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

by rapists and child molesters, in increasing the acceptability

of forced sex, and in diminishing men’s vision of the desirability and possibility of sex equality. Ignoring these similarities, some would limit the definition of pornography to violent materials, saying pornography is violence but not sex. This is unrealistic because pornography practices violence as sex. It would be unrealistic to limit a definition of pornography to

conventional coital sex, since the pornographers do not, and

just as impractical to exonerate everything in pornography

that someone feels to be sex. Everything in pornography is sex

to someone, or it would not be there.

The Ordinance makes the society have to choose whether

some woman—usually poor and without options and formerly

abused if not overtly coerced or tricked into being there—

must be used or abused in these ways and bought and sold by

pimps so that some segment of the buying audience can have

its sex life the way it wants it. This is essentially what is at stake

in debates over which specific presentations of women should

be included on the list. What is not at stake is which sexual

acts one enjoys or practices or prefers or morally approves.

Whatever one’s moral judgments, the presentations in the

definition are there because there is material evidence that

they do harm, and the decision has been made that the harm

they do to some people is not worth the sexual pleasure they

give to other people—not because the people making the laws

do not like these acts sexually or disapprove of them morally.

The Indianapolis definition is restricted to sexual violence.

If violence occurs in the making or use of the material, the

material itself need not show violence. But violence must be

shown in the material itself for a traf icking claim to be made.

The Indianapolis definition allows a victim of coercion or assault to sue if the materials—in addition to being graphic, sexually explicit, and subordinating to women—present

40

Pornography and Civil Rights

women “as sexual objects for domination, conquest, violation,

exploitation, possession, or use, or through postures or positions of submission, servility, or display. ” Often, individuals are coerced through violence into sexually explicit and subordinating performances, but the coercion itself is not shown in the film. Often the gun at the head is off stage. When it

comes to the traf icking provision, however, this subpart of

the definition provides the so-called “Playboy defense, ” meaning that the Indianapolis legislature wished to exempt from traf icking actions materials that, in its view, did not actually

show violence. So, in this version of the Ordinance, materials

that show women as sexual objects for domination, conquest,

violation, exploitation, possession, or use, or through postures or positions of servility, submission, or display could be reached only by those who are coerced into them or assaulted

because of them, but not by women generally.

Causes of Action

People hurt other people in many ways that are not against

the law. To have a “cause of action” means that there is a law

against what happened, so one can sue. The victims do not

have to first fight about whether they are permit ed to sue or

not, the way women now, without the Ordinance, have to fight

when they want to stop being hurt by pornography. With a