an idea of the society one wants to think one lives in, the question of pornography has not required looking into who can violate whom and get away with it. Once pornography is
framed as concept rather than practice, more thought than
act, more in the head than in the world, its effects also necessarily appear both insubstantial and unsubstantiated, more abstract than real. So both what pornography is and what it
does have been seen to lie in the eye of the beholder, to be a
mat er of what one is thinking about when one looks at it, to
be a question of point of view. And since the accepted solution
for dif ering moral views has been mutual tolerance, one
man’s harm has been seen as another’s social value as the pornography industry in the United States has doubled in the last ten years without effective interference from the courts.
The law has been wrong. Obscured beneath the legal fog of
obscenity law and the shield of the law of privacy and the perversely cruel joke of the law against prostitution has been the real buying and selling of real individuals through coercion or
entrapment, or through exploiting their powerlessness, social
worthlessness and lack of choices and credibility, their despair
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Pornography and Civil Rights
and sometimes their hope. Shielded from public view, in-part
through the collaboration of law, has been the manufacture
from skin and blood and ruined lives of a vicious product by vicious people. Veiled as well has been the shameless profiteering in run-down parts of town, the pressure deals with unscrupulous
politicians and judges, the arm-twisting of retailers, the
takeovers of magazine distribution networks and underground
control of legitimate entertainment businesses, the threats and
sabotage of the personal, occupational, and public lives of anyone who gets in their way, and the outright buying of liberal credibility, which parades a traffic in human beings—this auction block on every newsstand in the country—as a principled means of sexual and expressive freedom, and stigmatizes doing
or saying anything about it as censorship.
Equally clouded by specious media reports and outright lies
has been the direct evidence of a causal relationship between
the consumption of pornography and increases in social levels
of violence, hostility, and discrimination. * So, few knew of
those trapped in sexually toxic marriages or jobs to keep a roof
over their heads and to feed their children. Few—except the
many who did it or had it done to them—knew that the abuses
of pornography’s production are a mere prelude to the abuse
mass-produced through pornography’s mass distribution and
mass consumption: the rapes, the battery, the sexual harassment, the sexual abuse of children, the forced sex, the forced
* This evidence is consistent across social studies (studies on real people or real data in the real world), laboratory studies (controlled exposure and response situations in isolated settings), and testimony by both professionals (for example, therapists who work with victims and offenders, police who observe evidence of sex crimes) and direct victims (women in al walks of life, such as prostitutes, daughters, wives, students, employees). The evidence is summarized in Diana E. H. Russell, “Pornography and Rape: A Causal Model, ”
Most of the major social and laboratory studies are discussed in N. Malamuth and E.
Donnerstein, eds.,
Pornography and Civil Rights
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