world. This is hardly a unique problem in legal definitions.
Basical y, for pornography to work sexually with its major
market, which is heterosexual men, it must excite the penis.
From the evidence of the material itself, its common denominator is the use or abuse of a woman in an expressly sexual way. To accomplish its end, it must show sex and subordinate
a woman at the same time. Other people are sometimes used
in similar ways, sometimes in exactly the ways women are, but
always exploiting their gender. This is the reason that the definition covers everyone regardless of sex, yet covers each person as a member of their sex: that is the way the pornographers use them.
Under the Ordinance, pornography
women are reduced to subhuman dimension to the point where
they cannot be perceived as ful y human. But not al sexually
explicit pictures and words do this in the same way. For this reason, the Ordinance restricts its definition only to those sexually explicit pictures and words that actually can be proven to sub38
Pornography and Civil Rights
ordinate women in their making or use. Too, many materials
show women being subordinated, sometimes violently, including much mainstream media and feminist critique of violence against women. Some of this is sexually explicit, some is not.
Not even al sexually explicit material that shows women being
subordinated is itself a vehicle for the subordination of women;
some of it, like the transcript of the Minneapolis hearings on
pornography, expressly counters that subordination.
Subordination is an active practice of placing someone in an
unequal position or in a position of loss of power. To be a subordinate is the opposite of being an equal. Prisoner/guard, teacher/student, boss/worker define subordinate relations.
The simple notion on which the Ordinance is based, on account of which it has taken much criticism, is that man/woman not be such a relation, even though many people apparently
cannot imagine sex any other way. Subordination is at the core
of every systematic social inequality. It includes the practices
that enforce second-class status. Subordination includes objectification, hierarchy, forced submission, and violence. Anyone who brought a case under the Ordinance would have to
women in their making or use in order to show that the materials were pornography. In other words, the fact that a legislature finds that pornography subordinates women enough to pass a law does not mean that al materials that someone might
think are pornography are automatically illegal. It only gives
women a chance to try to prove in court that specific materials are pornography because they actively subordinate women (and meet the other requirements), therefore fit the definition.
The definition is closed, concrete, and descriptive, not open-
ended, conceptual, or moral. It takes the risk that al damaging materials might not be covered in order to try to avoid misuse of the law as much as possible. Some of the enumerated
subparts specify presentations of women that show express violence; some focus on acts of submission, degradation, humiliation, and objectification that have been more difficult to see as violation because these acts are most distinctively done to
women and called sex. Most of the public debate on the
The Ordinance
39
enumerated subparts revolves around defenses of materials
that individuals enjoy and feel they can get away with defending in public. Few are willing to defend violent pornography in public, even though the nonviolent materials are also known
to be harmful, if in different ways—for instance, in their use
