expressions but, with segregationists having enormous power in Congress and
nearly two centuries of racism saturating the society, no one
asked Blacks to make social policy that would cor ect socially
pervasive debasement. Instead, there was a
America’s segregationists, world-class racists by any measure.
It is not just that there are limits to what law can do; there
were serious limits to what this society would even consider
doing. There stil are.
FACTS:
1. Women were chattel property until the early part of the
twentieth century.
2. The Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed equal
protection under the law and, with the Fifteenth Amendment, gave Black men the right to vote, intentionally excluded women.
3. Women did not have a constitutionally protected right to
vote until 1920. In 1971, the Supreme Court said women
had a right to equal protection under the law.
4. “Sex” was amended to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the
section concerning hiring practices by segregationists to
try to defeat the whole bill.
5. The right to choose abortion is a right of privacy under
law, not a right of equality.
6. When discrimination against women takes place in the
same ways as discrimination against Blacks, there are civil-
14
Pornography and Civil Rights
rights remedies. When the pat erns of discrimination are
different, having different origins and different dynamics, there are no such remedies, no mat er how egregious the discrimination is or how violating the pat erns of sex-based inequality are.
In the job market, women have been forcibly excluded and
forcibly segregated. The low status of women has been partly
created and partly maintained through the exclusion and the
segregation. Civil-rights law is used to fight the exclusion and
the segregation in themselves and to fight the continuing bad
effects of past segregation.
In the common fabric of everyday life, women are, in a
sense, forcibly integrated, intimately. integrated, with society
organized so that women’s sexual and reproductive capacities
have been control ed by men. Women have been kept out of
the marketplace to be kept in the home, or kept in the bed,
or kept in the kitchen, or kept pregnant. Social institutions,
pat erns, and practices force women to fulfill the sexual and
reproductive imperatives of men.
Because so much of women’s social inequality centers on
forced sexual and reproductive compliance, the ways in which
women are debased in rights and in personhood center on issues of bodily integrity, physical self- determination, and the social eradication of forced sex or sexual abuse. Systematic violations of women’s rights to safety, dignity, and civil equality take the form of rape, battery, incest, prostitution, sexualized
torture, and sexualized murder, all of which are endemic in
this society now. These are acts of sex-based hate directed
