How can we justify not doing something about it, whether it
is a symptom or a cause?
Some people claim that pornography is irrelevant to violence against women. They say that pornography is new and contemporary and that rape, battery, and prostitution are old.
They say that pornography cannot be a cause of violence
against women because violence against women existed long
before pornography.
This is not true, but suppose it were.
Even if pornography is a cause now, and never was before,
we would have to do something about it now. Think about environmental pollution. It causes various kinds of cancer (though those who make the pollution don’t think so). Cancer existed
long before the kinds of environmental pollution that come
from highly industrialized societies. But this does not mean that
pollution in our society does not cause cancer in our society.
In fact, pornography has a long history in Western civilization (and in Asian and other civilizations too). Its history is as long as the documented history of rape and prostitution (the socal ed oldest profession, the misogynist meaning being that as
long as there have been women, women have prostituted themselves). We can trace pornography without any dif iculty back as far as ancient Greece in the West. Pornography is a Greek
word. It means the graphic depiction of women as the lowest,
most vile whores. It refers to writing, etching, or drawing of
women who, in real life, were kept in female sexual slavery in
ancient Greece. Pornography has always, as far back as we can
go, had to do with exploiting, debasing, and violating women in
forced sex. Drawings, etchings, and writings were made of or
about the female sex slaves performing forced sex acts. Women
were used in brothels to create live pornography for men.
The invention of the camera changed the social reality of pornography. First, it created a bigger market for live women be-74
Pornography and Civil Rights
cause live women were required to make the photographs.
Someone could make a drawing out of his imagination or
memory. A photograph turned a living woman into an exploited
pornographic commodity. Pornography less and less existed in
the realm of drawing, contiguous with art and imagination, and
more and more it existed in the purposeful and exciting realm
of documented sexual violation. Photographs acquired commercial primacy, and this meant that pornography required the sexual exploitation and violation of real women to exist in a
world redefined by the camera. Second, mass means of producing the photographs democratized pornography. As writing, etching, or drawing, or as live shows in brothels, it had been
the domain of rich men, aristocrats. Now the technology made
it available to al men. Video has remarkably furthered this
trend, bringing pornography into the home, both the product
itself and the video camera that al ows the man to make his own
pornography of his wife or lover or child.
The role of writ en or drawn pornography in sexual abuse
before the invention of the camera was not studied. The rights
of women did not matter. The rights of women in brothels
were not an issue. Violence against women did not mat er. The
use of women in live pornographic scenarios or as models for
pornographic drawings did not mat er to the men who used
them or to the society that allowed these uses of women. If
