How Evangelicals and Feminists Created an Unholy Alliance Against Porn
Big Sister is peeking into your window to find out whether you’re reading anything “sexually explicit which subordinates women.” The men holding up the ladder Big Sister is perched on are none other than the Reverend Falwell and his gang of anti-feminist Moral Majoritarians. And if Big Sister catches you reading any objectionable stuff, she is going to report you to President Reagan and Ed Meese — who have sworn to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, who regard all abortion as murder, and who consider homosexuality a felonious sin.
No, this isn’t a Saturday Night Live takeoff on an Orwellian nightmare. It is an all-too realistic representation of the crazy-quilt coalition that concocted the recently enacted Indianapolis anti-pornography statute now under challenge in the courts.
The Indianapolis statute—which was drafted by a feminist law professor named Catharine MacKinnon and a radical man-hating author named Andrea Dworkin, and enacted by a conservative city council with the support of a right-wing preacher—goes further in censoring magazines, books, films, and even museum paintings than any law in recent history. It defines pornography to include “the sexually explicit subordination of women, graphically depicted, whether in pictures or words.” Nor does the term “sexually explicit” narrow the prohibition; instead, it broadens it to include nudity like “uncovered exhibition of the genitals or buttocks.”
The ordinance’s drafters readily acknowledge and even boast that it is not limited to the hard-core porn of the peep show and the X-rated variety. (Much of that already has been banned by laws approved by the Supreme Court, though these laws are often not fully enforced.) Rather, the new law is aimed at the mainstream and Main Street media that offend some women: Penthouse, cable television, A-rated movies, and sexist fiction.
The Indianapolis statute empowers “any woman” aggrieved by a book, magazine, movie, or painting to file a complaint with a government agency. If the agency and a court agree that the material is covered by the ordinance—that is, if it contains nudity and subordinates women—the agency may issue an order against it. Simply put, that means a censorship board may ban it, even for reading or viewing by an individual in the privacy of his or her home.
Nor does the ordinance exempt books, films, and paintings with serious literary or artistic merit. Indeed, one of the drafters argues that the more serious and acceptable sexist art is, the more dangerous it is to women.
The specter of feminist censors roaming through bookstores and museums and filing complaints against books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, or paintings like The Rape of the Sabine Women, may be farfetched, but it surely is invited by the ordinance’s broad language. And all it takes is one aggrieved woman to start a censorship proceeding.
The current court challenge may well end up in the Supreme Court, as cities throughout the country line up to enact their own versions of the feminist censorship statute.
This “new approach” to censorship seems politically unstoppable. A Wall Street Journal columnist observed that if this ordinance had been drafted by the Moral Majority, it would have been “laughed out.” But since it has the backing of thousands of feminists—including some otherwise responsible leaders—it is being taken seriously by big-city politicians anxious to do something about smut without exposing either their left or right flanks.
It used to be that the perennial pre-election prattle about how smut is destroying our moral fiber would be greeted by sustained applause from the right and a collective groan from the left. Now things are different. The right is still applauding, but the left is in disarray. Many loyal opponents of censorship are unwilling to alienate their friends and allies in the feminist censorship movement. The result is a juggernaut which politicians in cities ranging from New York to Detroit to Madison and Wichita will find hard to resist.
The good news is that a growing number of sensible feminists are becoming appalled at their censorial sisters. Anti-censorship coalitions are springing up around the country. Groups such as the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force have recently emerged in New York, Berkeley, Montreal, and other cities. The women in these organizations are pointing to the dangers inherent in granting the power of censorship to those who regard sex as a dirty word. They are reminding their sisters of earlier episodes in feminist history, as when nineteenth-century American feminists joined with their conservative enemies to enact legislation raising the age of consent for girls, criminalizing prostitution, and closing the saloons. Eventually these early feminists felt used when they were thrown out into the street by their strange bedfellows. As one anti-censorship feminist has put it: “In all these cases, conservatives ultimately exercised more power in determining how laws, once enacted [by the coalition of conservatives and feminists], would finally affect women’s lives—more power than the feminists then imagined.”
History may well repeat itself if shortsighted feminists conspire with their archenemies to deny us all the freedom that nourishes equality. If together they succeed in closing the porno bookstores, the Moral Majority will turn on the feminist censors and start closing feminist bookstores, gay bookstores, pro-choice bookstores—and finally all bookstores except those that sell the gospel according to the radical right.
When I recently debated the leader of the Moral Majority in New England, I asked whether his organization would, if it had the power, ban the writings of Andrea Dworkin—the coauthor of the Indianapolis statute and an occasional user of four-letter words in her books and speeches. He answered without hesitation “We would most certainly ban such ungodly writings. It is not necessary,” he reasoned, “to use pornography to illustrate its evils. It is only necessary to read the Bible.”
