But the War on Poverty taught us that bureaucrats are not very good at repairing holes in the human spirit. That is why the most important part of this must be up to you and to the rest of the black middle class. In the end, out of self-interest, white America will pay the price for domestic tranquillity. But there is very little now that whites can do in a direct way for the maimed and hurting citizens of the Underclass. For two decades, you have called them brother or sister. You have said they are family. If you believe these sentiments, you must go to them now. They need you more than they need white pity. Or white social workers. Or white cops. They need someone to love them. Soon. If you do not go, neither will anyone else. And then they will surely be doomed. So, in a different way, will all of us.
ESQUIRE,
March 1988
THE NEW VICTORIANS
Here they come, with their steel faces and inflamed eyes, their fearful visions and apocalyptic solutions: the New Victorians. The Cold War is over and Americans are desperate for a new enemy. The New Victorians have found one and, as usual, it is other Americans.
Look there, in a museum, there are photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. Of naked men! Of sex! And in magazines and movies and video stores, nothing but smut and filth and degradation! The New Victorians tremble at the terrifying sight of the naked female breast, the curly enticements of pubic hair, the heart-stopping reality of the human penis. Disgusting. Degrading. Moral collapse! And if the republic is to be saved, the enemy must be cast into eternal darkness. Or at least returned to the wonderful iron hypocrisies of the 19th century.
The collective public face of the New Victorians is made up of the usual suspects: Senator Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan, the television Bible-whackers. But in the past few years, these yahoo crusaders have increasingly found themselves marching with unfamiliar allies. For there, at the front of the parade, loudly pounding the drums, is a small group of self-styled radical feminists. Sexual crusades indeed make strange bedfellows.
The unlikely Lenin of the feminist wing of the New Victorians is a 46-year-old lawyer named Catharine MacKinnon. She is a tenured professor of law at the University of Michigan, but that is a blurry job description. Basically, MacKinnon is a professional feminist. That is to say that, like a priest, a theologian or a romantic revolutionary, she is exclusively dedicated to the service of a creed. MacKinnon’s feminist vision is not limited to the inarguable liberal formulas of equal pay for equal work, complete legal and political equality and full opportunity to compete with men. Like Lenin, she doesn’t want mere reform. She wants to overthrow the entire system of what she sees as male supremacy. During the past decade, when the country shifted to the right and millions of American women rejected the harder ideologies of feminism, MacKinnon labored on with revolutionary zeal.
That zeal was shaped by the social and sexual upheavals of the Sixties and Seventies. MacKinnon was born in Minnesota, where her father was a federal judge, a major player in the state’s Republican Party. Like her mother and grandmother, Catharine MacKinnon attended Smith College. In the Seventies she went to Yale Law School, worked with the Black Panthers and rallied against the Vietnam war. But when many of her classmates moved on to the real world and its dense textures of work and family, she stayed on in New Haven and found both a focus and an engine for her life in an almost religious embrace of the women’s movement. MacKinnon’s basic formulation was simple: “Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away.”
At Yale, MacKinnon created the first course in the women’s studies program but was never given tenure. For a decade she served as an itinerant lecturer or visiting professor at the best American law schools, including Yale, Chicago, Stanford and Harvard, delivering sermons on the problems of women and the law. As a legal theorist, she is credited with defining sexual harassment and was frequently cited during Justice Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings. As a public speaker, dripping with scorn and cold passion, she was always in demand. The elusive guarantee of tenure was finally granted at Michigan in 1989.
But for all MacKinnon’s passion and occasional brilliance, even some feminists and legal scholars who applaud her work on sexual harassment find the rest of her vision indefensible. She dismisses them all, firm in her belief that she has discovered the truth. In a series of manifestos and lawsuits, MacKinnon has defined the legal agenda of the New Victorians. Their common enemy is that vague concept: pornography. MacKinnon’s basic legal theory is that pornography is a form of sex discrimination. She says that it’s made by men for men, but it is harmful only to women. Therefore, women should have the right to sue those who produce it and sell it. Pornography, in MacKinnon’s view, is a civil rights issue.
Andrea Dworkin (author of Intercourse and Pornography: Men Possessing Women) functions as Trotsky to MacKinnon’s Lenin, providing rhetorical fire to her analytical ice. Dworkin came to speak before one of MacKinnon’s classes at the University of Minnesota in 1983 and the women have been friends and allies ever since. Here’s an example of Dworkin’s style: “Know thyself, if you are lucky enough to have a self that hasn’t been destroyed by rape in its many forms; and then know the bastard on top of you.”
Together, MacKinnon and Dworkin have had some limited successes. Hooking up at various times with such odd fellows as anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, local opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment or various mountebanks from the religious right, they drafted antiporn ordinances for Indianapolis; Bellingham, Washington; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Minneapolis and supported them with articles, interviews and public hearings. These proposed laws were either defeated by the voters, vetoed by local politicians or ruled unconstitutional by the courts. But the New Victorians did not surrender.
Last February, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that MacKinnon’s basic theory on pornography was correct. It upheld a law suppressing “obscene” material that “subordinates” women, stating that “materials portraying women as a class as objects for sexual exploitation and abuse have a negative impact on the individual’s sense of self-worth and acceptance.” Yes, the court admitted, this decision limits freedom of expression. But there was a superseding need to halt “the proliferation of materials which seriously offend the values fundamental to our society.”
This obviously was a major victory for the New Victorians and for MacKinnon herself; she had worked with a Toronto women’s group on the drafting of a brief that supported the Canadian bill. The Canadian court’s decision also provided a legal model for what the New Victorians want to see done in the United States. They are now trying to pass similar legislation in Massachusetts.
MacKinnon told The New York Times: “It’s for the woman whose husband comes home with a video, ties her to the bed, makes her watch and then forces her to do what they did in the video. It’s a civil rights law. It’s not censorship. It just makes pornographers responsible for the injuries they cause.”