densely located there. This woman might well have made my
bed that morning. It was an overwhelming mandate. Of
course we said yes and tried to get the NOW women to join,
which they pretty solidly refused to do.
New Orleans is like most other cities in the United States
in that the areas in which pornography and prostitution flourish are the areas in which poor people, largely people of color, live. We were being invited to stand up with them against the
parasitic exploitation of their lives, against the despoiling of
their living environment.
The group was poor. They took packages of paper plates,
wrote on the plates “No More Porn, ” and stuck the inscribed
plates up on storefronts and bars al along Bourbon Street.
Demonstrators also carried NOW logos. There were maybe a
hundred people marching (as opposed to the thousand or
so back in the hotel). I was privileged to speak out on the
street with my sisters, a bullhorn taking the place of a microphone.
Meanwhile someone in the leadership of NOW had called
the police to alert them to an illegal march, a march without
a permit. As our rally came to an end and we were marching
out of the French Quarter the police approached. We ran. They
ar ested one of us at the back of the line. He, an organizer
from Minneapolis, went to jail for the night, a martyr for the
feminist cause. And it became a bad feminist habit for the rich
to rat out the poor, turn on the poor, keep themselves divided
from the poor - no mixing with the dispossessed. The ladies
with the cash to go to New Orleans from other parts of the
country did not want to be mistaken for the downtrodden.
The Women
The first time a woman came up to me after a speech to say
that she had been in pornography was in Lincoln, Nebraska -
at a local NOW meeting in the heartland. I knew a lot about
pornography before I started writing
literary pornography and because, as a woman, I had prostituted. In pornography one found the map of male sexual dominance and one also found, as I said in a speech, “the
poor, the illiterate, mar ied women with no voice, women
forced into prostitution or kept from get ing out and women
raped, raped once, raped twice, raped more times than they
[could] count.”
Pornography brought me back to the world of my own
kind; I looked at a picture and I saw a live woman.
Some women were prostituted generation after generation
and, as one woman, a third-generation prostitute, said, “I’ve
done enough to raise a child and not make her a prostitute
