Is some gay men’s access to pictures of subordinating gay sex
more important than the right of men or boys not to be raped
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Pornography and Civil Rights
or violated so that pictures can be made of them, or the desire
of other gay men to shape a community free of eroticized self-
hatred? The point of considering all these questions at once
is this: if harm is done, and it is based on gender, neither the
particular sex acts performed nor the gender of those who get
hurt should determine whether their civil rights are protected
or not.
Because the particular acts do not change the damage done,
and because harm is stil harm when done by women to women
and by men to men, there is no special exemption in the Ordinance for gay and lesbian materials. We are frankly mystified as well as anguished that there are lesbians who identify with
and defend the pornographers’ woman-hating so-called lesbian sexuality. Al lesbians have necessarily suf ered from the pornographers’ definition of lesbian that is so central to the
violence, hatred, contempt, and discrimination directed
against lesbians in society. Al lesbians, in societies saturated
with pornography must live with the fact that the pornographers have made lesbianism into a pornographic spectacle in the eyes of men.
The Ordinance does not direct itself specifically against
same-sex materials as obscenity law has (with very lit le effect
in the United States). As a mat er of fact, it may be difficult to
persuade courts to apply the Ordinance to same-sex materials for the same reason that sex-discrimination law has been so useless to advancing the civil rights of gay men and lesbians: sex-discrimination law, of which the Ordinance is a part, has been largely obsessed with what it cal s “the gender difference” as defining its concerns. This implicit heterosexual bias to its definition of gender means that it has been difficult for
courts to see sex discrimination in a same-sex context. If the
at empt to apply the Ordinance to harmful gay and lesbian
pornography succeeds, it would provide a precedent that
could be used to apply sex-discrimination prohibitions to
other civil-rights violations of gay men and lesbians. It would
become part of a sexual politics and a civil-rights law that connects a feminist critique of male supremacy with a politics of gay and lesbian liberation.
Questions and Answers
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Q: What do the American people think?
A: First, we have to tel you that a lot of people haven’t been
asked or haven’t been listened to. The women and children who
have been hurt through pornography—used to make it or had
it used on them in sexual assault—are stil a largely unidentified
population, in part because the pornographers retaliate. We wil
give you just one example. In Minneapolis, women went before
the City Council to say how they had been hurt in or by pornography. The experiences were horrible. They included rape, gang-rape, battery, torture, rape by animals, and more. Subsequently, one nationally distributed pornography magazine
published an article that identified the women by name and used
direct quotes from their testimony—quotes highlighted and
chosen to emphasize graphic sexual violence. As a result of this