and defends the abuser and ignores and stigmatizes. the
abused, undermines the victim’s sense of personal ef icacy,
trust, belief in political action, and faith in the legal process.
By the time individuals recover sufficiently to act, the time period within which they must complain before the injury expires has long elapsed. Discrimination laws customarily allow a disgracefully and uniquely short several- month period within which to complain. The six-year period provided by the Ordinance is more like the usual period allowed for personal
injuries the law takes seriously. The time period would start
to run from the last date the injury was done, except when it
was argued that there was a good reason to start it later—for
example, because the victim was a child when the abuse ended,
or because an adult victim remained under duress or threat
although the forced pornographic performances had ended.
Civil Rights and Speech
The Ordinance takes power from some of the most powerful people in society—those who can buy and sel other human beings for intimate gratification—and gives it to some of the
most powerless people in society—those who, as a class, have
previously been intimately violated with impunity. Given the
way the law has framed the pornography question to benefit
the powerful, one could expect that the first judicial response
to this redistribution would be negative. It was. In 1985, in a
lawsuit brought by a media group (some pornographers, most
not) against the City of Indianapolis for passing the Ordinance, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit found that the Ordinance violated the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. The decision conceded that pornography does the harm we say it does, and the legislature said it did: contributing materially to rape and other sexual
violence, constituting a form of subordination in itself, and
being partly responsible for second-class citizenship in many
forms, including economic ones. But the decision held the
pornography was more important—indeed, that one could
tell how important the pornography was by the harm that it
did.Miscasting the Ordinance into obscenity’s old drama of
ideas, the decision assumed that the Ordinance restricted
ideas even though the Indianapolis Ordinance was confined
to four practices: coercion into pornography, forcing pornography on a person, assault due to specific pornography, and traf icking in materials that subordinate women. So far as the
Ordinance is concerned, al the ideas pornography expresses
can be expressed—so long as coercion, force, assault, or trafficking in subordination is not involved. These are acts, not viewpoints or ideas. Coercion is not a fantasy. Force is not a
symbol. Assault is not a representation. Trafficking in subordination is an activity two times over—once as traf icking and once as subordination—not just a mental event.
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Pornography and Civil Rights
Under United States law, speech interests are regularly found
les important than other interests when courts decide that pictures and words are false, obscene, indecent, racist, coercive, threatening, intrusive, or even inconvenient or inaesthetic.
Using a child to make sex pictures, or distributing or receiving
such pictures—whether or not the child is forced, whether or
not one knows that the child is a child, and whatever the sex
pictures show—is a crime for which one can be put in jail. Yet
the Seventh Circuit decision on the Ordinance tells women that
