For a moment, indulge me in a sixties-style paranoid fantasy.
Feminist Self-Destruction
What would be the best way to sabotage the women’s movement? Here’s my scenario: Invent the antipornography crusade, enlist feminists in the cause, then sit back and watch the movement self-destruct.
As farfetched as that seems, in fact, the debate over pornography has so divided feminists and dissipated our energies that I sometimes wonder if agents provocateurs have infiltrated our circles and succeeded in disrupting our ranks, deflecting us from what used to be our common goals. Mention pornography now, and we feminists are at each other’s throats.
Ironically, it didn’t take right-wing antifeminists to do this. It’s one of the consequences of groups, such as Women Against Pornography, who have made pornography their primary and obsessional cause. All other issues are secondary to them, and arguments over pornography and censorship are so intense and personally vituperative for them that even before Meese’s lustbusters had their chance to undermine civil liberties, these sisters themselves had come a long way toward suppressing free speech and thought. Of course, I’m worried about the draconian measures that might be legislated as a result of the Meese Commission’s report, but I’m equally concerned about the divisive hysteria that surrounds this issue when feminists discuss it. By contrast, there seems to be an atmosphere of calm reasonableness (despite the outlandish claims of Meese’s minions) when, for example, Bob Guccione and American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Barry Lynn take on the opposition. At least in front of the cameras, both sides assume that civil liberties can be discussed in civil tones.
Not so among us feminists, I’m afraid. Our debates are invariably heated and overwrought, often degenerating into shouting matches and personal attacks. Many of our meetings — whatever the other feminist issues on the agenda — founder on the rocks of pornography and censorship. At colleges where Andrea Dworkin or Catharine MacKinnon present their “Model Antipornography Law” (which would make pornography a violation of women’s civil rights), I’ve heard one young woman called a “traitor to her sex” and another accused of “identifying with the oppressor,” all because they dared to worry aloud about censorship. Another student said she feared losing her “right” to enjoy pornography (she called it “erotica,” in deference to the current feminist, but nevertheless blurry, distinction) and was roundly booed when she bravely conceded that she sometimes “got off” on Penthouse. I’m also told that when an undergraduate at a large university back-ordered an issue of this magazine for a specific article, she felt compelled to ask for it in a “plain brown wrapper” so that “any woman who saw my mail” wouldn’t berate her for betraying the cause.
Colleges haven’t always lived up to our visions of them as bastions of free speech and unrestricted inquiry. How ironic, though, that in this case the ideal is tarnished not by administrators or vested interests, but by feminists who feel it’s permissible to shout or intimidate young women into submission, all in the name of their cause. At a time when the women’s movement needs to reach out to the younger generation, some feminists are using the “bonds” of sisterhood to stifle dissent from what they insist is the “correct” feminist line on pornography.
We feminists used to hold dear one fundamental principle: respect for another woman’s point of view. But that seems to have vanished with the pornography debate. Even at the 1985 and 1986 national conventions of NOW, any discussion of the question became emotional and divisive, largely because Andrea Dworkin and/or her troops arrived with ultimatums for the delegates: Support our antipornography legislation as national NOW policy or you’re not the feminists you claim to be. But too many members of NOW have been afraid of the proposal’s potential problems, and it has not been passed. The NOW national board has promised to study the issue further, but in 1985 this wasn’t good enough for Dworkin, and I heard her rail against NOW for its failure to see that “we are living at the beginning of a holocaust against women.” The analogy was clear and sickening — we feminists who hold different views about pornography and worry about censorship and the First Amendment are as guilty of murder as those who closed their eyes to Nazi death camps. Charming rhetoric indeed. Then Dworkin proceeds, with racking sobs, to her litany of crimes against women supposedly caused by pornography (rape, spousal abuse, physical assault, bondage, violence, coercion, and child molestation — to name just a few of the felonies she thinks could be eliminated by banning pornography), and I find her language as offensive as the most scurrilous smut. Not only does she rant and rave against men in general — they “use women as so much dead meat” — but she also implies that we who don’t agree with her are complicit in these crimes. So much for unity and “sisterhood.”
Why all this sound and fury? My hunch is that the intensity of the feminist debate over pornography goes deeper than the issue itself: At the heart of it is the basic question of how we, as women, choose to see ourselves.
Beneath the rhetoric of feminist antipornography statements, as well as behind Dworkin’s argument in her book Pornography, Men Possessing Women (the title itself should be a tip-off), is an insistence on the “woman as victim” mentality. There are real victims of social and economic constraints, of violence and abuse, but this ideology of victimization assumes that women have no identities except those imposed by male stereotypes, that we are victims because we are as delicate and as easily manipulated as passive, helpless children. Thus, if we are depicted as x, we become x; in antipornography arguments, women are demeaned by pornography because they are depicted as “whores.” This logic derives from the word’s etymological roots — porno and graphy, meaning “writing about whores.” Dworkin et al. then expand the literal definition of pornography to include “the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women” or “presentation” of them as “sexual objects,” either as “enjoying pain, humiliation or rape” or “in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility or display.”
With this definition, what’s left out? Nothing really, because at bottom the argument assumes that only men are doing the looking, that men see or read pornography and automatically think “whore” and that their sexual fantasies immediately turn to violence. Ignoring all the studies that find no provable connection between pornography and violent crimes, Dworkin continues to argue that because men view women as whores in pornography, we, as women, are degraded. To listen to her, no woman can catch a glimpse of Penthouse without feeling insulted or demeaned. Demeaned from what? The virgin? The perfect woman? You have to buy into the madonna-whore stereotype to view explicit female sexuality as degradation. Not surprisingly, Phyllis Schlafly, who’s been taking feminists to task for subverting true womanhood, spouts the same line: Pornography “has an enormous effect on sexual crimes and the way men view women.”
The way men view women — that’s what counts most in antipornographers’ statements, be they feminists or conservatives. Despite the fact that we in the women’s movement insist that what matters is how we view ourselves, Dworkin is almost exclusively concerned with men: Women are demeaned or subjugated if pornography involves men, either as participants or as viewers or readers. Just the implied presence of an aroused penis signals enslavement and domination in her mind, as if pornography would be acceptable to her if only women had access to it. Of course, some lesbian pornography is heavily laced with S & M and bondage, but presumably that’s okay, because women, unlike men, won’t be stimulated to commit rape, spousal abuse, or child molestation. Still, most women I know don’t feel tainted or subjugated if Penthouse is flashed before them, despite its largely male readership. We may not like some things we see in these pages, we may be bored by others, but in truth be told, we get turned on by some of it, too. Yet who is to say which is what to whom, and why?
“I’d like to grant women the freedom of sexual fantasy along with other rights. We should be allowed our own turn-ons without being told what is ‘correct.’”
Ignoring the fact that censorship always depends on who has the power to say what is offensive to whom, feminist antipornographers base their case on the simpleminded ideology of man the oppressor, woman the infantilized victim. But only the acceptance of the stereotype of female weakness and passivity guarantees a feeling of being victimized either by pornography or by men in general. Nothing seems either as tragic or as indicative of women insisting on their own victimization than the young woman who doused herself with gasoline and set herself on fire in an adult bookstore. Perceiving herself as nothing but a victim of pornography, she had done herself more violence than the pornography she was protesting.
In point of fact, pornography can only symbolize the domination or servility of women when women are subjugated or unequal in the social and economic world. In that sense, it may be symptomatic, as the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force (FACT) sensibly argues. But what’s the first step toward changing this? Obviously, not to suppress the image (or free speech about images of women), but to alter the reality to which it can symbolically refer.
If we view ourselves as the equals of men and fight for those freedoms, we will not be seen as either helpless children, requiring protectionist laws that have long been used to proscribe women’s freedom, or as whores because another woman chooses to pose for Penthouse. As for the victims of violent crimes, we all need to be protected from the nuts and wackos — whether there’s a screw loose, a genetic deficiency, or a horrendous childhood, pornography’s not the genesis — and perhaps our criminal laws need to be strengthened, but no amount of censorship will get the creeps off the streets.
Pornography and censorship are complicated subjects, but we as feminists are doing ourselves a disservice by making them such burning, overriding issues at a time when we are losing ground in the face of Reagan’s social and economic policies. Nevertheless, I’d also wager that even if we were to achieve a totally egalitarian society, the same images of women would persist in pornography without the supposed symbolic meaning of dominance or subjugation or servility. That’s the nature of sexual fantasies, for women as well as men, and I’d like to grant women that freedom along with other rights and liberties.
We should be allowed our own turn-ons without being told what is “correct” or acceptable. It is bad enough when the Meeses of this world tell us what kind of women we should be. But it is worse when, in the name of women’s rights, feminist antipornographers tell us who we are and what we can be, not just in society but in our imaginations as well.
You just have to wonder what these “conservative feminists” might have made of Tinder, right? What? Women like sex too? EGADS! … Aside from contemplating how little one gets to use “egads” in a sentence these days, you might enjoy reading a bit about femnism and pornography in a more scholarly fashion. … Or you might not. Some people never change.
