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

obscured or permit ed inequality, had

reflected and furthered it both, was seen not as a reason that

law should be disregarded but as a reason it had to be used.

This was not done out of political naivete or civics-class faith

in the legal system’s intrinsic justice. It was done out of determination to make this society’s normal everyday mechanisms work for normal everyday people—all of them. Civil rights is

a “Look, we live here, too” movement. It is not dedicated primarily to making the society more comfortable for outlaws or to lessening the stigma of marginality or to making powerlessness feel bet er. It is dedicated to changing basic norms so that what was outlaw and marginal and powerless no longer is. It

aims to alter the mainstream. For civil-rights movements,

then, the fact that law is an instrument of the powerful has

never been an inert fact to be met with complacency or

despair, far less a reason to leave its power in the hands of the

powerful. It has been a reason that the law cannot af ord to

be ignored. The law’s pretense at providing equal justice did

not provide an occasion for cynicism, but a hypocrisy to be

exposed and a promise to be delivered, not a radical reason

to do nothing. The law of sex discrimination, aimed at altering the inequality of women to men, at eliminating the subordination of women to men as a norm, has been a part of this tradition, at least to some of us.

The civil-rights approach to pornography is an application

of this tradition, this analysis, and this determination to the

emergency of pornography and the condition of women. Accordingly, the antipornography civil-rights law (“the Ordinance”) does not admonish or moralize or apologize or request. By making it possible for women who can prove harm Pornography and Civil Rights

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to sue pornographers, it draws a line by making action

possible. In so doing, it defines a standard that tells the pornographers and their consumers that women are human beings, meaning that when they are hurt, something can be

done about it. Unlike any prior approach to pornography,

this law is based on proof of a harm, not a judgment about the

permissibility of an idea. And, like al civil-rights legislation,

it addresses a harm that derives its meaning and sting from

group status.

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Pornography and Civil Rights

The Ordinance

Statement of Policy

The statement of policy that begins the Minneapolis Ordinance capsulizes its legal approach: Pornography is sex discrimination. It exists in Minneapolis posing a substantial threat to the health, safety, peace, welfare, and equality of citizens in the community. Existing state and federal laws are inadequate to solve these problems in Minneapolis.

Pornography is recognized as a practice of civil inequality

on the basis of gender, posing the threats to its target population that al socially institutionalized inequalities do. This clause also recognizes the obvious fact that, while many of the

acts that make up the distinctive harms of pornography are

formally illegal, no existing laws are effective against them. If

they were, pornography would not flourish as it does, and its

victims would not be victimized through it as they are. Lawyers

seeking to protect pornography often become extremely ingenious in inventing legal theories that they insist already cover all serious harms of pornography—legal theories they

seldom intend to try to make work, by the way.