sold Ivory soap in television commercials until she was booted
out by a morals clause in her Ivory contract. The conversation
came from out of nowhere; nothing logically led to it and
nothing explained the fact that the men al liked the conversation and participated happily. They talked in particular about how much they would like to fuck her in the as . This seemed
to derive from her most famous movie,
which they al seemed to have seen.
I sat there in dismay and confusion. Weren’t we trying to
stop exploitation? Weren’t we the love children, not the hate
children? Didn’t we believe in the dignity of al persons?
Wasn’t it clear - surely it didn’t have to be pointed out - that
pornography defamed women? Even if Carl’s woman friend
and her friends debased themselves, commercial pornography
required male consumption and brought the defamation to
a new level. What the men said was so vile that I was real y
wounded by it. I seemed unable to learn the lesson that pornography trumped political principle and honor. (I may have learned it by now)
I found myself nauseated and in my mind debated whether
or not I would give a little exit speech or simply get up and
leave. The exit speech would have the advantage of let ing
them know how they had let down me and mine, others
like me, women. Were these men worth it - were they worth
fighting for the right words, which was always so hard? Were
they worth overcoming the nausea, or should I just puke on
the table (and I was damned close to it)? I noted that the men
were having a good time and that the women not only did not
raise their eyes but had their heads lowered as if trying to
pretend they didn’t hear or weren’t there. I noticed that the
men did not notice that the women had suddenly become
absent, at the table yes but not present, not verbal - there was
a quiet resembling social or political death; in ef ect, the women
were erased. I got up and walked out. I never went back to the
group and stopped get ing my $75-a-week paycheck, which
was the mainstay of my existence. Everything else I earned
was chump change.
Petra Kel y
Some twenty years after my last leftist meeting, I went to a
memorial service at the United Nations Chapel for Petra Kel y
Petra Kel y was the daughter of an Amerikan father and a
German mother; she was a pacifist and a feminist. Living in
Germany she founded the Green Party, which was devoted to
ecofeminism, nonviolence, and anti pornography politics. She
brought one of the first lawsuits against a pornographer for
slander, libel, and hate. She put up a hell of a fight but lost
