(i) City, state, and federally funded public libraries
or private and public university and college libraries
in which pornography is available for study, including
44
Pornography and Civil Rights
on open shelves but excluding special display presen-,
tations, shall not be construed to be traf icking in pornography.
(i ) Isolated passages or isolated parts shall not be
actionable under this section.
(i i) Any woman may file a complaint hereunder as
a woman acting against the subordination of women.
Any man, child, or transsexual who alleges injury
by pornography in the way women are injured by it
may also file a complaint.
The traf icking provision makes it possible for any woman
to bring a complaint against pornographers for subordinating
women. It is not necessary for an individual woman to show
that she has been harmed more than all other women have by
pornography. It is definitely necessary for her to prove that
the materials meet the definition of pornography, for which it
is necessary to prove that they do the harm of subordinating
women. A traf icking complaint would provide the opportunity for women to at empt to prove to the satisfaction of a trier of fact that there is a direct connection between the pornography and harm to women as a class. Such harm could include being targeted for rape, sexual harassment, battery, sexual
abuse as children, and forced prostitution. It would include
the harm of being seen and treated as a sexual thing rather
than as a human being—the harm of second-class citizenship
on the basis of gender. Sources of proof would be the same as
those used as the factual basis for passing the Ordinance: the
testimony of direct victims and other authorities and the materials themselves. The argument would be that pornography demonstrably makes women’s lives dangerous and second
class, that pornography sets the standard for the way any
woman can be treated, that so long as it is protected women
wil not be. So long as it can be done, it wil continue to be
done—to a woman. Which woman is only a mat er of roulet e.
Women in pornography are bound, bat ered, tortured,
harassed, raped, and sometimes killed. Or, in the glossy men’s
entertainment magazines, they are “merely” humiliated,
The Ordinance
45
molested, objectified, and used. In al pornography, they are
prostituted. This is done because it means sexual pleasure to
pornography’s consumers and profits to its providers. But to
the women and children who are exploited through its making
