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

about pornography: that is, by articulating a political opposition to it. A New York Times reporter was told by a chief editor that The New York Times would no longer carry news stories

about the feminist political opposition to pornography. This

occurred in 1978, after the reporter had published a superb

news story objectively describing a major conference on pornography at New York University law School. The chief editor said that such news stories created a feeling against pornography that threatened the First Amendment. The New York 78

Pornography and Civil Rights

Times itself published an editorial denouncing the feminists reported on in the news story, characterizing our positions as

“shril ” and “hysterical. ” News stories disappeared from those

pages for many years. When impossible to suppress, such stories have been carried, usually slanted against us. Feminist authors writing on pornography have been repeatedly told

that such books would not be published because they endangered First Amendment rights. Magazine editors have rejected numerous articles by feminist authors opposing pornography on the same grounds: that to publish the articles would jeopardize the First Amendment. The same people who say the

pornographers must be protected because everything must be

published and protected are the first to say that feminist work

opposing pornography must not be published in order to protect free speech.

The feminist version of this pernicious nonsense has been the

insistence on having a propornography side represented whenever antipornography politics are expressed, in published or spoken forums. There are feminist right-to-life activists, but no

one in the women’s movement has been insisting that they get

equal time, let alone that they speak wherever and whenever

prochoice politics are expressed. These feminist right-to-life

groups began on the radical Left, in fact, in the nonviolence

movement. Now there are also more politically moderate feminists who are prolife and at the same time for the Equal Rights Amendment and the rest of the feminist agenda. Not only is

their participation not required at feminist events; they are not

allowed in the door. It is only on the issue of pornography that

those who support the pornography industry in the name of

what they cal feminism must speak whenever those who oppose pornography speak. Since pornography is a distillation of woman hating, linked in women’s experience to rape, battery,

incest, and forced prostitution, it is impossible to understand

how the moral and political imperative developed to have so-

called feminists speak in behalf of pornography. This can only

be understood as the feminist version of shut up.

The mainstream says: shut up to protect free speech. Feminists say shut up because if you speak we wil have other women Questions and Answers

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here calling themselves feminists to defend this exploitation of

women. In this way, we wil wipe out what you have said. We

don’t do this to anyone else who stands up for the rights of

women, but we wil do this to you because we want you to shut

up. You make us feel bad. We can’t stand up to the pornographers. They are too mean, too real, and too powerful. We want to celebrate women. We don’t want to have to face how

powerless we are in the face of organized, profit-making male

cruelty. It has been hard enough for us to face rape, incest, and

battery. So we are having these women in here who say they

are feminists but enjoy calling themselves “girls, ” and they

want us to have fun having sex now, and they say pornography