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

86

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

87

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

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