the same points - show the same inequities - as with prisons.
Pornography and prisons were built on cruelty and brutalization; the demeaning of the human body as a form of punishment; the worthlessness of the individual human being; restraint, confinement, tying, whipping, branding, torture,
penetration, and kicking as commonplace ordeals. Each was a
social construction that could be different but was not; each
incorporated and exploited isolation, dominance and submission, humiliation, and dehumanization. In each the effort was to control a human being by attacking human dignity. In each
the guilt of the imprisoned provided a license to animalize
persons, which in turn led to a recognition of the ways in
which animals were misused outside the prison, outside the
pornography. Arguably (but not always), those in prison had
commit ed an offense; the offense of women in pornography was in being women. In both prisons and pornography, sadomasochism was a universal dynamic; there was no chance for reciprocity or mutuality or an equality of communication.
In prison populations and in pornography, the most
aggressive rapist was at the top of the social structure. In
prison populations gender was created by who got fucked; so,
too, in pornography. It amazed me that in pornography the
prison was recreated repeatedly as the sexual environment
most conducive to the rape of women.
The one dif erence, unbridgeable, intractable, between prisons
and pornography was that prisoners were not expected to like
being in prison, whereas women were supposed to like each
and every abuse suffered in pornography.
Sister, Can You
Spare a Dime?
In 1983 Catharine A. MacKinnon and I drafted, and the City
of Minneapolis passed, a civil law that held pornographers
responsible for the sexual abuse associated with the making
and consuming of pornography If a woman or girl was forced
into making pornography or if a woman or girl was raped or
assaulted because of pornography, the pornographer or retailer
could be held responsible for civil damages. If a woman
was forced to view pornography (commonplace in situations
of domestic abuse), the person or institution (a school, for
instance) that forced her could be held responsible. The burden
of proof was on the victim. In addition, the law defined
pornography as sex discrimination; this meant that pornography helped to create and maintain the second- class status of women in society - that turning a woman into an object or
using her body in violent, sexual y explicit ways contributed
