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

been protected speech? Pornography is a systematic act

against women on every level of its social existence. It takes a

rape culture to require and permit it. It takes acts against

women to make it; selling it is a series of acts (transactions)

that provide the incentive to make it and mass-produce the

abuse; consuming it is an act against women and spawns more

acts that make many more women’s actual lives dangerous,

meaningless, and unequal. It is therefore an act against

women to protect and defend it.

Women, it is said, should be loyal to pornography because

our freedom and equality depend on protecting it. This is because pornography, it is said, is freedom and equality, so doing anything about it is repression, fascism, and censorship. In

practice, this has meant that whatever the pornographers do

is “speech, ” and whatever those who oppose them do is censorship. Actually, this is a mat er of point of view. Whoever takes the point of view that pornography is “speech” takes the

of icially protected viewpoint, hence is ut ering “speech” that

is protected as such.

Whoever takes the point of view that pornography is a practice of censorship and silence and institutionalized deprivation of liberty is, in this view, practicing censorship, even if only words are used. This point of view can be silenced in the

name of speech. Women screaming in pain in a pornography

62

Pornography and Civil Rights

film is “speech. ” Women screaming in the audiences to express their pain and dissent is breach of the peace and interferes with “speech. ” “Snuf ” is “speech. ” Demonstrators who use strong language to protest “Snuf ” are arrested for obscenity. When Penthouse hangs Asian women from trees, it is

“speech. ” When antipornography activist Nikki Craft leaflets

with the same photographs in protest, she is threatened with

arrest for public lewdness. When B. Dalton sells pornography

in a shopping mall displayed at a child’s eye level, that is

“speech. ” When Nikki Craft holds up the same pornography

in the same shopping mall in protest, she is detained in a back

room of B. Dalton’s by the police for contributing to the delinquency of minors. When pornographers make pornography of feminists, that is “speech. ” When publishers refuse to publish feminist work, saying that publishing Andrea Dworkin is bad for freedom of speech because of her opposition to pornography, that is the way freedom of “speech” is supposed to work. Nor could she get an article published discussing these

examples.

When the At orney General’s Commission on Pornography

wrote a let er to solicit information on pornography sales, the

Commission was sued by pornographers saying that these

words were intimidating, and a court enjoined publication of

the results. Now, the pornographers censor the government

in the name of freedom of speech, while those who speak of

women’s rights against pornographers are called censors for

trying to do something about it.

When the Seventh Circuit’s decision on the constitutionality of the Ordinance was appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court, a new kind of silence enveloped it: the silence of the powerful. The Court disposed of the case by a procedure called summary affirmance, meaning no writ en briefs, no oral arguments, and no reasons. This procedure, designed primarily for cases that prior law has clearly resolved, was highly unusual for the Court to use in this sort of case, one in which a federal Court of Appeals invalidated a local ordinance on a

U. S. constitutional ground on a theory the Supreme Court

had never heard before. The Supreme Court (with three dis-

Civil Rights and Speech