against a population presumed to be inferior in human worth.
These are means of keeping women subjugated as a group
with a low civil status and a degraded quality of life.
The second-class status of women is justified in the conviction that by nature women are sexually submissive, provoke and enjoy sexual aggression from men, and get sexual
pleasure from pain. By nature women are servile and the servility itself is sexual. We are below men in a civil and sexual The Meaning of Civil Rights
15
hierarchy that mimics the sex act. It is our sexual nature to
want to be used, exploited, or forced. Sex equality is seen to
violate the very natures of men and women, presuming a
sameness where none exists; and violations of women are seen
to be part of normal human nature, not the result of a coercive social system that devalues women.
Women need laws that address the ways in which women
are kept second-class: the institutional sanctions for violence
and violation,
equality, and self-esteem.
Principles:
1. Remedies for inequality must be derived from the specific
kinds and pat erns of inequality that exist. They must
address the real ways in which people are hurt.
2. Civil inferiority is social y coerced, not natural.
3. To dismantle the coercion, you have to figure out how
society organizes and maintains it.
4. Those who are civil y inferior are presumed to have a nature that deserves the treatment they get.
5. Women’s human rights are violated through sexual exploitation and abuse. Rape, battery, incest, prostitution, sexualized torture, and sexualized murder express contempt for the human worth of women and keep women second-class.
6. Sex-based violation can both express an at itude and be a
material means of keeping women down.
16
Pornography and Civil Rights
The Nature of Change
People seem to resist change and to defend the status quo
whatever it is. Sometimes the defenses are bigoted and violent.
Sometimes they are sophisticated and intellectual. If the status
quo is endangered, both kinds of defenses are called into play.
Inequality is made to seem normal and natural, whatever
social form it takes.
When some people have power and some people do not,
creating equality means taking power from those who have
too much and giving power to those who have too little. Social change requires the redistribution of power.
Those who have power over others tend to cal their power
“rights. ” When those they dominate want equality, those in
power say that important rights wil be violated if society changes.
In the segregated South, two kinds of “rights” were defended
