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

or sexual atrocities can be visually documented. The issue is

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Pornography and Civil Rights'

rather, given the fact that someone must be lynched to make

a picture of a lynching, how is a picture of a lynching regarded, socially and legally. If it takes a lynching to show a lynching, what is the social dif erence, really, between seeing

a lynching and seeing a picture of one? What would it say

about the seriousness with which society regards lynching if

actual lynching is illegal but pictures of actual lynching are

protected and highly profitable and defended as a form of

freedom and a constitutional right? What would it say about

the seriousness and effectiveness of laws against lynching if

people paid good money to see it and the law looked the other

way, so long as they saw it in mass-produced form? What

would it say about one’s status if the society permits one to be

hung from trees and calls it entertainment—cal s it what it is

to those who enjoy it, rather than what it is to those to whom

it is done?

Courts have often sided with those who would lose power

if equality were taken seriously. One way courts have done this

is by invalidating effective measures against discrimination by

calling them discrimination in reverse, or reverse discrimination. The Court of Appeals did exactly this in its decision in the legal chal enge to the Ordinance: it called legislative action against discrimination itself a form of discrimination. The court thus actively supported discrimination by blocking legal

action against it. In other words, the court acted as if state-

sanctioned sex inequality were state neutrality on the subject

by holding that allowing citizens to pursue sex equality was

state-sanctioned discrimination. In this way, acting against discrimination was made indistinguishable from discrimination itself, and inequality was made indistinguishable from equality

as a state policy goal. Although the court did not for a moment question that pornography is a form of sex discrimination, it seemed not to understand that in protecting the pornographers, the court embraced admitted sex discrimination as state policy. In perhaps its final conceptual perversity, the

Seventh Circuit elevated the law against obscenity—and obscenity is nothing but an idea that depends on moral and value judgments, which themselves depend entirely on point of

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view—as a standard by which to find the Ordinance, which

restricts bigoted acts, unconstitutional as a form of “thought

control. ”

Yes, pornography is propaganda; yes, it is an expression of

male ideology; yes, it is hate literature; yes, it is the documentation of a crime; yes, it is an argument for sexual fascism; yes, it is a symbol, a representation, an artifact, a symptom of male

dominance; yes, it conveys ideas as any systematic social practice does. It is also often immoral, tasteless, ugly, and boring.

But none of this is what pornography distinctively is, how it

works, what is particularly harmful about it, or why we have

to stop it. Was the evil of the Holocaust what it said about Jews?

Was ending it a form of thought control? If Dachau had been

required to make anti-Semitic propaganda, should it have