institutionalized pornography by shielding the sexual sphere, where so much of pornography’s violence to women is done, including by outright guaranteeing the right to possess pornography in the home, the most violent place for women. Pornography has
also been legally institutionalized through decrying but permit ing pimping and prostitution (of which pornography is one form), making sure prostitutes are the ones who pay for
doing what the entire social system has given them, as women,
little choice but to do in one form or another.
The law has helped make pornography a social institution
more indirectly as wel . The law of rape makes the pornographic assumption that women may consent to forced sex.
The law of child custody applies the pornographic definition
of the female to mothers. Women who have sexual relations
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27
with a man or men not the father of their children have long
been considered loose women, hence not good mothers.
Lesbian mothers have found that a woman who is not being
sexually used by a man is considered an inadequate woman,
hence also not a good mother. The frequent failures of attempts under sex-discrimination law to get women the same pay as men when they do dif erent work of comparable value
permits job definitions and pay scales to continue based on
pornographic definitions of women’s proper role as men’s
hierarchical subordinates, as sexually pleasing to men visual y, and as servicers of male needs. It also keeps women so poor they need to sel sex to men to survive. The law of evidence pervasively permits a woman’s credibility to be based upon the pornographic standard that what a woman is sexual y and does sexually is the relevant measure of her word and her worth. If she has had sex, she is worthless as a human
being and can neither be violated nor believed. If she has not
had sex, she is worthless as a woman, hence is not worthy of
belief. Pervasively, whether by the collaboration of ineffective
or perverse action, or by the complicity of inaction, the legal
system has supported the existence and burgeoning of this industry and its social propriety as wel . Deep legal echos on al levels of the system support the existence of pornography in
the world and make it seem right that the legal system condones it. What the law does, the law must undo.
Law in the United States provides a forum for airing disputes recognized as legitimate and an avenue for redressing grievances and harms considered worth redressing for people
considered worth intervention. For individuals who are hurt
by other individuals, civil court promises dignity to conflict,
recognition to an arguable harm, some ground rules beyond
overt force, an opportunity to fight for one’s life, a chance for
vindication, and the possibility of relief... maybe even a little
change. Those whose harms the society takes seriously are
permit ed access to court; they are full citizens. Those whose
harms the law refuses even to allow into court are not; they
are victims, period. In this country, civil-rights law particularly has been an oppositional force for change. It has given 28
Pornography and Civil Rights
people, dignity, self-respect, and hope, without which people
cannot live. Ever since Black people demanded legal change
as one means to social change, civil rights has stood for the
principle that systematic social inequality—the legal and social institutionalization of group-based power and powerlessness—should and would be undone by law. Law would do this both because it had a shameful part in creating and maintaining social inequality and because it could do something about it. The fact that law had
