prostitution, the unwanted sexualization, the second-class status. And the increasing inability to tell the difference between al of that and sex—al of that and just what a woman is.
Those who do this are silent in order to protect their power,
profits, and pleasure. Many who have this done to them are
silent because they are ashamed, afraid, bought, or dead. But
overwhelmingly they are silent because even when they speak
no one listens. This makes them ashamed and afraid—and
even, for al we know, bought or dead. For the rest, those who
have known have not cared, and those who might have cared
have not known—or were kept from knowing, or were not
permit ed to care, or thought they could not afford to know
or care. Completely absent from most legal and political debate on the subject have been the twelve individual men whose names virtually never surface. These are the heads of large
organized-crime families who own, control, and profit from
the pornography industry, buying with terror whatever legitimacy and impunity they cannot buy with money, thriving while others pay the human cost. The entire debate over pornography is primarily for their benefit.
The legal conception of what pornography is has authoritatively shaped the social conception of what pornography does. Instead of recognizing the personal injuries and systemic harms of pornography, the law has told the society that pornography is a passive reflection or one-level-removed
“representation” or symptomatic by-product or artifact of the
real world. It thus becomes an idea analog to, a word or picture replay of, something else, which somehow makes what it presents, that something else, not real either. So its harms have
not been seen as real. They have, in fact, been protected under
the disguise of the name given that world of words and pictures which are not considered real: “speech. ” This could happen because law is an instrument of social power first, and those who produce and consume pornography have social
power. Pornography is made unreal to protect it, in order to
protect the pleasure, sexual and financial, of those who derive
its benefits. Those who are hurt by pornography—society’s
powerless, its disregarded, its rejects, the invisible and voice-
26
Pornography and Civil Rights
less, mostly women and children—are made unreal in order
to keep their abuse defined the way those who enjoy it define
it: as sex. Particularly with women, whose social definition as
inferior is a sexual one, victimization through pornography
has been perceived as a natural state, not as victimization at
al but as fit ing and chosen. When they are thought to be paid
for their exploitation, that both confirms that this is what they
have to sel and, by making it a market transaction, makes it
appear not to be exploitation at al .
Law is often thought to be a neutral instrument. But law has
participated directly in making pornography a legal and social institution. Obscenity law misdefines the problem of pornography as offensive and. immoral public displays of sex, evades the real harms, and is unworkable in design, while always making it seem that the problem could be solved with greater exercise of prosecutorial wil . It is the seductiveness
of obscenity law to seem potential y effective because its terms
are so meaningless they could mean almost anything. As a result, they have meant almost nothing, being (actually) dependent upon the viewpoint of the observer. This makes obscenity law less useful the more pornography is a problem, because
the more pornography is consumed, the more observers’
views are shaped by it, and the more the world it makes confirms that view. Privacy law has further
