Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality

2. The authority of those who dominate must also be resisted

and destroyed.

3. Deference to male authority means deference to second-

class status.

4. Resisting the authority of men is necessary.

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Pornography and Civil Rights

Equality as a Social Goal

Freedom of Association

Whites have freedom of association because whites have

power. Whites use it to exclude Blacks. Blacks do not have freedom of association because they are forbidden from going many places under many circumstances. Whites say that if they

are forced to integrate, they wil be deprived of their right to

freedom of association. They are in fact deprived of it so that

this same right can be extended to Blacks. The mathematics of

the situation are clear: as long as whites count as the humans

who have a right to rights, making them integrate means

taking away their absolute control of association in public and

in private. As soon as Blacks count as humans who also have

rights, freedom of association is in fact extended, increased,

significantly multiplied, because Blacks can exercise it by going

to the places whites had been able to forbid them to go.

Freedom of Speech

Women, who have lived in social, political, and legal silence,

are told that freedom of speech is a sacrosanct right, and that

any ef ort to diminish it for anyone diminishes it for women.

Though women have been excluded from access to the means

of communication, from the political dialogue, from education, from economic equity or political power; though women are forced into social silence by contempt and by terrorism;

though women are excluded from participation in the institutions that articulate social policy; women are supposed to value speech rights by valuing the rights of those who have

excluded them. In particular, if a pornographer takes a

woman and hangs her bound and gagged and photographs

her and publishes the photograph, she, that particular woman,

is supposed to value his right to speech over her own; and if

she should suggest that he must not be allowed to profit from

her physically coerced silence, she wil be told that her right

Equality as a Social Goal

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to freedom of speech depends on protecting his. If she says,

But he gagged me and hung me and I couldn’t talk so I did

not have a right of speech that I could exercise, she wil* be

told to solve her problem in some way that wil not impinge

on or diminish his right to express himself through his use of

her body. If she recognizes that his so-called right is an exercise of power at the expense of her humanity, and if she wants rights of speech that are real in the world such that he cannot

gag her and hang her and photograph her and publish her,

she wil be accused of wanting to take his rights from him. In