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

trouble knowing what to buy. But before the Ordinance, the

indefinability of pornography had become the key to its defi36

Pornography and Civil Rights

nition. Men had decided that the bot om line of pornography

was that it was sexual y arousing. Therefore, they were unwilling to have other men define it, or even to admit it could be defined, because that would be a step toward giving up what

they like, which they were unwilling to do. Once the pornographic is synonymous with the sexually arousing, anything that is sexually arousing might be pornographic. But so many

things produce that definite stirring between the legs, including the violence against women and violation of women and objectification of women in R-rated movies or Vogue magazine

or Calvin Klein commercials or Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan. ”

So a definition of pornography with a core of meaning—far

less one with limits that do not depend on whether the viewer

is turned on or not—was pronounced intrinsically impossible.

The Ordinance adopts a simple if novel strategy for definition. It looks at the existing universe of the pornography industry and simply describes what is there, including what must be there for it to work in the way that it, and only it,

works. It is true that pornography exists on a larger social

continuum with other materials that objectify and demean

women and set the stage for and reflect women’s social devaluation. It is true that many materials (such as some religious works and sociobiology texts) express the same message as

pornography and are vehicles for the same values. This does

not mean either that pornography cannot be defined or that

it does not operate in a distinctive way.

Pornography is not what pornography says. If it were, the

Ordinance’s definition of pornography would be itself pornography, because it says exactly what pornography is. In other words, the Ordinance does not restrict pornography on

the basis of its message. The same message of sexualized

misogyny pervades the culture—indeed, it does so more and

more because pornography exists. But that does not make

“Dallas” and “Dynasty” into pornography, however close they

come. Indicators of the difference are that no one is coerced

into performing for Calvin Klein commercials; no one is tied

up in front of “The Secret Storm” and forced to enact its

scenes later; no rapist or john we have heard of has read

The Ordinance

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Masters and Johnson or Ulys es aloud to his victim and demanded she perform its contents. Nor are these materials peddled on New York City’s 42nd Street by organized crime.

These indicators are no substitute for a definition. But they

do show that, in the world, a lot of people know the difference

between pornography on the one hand and art, literature,

mainstream media, advertisements, and sex education on the

other. This remains the case even though al these materials

are definitely part of a world that one might call pornographic in the political sense: a world in which women are visual objects for sexual use. Such materials are not pornography—

and, frankly, everyone knows they are not. The definitional

task is merely to capture in words something that is commonly

known and acted upon but not already totally defined in the