or use, it means being bound, bat ered, tortured, harassed,
raped, and sometimes killed, or merely humiliated, molested,
objectified, and used, because someone who has more power
than they do, someone who matters, someone with rights, a full
human being and a ful citizen, gets pleasure from seeing it, or
doing it, or seeing it as a form of doing it. In a case under the
Ordinance, it could be shown at trial that in the hundreds and
hundreds of magazines and pictures and films and videocassettes and so-called books now available in outlets from adult stores to corner groceries, women’s legs are splayed in postures
of sexual submission, display, and access. We are named after
men’s insults to parts of our bodies and mated with animals.
We are hung like meat. Children are presented as adult
women; adult women are presented as children, fusing the
vulnerability of a child with the sluttish eagerness to be fucked
said to be natural to the female of every age. Racial hatred is
sexualized by making every racial stereotype into a sexual
fetish. Asian women are presented so passive they cannot be
said to be alive, bound so they are not recognizably human,
hanging from trees and light fixtures and clothes hooks in
closets. Black women are presented as animalistic bitches,
bruised and bleeding, struggling against their bonds. Jewish
women orgasm in re-enactments of death-camp tortures. In
so-called lesbian pornography, women do what men imagine
women do when men are not around, so men can watch. Pregnant women and nursing mothers, amputees and other disabled or il women and retarded girls are used for sexual excitement. In some pornography called “snuff, ” women or
children are tortured to death, murdered, to make a sex film.
Through its production, pornography is a traffic in female
sexual slavery. Through its consumption, pornography
further institutionalizes a subhuman, victimized, second-class
status for women by conditioning orgasm to sex inequality.
When men use pornography, they experience in their bodies
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Pornography and Civil Rights
that one-sided sex—sex between a person and a thing
that sexual use is sex, sexual abuse is sex, sexual domination
is sex. This is the sexuality they then demand, practice, and
purchase. Pornography makes sexism sexy. It is a major way
that gender hierarchy is enjoyed and practiced. Pornography
is a sacred, secret codebook that has both obscured and determined women’s lives. There laid bare is misogyny’s cold heart: sexual violation enjoyed, power and powerlessness as
sex. Pornography links sexual use and abuse with gender
inequality by equating them: the inequality between women
and men is both what is sexy about pornography and what is
sex discriminatory about it.
In the hearings in Minneapolis, the harm of pornography
was extensively documented in proceedings one observer, a
member of the city’s Civil Rights Commission, likened to the
Nuremburg trials. Researchers and clinicians documented
what women know from life: pornography increases at itudes
