writ en or drawn pornography was used in the sexual abuse
of women, prostitutes, or children, it did not mat er. None of
them had any legal rights of personhood.
The proliferation of pornography in our society, its use in
sexual assault, its widespread legitimacy, its legal impunity, its
accessibility, the need for real women to make the product in
a market constantly expanding in size and sadism, have presented the contemporary women’s movement with an emergency of staggering proportions: sexual sadism against women is mass entertainment; sexual exploitation of women
is protected as and widely understood to be a civil liberty of
men; the sexual violation of women in the pornography itself
is protected by the courts as “speech. ”
It’s a hell of a symptom, isn’t it?
Questions and Answers
75
Q: Okay, we try to dismiss pornography by saying it’s a symptom, not a cause, and we fight for pay equity even though low pay is a symptom. What other evidence is there of a double
standard?
A: In opposing pornography, feminists have been accused of
being essentially right-wing, or giving aid and comfort to the
political Right, or being in an alliance with the Right. These
charges were made long before the existence of the Ordinance. They were made as soon as feminists began to speak out about the woman hating in pornography and as soon as
feminists began to organize pickets and demonstrations to
protest the production and distribution of pornography. In
1970, feminists committed civil disobedience by sitting in at
the of ices of Grove Press to protest the publication of pornography there and the way Grove treated its women employees. The super-radical-leftist publisher/owner of Grove Press not only had the feminists arrested by the then very brutal New York City Police Department for criminal trespass on his private property—he also accused them of working for the
C. I. A. You can’t get a bigger charge of collusion than that one;
who cares that the man who made it was defending his profits, his pornography, his mistreatment of women workers (a/k/a “workers”)? Certainly, the Left saw him as a radical, not
as a capitalist. The Left continues to see pornographers as
radicals, not as capitalists. With the emergence of Jerry Fal-
wel on the national scene, feminists who opposed pornography were likened to Mr. Falwell, Feminist leaders were characterized as demagogues and puritanical opportunists in
ongoing campaigns of character assassination. Mr. Falwell
came to represent al that the Left detested in religion and
politics and feminists who opposed pornography were robbed
of their own political identities and convictions and caricatured as having his. Since Mr. Falwell had supported segregation in the 1960’s, had supported the Viet Nam War, currently does support the regime in South Africa and the militarism of Cold War anticommunism, opposes abortion
rights and gay rights, and since the feminist leaders of the an76
Pornography and Civil Rights
tipornography movement hold opposite views on each and
every issue, this was an extraordinary slander. But it was repeated as fact in mainstream newspaper articles and in the feminist press.
We don’t believe that this is done to people on other issues.
Take, for example, the often vituperative debate on the existence of the state of Israel. One of the women most active in calling feminists who oppose pornography right-wing has
writ en eloquently in behalf of the continued existence of the
