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

whose heads are cut and spliced onto other women’s bodies

and genitals, or who are viciously caricatured in pornographic cartoons.

Al pornography defames women as a class by devaluing

them in the eyes of those who consume the material. It links

women’s reputation and women’s sexuality by degrading

both, and thus limits the possibilities for individual women.

But some pornography goes further against specific individuals by undermining their individual reputations and destroying their standing in the community and their work possibilities. Defamation through pornography is a form of public rape that multiplies humiliation as it broadcasts it, takes away

a woman’s integrity, violates her personal boundaries, shat ers

her own self-respect in the mirror of the world around her,

making an image of her that she walks into irrevocably whenever she walks down the street, suffocating her in her own bed at night. It undermines her authority. By lowering the floor

for acceptable treatment of her, it makes possible virtually anything to be said about her and targets her for physical abuse as wel . Those who are singled out for this exemplary form of

public hanging are selected because they are women who are

visibly self-possessed, effective, articulate, successful, feminist,

or beautiful in a way the pornographers must defile, use, own,

steal, sel .

Defenses

It shall not be a defense that the defendant in an action

under this law did not know or intend that the materials were pornography or sex discrimination, except that in an action for damages for trafficking and in an

action for damages against a publisher, sel er, exhibitor, or distributor for assault, it shall be a defense that the defendant did not know or have reason to know

that the materials were pornography.

Either pornography does harm or it does not. If it does, it

does not stop doing so because the pornographers do not know

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Pornography and Civil Rights

that it is pornography or that it does harm. But pornographers

know exactly what they are doing and to whom; they just do

not care. The problem is, the more they know what they are

doing, the more difficult, it becomes to prove that they know,

because they are far bet er at covering up what they do than

are those who act unconsciously or inadvertently. As a result,

requiring victims to prove that perpetrators like pornographers know or intend their acts against them is an invitation to cover-ups that would make the Ordinance a dead letter.

The main practical purposes of the Ordinance are to stop

the harm of pornography from continuing and to compensate direct victims in a way that both helps them and provides some deterrent to future abuse. In light of these purposes,

this provision recognizes the difference between major pornography distributors and the legitimate booksellers who sell an occasional item of pornography. Women and children are

not being bought and sold in this country so that legitimate

booksellers can sell the occasional copy of the Marquis de

Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. But women and children are being

raped because they are doing this. Therefore, they can be sued

for selling materials that cause assault. If they were sued for

damages for traf icking, they could argue that they did not

know or intend what they sold to be pornography. They might

win and they might not.

A big producer or distributor of pornography would have