for equality of rights in employment, education, property, public accommodations, and public services; create public and private harassment, persecution, and
denigration; expose individuals who appear in pornography against their wil to contempt, ridicule, hatred, humiliation, and embar assment and target
such women in particular for abuse and physical aggression; demean the reputations and diminish the occupational opportunities of individuals and groups on the basis of sex; promote injury and degradation such
as rape, battery, child sexual abuse, and prostitution
and inhibit just enforcement of laws against these acts;
contribute significantly to restricting women in particular from full exercise of citizenship and participation in public life, including in neighborhoods; damage relations between the sexes; and undermine women’s
* For the exact text of both Ordinances, see Appendix A (Minneapolis) and Appendix B (Indianapolis). Note that the findings here that support a claim for defamation through pornography had not yet been included in either Ordinance.
The Ordinance
33
equal exercise of rights to speech and action guaranteed to al citizens under the Constitutions and laws of the United States and [place].
In Minneapolis, where the Ordinance was first introduced in
late 1983, the City Council held public hearings to inquire into
the ef ects of pornography and to provide the basis for a civil-
rights law against it. Based on these hearings, and expanded
and reconfirmed through the efforts of people in many communities, the Ordinance’s findings outline a range of harms from the individual and intimate to the social and anonymous.
In the hearings, women and men spoke in public for the first
time in the history of the world about the devastating impact
pornography has had on their lives. They spoke of being
coerced into sex so that pornography could be made of it. They
spoke of pornography being forced on them in ways that gave
them no choice about seeing the pornography or later performing the sex. They spoke of rapes pat erned on specific pornography that was read to them during the rape, repeated like a mantra throughout the rape; they spoke of being turned over
as the pages were turned over. They spoke of the sexual harassment of living or working in neighborhoods or job sites saturated with pornography. A young man spoke of growing up gay, learning from heterosexual pornography that to be loved
by a man meant to accept his violence, and as a result accepting
the destructive brutality of his first male lover. Another young
man spoke of his struggle to reject the thrill of sexual dominance he learned from pornography and to find a way of loving a woman that was not part of it. A young woman spoke of her
father using pornography on her mother, and using it to keep
her quiet about her mother’s screams at night, threatening to
enact the scenes on the daughter as wel if she told anyone.
Another young woman spoke of the escalating use of pornography in her marriage, unraveling her self- respect, her belief in her future, the possibility of intimacy, and her physical integrity—and of finding the strength to leave. Another young woman spoke of being gang-raped by hunters who looked up
from their pornography at her and said it al : “There’s a live
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Pornography and Civil Rights
one. ” Many spoke of self-revulsion, of the erosion of intimacy,
of unbearable indignity, of shat ered self, of shame, and also of
anger and anguish and outrage and despair at living in a
country in which their torture is enjoyed and their screams are
only heard as the “speech” of their abusers.
Therapists spoke of bat ered women tied in front of video
