaign promoted a traditional view of women as helpless, and that the anti-porners were allying themselves with the most anti-feminist, conservative forces in the country...
...Why don't women lawyers act as though they give a damn...
...That persuaded such feminist stars as Rita Mae Brown, Two hundred women showed up at an off-campus speak-out on "politically correct sex" hosted by the Lesbian Sex Mafia...
...Many of these anti-porn activists have focused on raising the consciousness of women about the dangers pornography poses to their dignity and safety...
...Hundreds of thousands of people are dying...
...It's an act of mutual pleasuring in a context of respect and consent," she says...
...You give women the support they need for raising their children and that won't happen...
...At a 1982 Barnard...
...The [Women Against Pornography] people are, wittingly or unwittingly, playing into a conservative clamp down on women's liberation," argues Barbara O'Dair, one of the book's editors...
...Andrea Dworkin, co-author of the Indianapolis ordinance, repeated her charge of collaboration...
...MEMBERSHIP Feminists war against each other over pornography by Art Levine and Kathleen Currie "T he anti-pornography campaign doesn't want to hear about pleasure and what turns us on," Paula Webster, a feminist writer, defiantly told the feminists at the 1985 "Women and the Law" conference...
...More mainstream feminist leaders are now taking sides in the battle...
...Variations of this law were proposed and nearly passed in several other cities...
...Is she submitting, or is she in control...
...College conference, "The Scholar and the Feminist: Towards a Politic of Sexuality," the "sexual outlaws," includingadvocates of sadomasochism and more moderate pro-sexers, tried to rally their troops...
...To prove her point, Leidholdt recited some of the more outrageous comments from pro-sexers who attended a workshop a few years earlier on "erotic taboos" that was chaired by Webster: "I want to sleep with young girls...
...Nan Hunter, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer and FACT co-founder, denounced the report for condescending protectionism that "ultimately harms women," and charged that when the Meese Commission said "pornography degrades women, they mean that sexually explicit materials encourage premarital sex, birth control, abortion, oral sexuality, homosexuality, and teenage sexuality, which they would like to eradicate...
...The commission found, among other things, that there is a causal link between violent and "degrading" pornography and violence towards women...
...These sorts of activities brought out the antiporn vigilantes...
...Brandishing the devices and symbols of lesbian S&M—from cut-out leather pants to nipple clamps to studded neck and wrist straps—members of the crowd attacked the anti-porners who viewed them as traitors to feminism for aping the worst aspects of patriarchal sexuality...
...This campaign may really be a symbolic castration of men," she continued to more hissing...
...They support sexual oppression of women ." Their support for anything from sex with children to pornography showed they'd been brainwashed by the sick male view of sexuality, she argued...
...Dorchen Leidholdt said of the report, "We commend the commission for being the first federal government body to report on the systematic campaign of abuse, terror, and discrimination being waged against over half the citizens of this country...
...Yes...
...Then she launched into a blistering tirade against Webster and the pro-sexers...
...the student yelled...
...The two sides of the fight are now going at each other with an intensity not seen since the Stalinists and Trotskyists hurled pamphlets in the thirties...
...Not surprisingly, the leaflet infuriated the backers of the conference...
...Each accuses the other of betraying the credos of feminism...
...In a fight over an anti-porn referendum in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1985, Catherine MacKinnon lumped her pro-sex opponents in with "pimps and pornographers," calling them "house niggers who sided with the masters...
...At one point she said, "Under this law, the new feminist erotica that is starting to come out would be gone...
...In Minneapolis, an ordinance passed the city council twice but was vetoed by the mayor...
...Hunter appeared momentarily shaken by the vehemence of their response...
...The pro-sexers argued that the ordinance could be used against feminist and lesbian sex materials...
...In Los Angeles, where similar legislation was fought by leaders of the Feminist Women's Health Center and the U.S...
...That's disgusting," she said, returning it to the shelf...
...When Webster finished, Dorchen Leidholdt, co-founder of Women Against Pornography, took the microphone...
...The most heated attacks on anti-pornography groups like New York's Women Against Pornography came in the early eighties from a band of lesbian sadomasochists who saw themselves as sexual freedom fighters pitted against the prudish, repressive anti-porners...
...You give women the power they need and that won't happen," the law student shouted back...
...demanded the incest victim, who was now crying...
...But, no, you want to attack a goddamn symptom...
...Art Levine and Kathleen Currie are Washington writers...
...MacKinnon then dismissed the legal reasoning of Hunter and other opponents of the antiporn legislation...
...Now that sounds pretty horrible, but think about it for a minute...
...Look further into the language of the ordinance," she continued, pointing to a section that barred presenting women as sex objects who are hurt or tied-up...
...This, they contended, was broad enough that it could have been used to ban Henry Miller's books or Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, along with Black Bun Busters and 7H-Sexual Lust, cited as offensive by the Meese Commission...
...Notebooks in hand, they wrote down the titles of cheap paperbacks and magazines: Journey...
Vol. 19 • June 1987 • No. 5
