and behaviors of aggression and other discrimination by men
against women. Women testified that pornography was used
to break their self-esteem, to train them to sexual submission,
to season them to forced sex, to intimidate them out of job opportunities, to blackmail them into prostitution and keep them there, to terrorize and humiliate them into sexual compliance,
and to silence their dissent. They told how it takes coercion to
make pornography, how pornography is forced on women and
children in ways that give them no choice about viewing the
pornography or performing the sex. They told how pornography stimulates and condones rape, battery, sexual harassment, sexual abuse of children, and forced prostitution. We learned from the testimony that the more pornography men
see, the more abusive and violent they want it to be; the more
abusive and violent it becomes, the more they enjoy it, the more
abusive and violent they become, and the less harm they see in
it. In other words, pornography’s consumers become unable
to see its harm because they are enjoying it sexually. Men often
think that they use pornography but do not do these things.
But the evidence makes clear that pornography makes it impossible for them to tell when sex is forced, that women are The Ordinance
47
human, and that rape is rape. Evidence of a direct cor elation
between the rate of reported rape and consumption figures of
major men's entertainment magazines supports this. Pornography makes men hostile and aggressive toward women, and it makes women silent. Anyone who does not believe this should
speak out against pornography in public some time.
Pornography also engenders sex discrimination. By
making a public spectacle and a public celebration of the
worthlessness of women, by valuing women as sluts, by defining women according to our availability for sexual use, pornography makes al women’s social worthlessness into a public standard. Do you think such a being is likely to become Chairman of the Board? Vice President of the United States?
Would you hire a “cunt” to represent you? Perform surgery
on you? Run your university? Edit your broadcast? Would
you promote one above a man? Pornography’s consumers
make decisions every day over women’s employment and educational opportunities. They decide how women wil be hired, advanced, what we are worth being paid, what our
grades are, whether to give us credit, whether to publish our
work. They also decide whether or not to sexually harass us,
and whether other pornography consumers have sexually
harassed us when we say they have. They raise and teach our
children and man our police forces and speak from our pulpits and write our news and our songs and our laws, telling us what women are and what girls can be. Pornography is their
Dr. Spock, their Bible, their Constitution. It is so basic it is a
habit, their standard for what they “know” without knowing
they know it. It simply makes up how they see the world, a
world in which women, in order to be treated as equals, must
try to convince them that we are exceptions among women,
that is, that we, although female, are just as human as they
are. In creating pervasive and invisible bigotry, in addition to
constituting sex discrimination in itself, pornography is utterly inconsistent with any real progress toward sex equality for women.
Although the social position of men, children, and transsexuals is not absolutely defined by pornography in the way 48
Pornography and Civil Rights
