system was developed by the Quakers). After the publication
of Our Blood, I wrote a proposal for a book on prisons. I was
struck by the way prisons stayed the same through time and
place: the confinement of an individual in bad circumstances
with a sadistic edge and including al the prison rites of passage.
I was struck by how prisons were the only places in which men
were threatened with rape in a way analogous to the female
experience. I was struck by the common sadomasochistic
structure of the prison experience no mat er what the crime
or country or historical era. That proposal was rejected by a
slew of publishers. I found myself at a dead end.
But an odd redemption was at hand. I had noticed that in
al pornography one also found the prison as leitmotif, the
sexualization of confining and beating women, the ubiquitous
rape, the dominance and submission of the social world in
which women were literally and metaphorically imprisoned.
I decided to write on pornography because I could make
the same points - show the same inequities - as with prisons.
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Heartbreak
Pornography and prisons were built on cruelty and brutalization; the demeaning of the human body as a form of punishment; the worthlessness of the individual human being; restraint, confinement, tying, whipping, branding, torture,
penetration, and kicking as commonplace ordeals. Each was a
social construction that could be different but was not; each
incorporated and exploited isolation, dominance and submission, humiliation, and dehumanization. In each the effort was to control a human being by attacking human dignity. In each
the guilt of the imprisoned provided a license to animalize
persons, which in turn led to a recognition of the ways in
which animals were misused outside the prison, outside the
pornography. Arguably (but not always), those in prison had
commit ed an offense; the offense of women in pornography was in being women. In both prisons and pornography, sadomasochism was a universal dynamic; there was no chance for reciprocity or mutuality or an equality of communication.
In prison populations and in pornography, the most
aggressive rapist was at the top of the social structure. In
prison populations gender was created by who got fucked; so,
too, in pornography. It amazed me that in pornography the
prison was recreated repeatedly as the sexual environment
most conducive to the rape of women.
The one dif erence, unbridgeable, intractable, between prisons
and pornography was that prisoners were not expected to like
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Prisons
being in prison, whereas women were supposed to like each
and every abuse suffered in pornography.
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Sister, Can You
Spare a Dime?
In 1983 Catharine A. MacKinnon and I drafted, and the City
of Minneapolis passed, a civil law that held pornographers
responsible for the sexual abuse associated with the making
and consuming of pornography If a woman or girl was forced
into making pornography or if a woman or girl was raped or
assaulted because of pornography, the pornographer or retailer
could be held responsible for civil damages. If a woman
was forced to view pornography (commonplace in situations
of domestic abuse), the person or institution (a school, for
instance) that forced her could be held responsible. The burden
of proof was on the victim. In addition, the law defined
pornography as sex discrimination; this meant that pornography helped to create and maintain the second-class status of women in society - that turning a woman into an object or
using her body in violent, sexual y explicit ways contributed
to the devaluing of women in every part of life. The pornography itself was defined in the statute as a series of concrete scenarios in which women were sexual y subordinated to men.
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Sister, Can You Spare a Dime?
In 1984 I went with a group of activists and organizers to
the convention of the National Organization for Women in
order to get NOW’s support for this new approach to fighting
pornography.
The convention was held in New Orleans in a posh hotel.
Sonia Johnson, an activist especially associated with a radical
crusade to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, was running
for president of NOW, and she sur endered her time and space
so that I could address the convention on her behalf; our
understanding was that I would talk about pornography and
the new approach MacKinnon and I had developed.
It was a hot, hot city in every sense. Leaving the hotel one
saw the trafficking in women in virtually every venue along
Bourbon Street. The whole French Quarter, and Bourbon
Street in particular, was crowded with middle-aged men in
suits roving as if in gangs, dripping sweat, going from one sex
show to the next, searching for prostitutes and strippers.
In the hotel, NOW women were herded into caucuses and
divided into cliques. I'm a member of NOW, even though its
milksop politics deeply offend me. Now I was going to try to
persuade the members that they should pursue the difficult
and dangerous task of addressing pornography as a civil rights
issue for women.
It is hard to describe how insular NOW is. It is run on the
national level by women who want to play politics with the
big boys in Washington, D. C., where NOW’s national of ice
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Heartbreak
is located. I had, over the years, spoken at ral ies and events
organized by many local NOW chapters al over the country.
On the local level, my experience with NOW was entirely
wonderful. The members were valiant women, often the sole
staf for battered women’s shelters and rape crisis centers,
often the only organized progressive group in a smal town or
city. I’ve never met better women or bet er feminists. Those
who run the nationally visible NOW are different in kind:
they stick to safe issues and mimic the politics and strategies
of professional political lobbyists.
Soon after I came back from Amsterdam, I spoke at a ral y
organized by the local NOW chapter in Washington, D. C. At
the time the burning issue was the Equal Rights Amendment,
a proposed amendment to the U. S. Constitution that would
have given women a basic right to equality. There was a lot
of of icial (national) NOW literature on the Equal Rights
Amendment that I saw for the first time in D. C. I couldn’t
understand why reading it made me question the ERA - a
question I had only on contact with national NOW, its literature and its spokespeople. But of course, I did understand - I just wasn’t schooled yet in the ways of this duplicitous feminist organization. The literature was al about how the ERA would benefit men. Guts were sorely lacking even back then.
A decade later, the organization was torn over pornography.