sets and forced to watch, then participate in, acts of sexual
brutality. Former prostitutes spoke of being made to watch
pornography and then duplicate the acts exactly, often starting as children. Psychologists who worked with survivors of incest spoke of sexual tortures with dogs and electric shocks
involving the consumption of pornography. One study documented more rapes in which pornography was specifically implicated than the total number of rapes that were reported at the time in the city in which the study was done. Correlations
showed increases in the rate of reported rape with increases
in the consumption figures of major men’s entertainment
magazines. Laboratory studies showed that pornography portraying sexual aggression as pleasurable for the victim (as so much pornography does) increases the acceptance of the use
of coercion in sexual relations; that acceptance of coercive sexuality appears related to sexual aggression; that exposure to violent pornography increases men’s punishing behavior
toward women in the laboratory. It increases men’s perceptions that women want rape and are uninjured by rape. It increases their view that women are worthless, trivial, nonhuman, objectlike, and unequal to men.
No one claimed that these things never happen without
pornography. They said that sometimes it was because of pornography that these things happened. No one claimed that these are the only things that happen because of pornography.
They said only that no mat er what else happens, this does.
The Ordinance was writ en, as the pornography and its
defenses have been, in the blood and the tears of these women
and men, in the language of their violated childhoods and
stolen possibilities. The Ordinance, unlike the pornography
and its defenses, was writ en in the speech of what has been
their silence.
The Ordinance
35
Definition
The way a legal definition works is that someone who wants
to use the law must prove that each part of it applies to their
case. For example, anyone who wants to use the antipornography civil-rights law would have to prove first that whatever materials they want to attack
Pornography is the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words that also includes one or more of the following: (i) women
are presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things,
or commodities; or (i ) women are presented as sexual
objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or (i i) women
are presented as sexual objects who experience sexual
pleasure in being raped; or (iv) women are presented
as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or
bruised or physically hurt; or (v) women are presented
in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility, or display; or (vi) women’s body parts—including but not limited to vaginas, breasts, or but ocks—are
exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts;
or (vi ) women are presented as whores by nature; or
(vi i) women are presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or (ix) women are presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that
makes these conditions sexual.
The use of men, children, or transsexuals in the
place of women in [the paragraph] above is also pornography.
Pornography is an industry. It exists in the world. No pornographer has any trouble knowing what to make. No distributor has any trouble knowing what to carry. No retailer has any trouble knowing what to order. No consumer has any
