The big girls in the big of ice didn’t want to get their hands
dirty - the issue demanded at least an imagined descent down
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the social ladder. Lots of local NOW activists were fully
engaged in the fight against pornography and brought those
politics to the convention. Then there were what I take to be
honorable women who believed the pornographers' propaganda that the civil rights approach would hurt freedom of speech. Then there were the women, a small but determined
group, who thought that equality meant women using
pornography in the same ways that men did. We wanted a
resolution from NOW supporting the civil rights approach.
We got it, but, speaking for myself, at great emotional cost.
NOW runs its meetings using Robert’s rules of order,
which is democracy at its most degraded. One had to know
whether to hold up a red poster or a green poster or a yellow
poster to be recognized by the chair to speak. I can’t even now
articulate the points of order involved. When I got home, I
dreamt about those posters for months.
A vote was held on whether I could speak for Sonia Johnson.
The women voted no. So much for free speech. In place of
addressing the whole convention, we organized a meeting to
which anyone interested could come. I was speaking, and in
the middle NOW cut off the electricity for the mike. More
free speech. I was in tears, real y. The woman who cut off the
juice and then physically repossessed the mike - just following
orders, she said - claimed that we had not followed the rules
for holding our meeting. We had, but never mind.
Then the most miraculous thing happened. We had a suite
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Heartbreak
in the hotel, as did other subgroups of NOW, so that people
could come by, talk, pick up literature, find out for themselves
who we were and what we believed.
I was approached by a black woman who worked in the
hotel and asked if we would march down Bourbon Street
with the workers in the hotel and the local chapter of the
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now
(ACORN) to protest the pornography and prostitution so
densely located there. This woman might well have made my
bed that morning. It was an overwhelming mandate. Of
course we said yes and tried to get the NOW women to join,
which they pretty solidly refused to do.
New Orleans is like most other cities in the United States
in that the areas in which pornography and prostitution flourish are the areas in which poor people, largely people of color, live. We were being invited to stand up with them against the
parasitic exploitation of their lives, against the despoiling of
their living environment.
The group was poor. They took packages of paper plates,
wrote on the plates “No More Porn, ” and stuck the inscribed
plates up on storefronts and bars al along Bourbon Street.
Demonstrators also carried NOW logos. There were maybe a
hundred people marching (as opposed to the thousand or
so back in the hotel). I was privileged to speak out on the
street with my sisters, a bullhorn taking the place of a microphone.
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Sister, Can You Spare a Dime?
Meanwhile someone in the leadership of NOW had called
the police to alert them to an illegal march, a march without
a permit. As our rally came to an end and we were marching
out of the French Quarter the police approached. We ran. They
ar ested one of us at the back of the line. He, an organizer
from Minneapolis, went to jail for the night, a martyr for the
feminist cause. And it became a bad feminist habit for the rich
to rat out the poor, turn on the poor, keep themselves divided
from the poor - no mixing with the dispossessed. The ladies
with the cash to go to New Orleans from other parts of the
country did not want to be mistaken for the downtrodden.
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The Women
The first time a woman came up to me after a speech to say
that she had been in pornography was in Lincoln, Nebraska -
at a local NOW meeting in the heartland. I knew a lot about
pornography before I started writing Pornography: Men
Pos es ing Women because, as an intellectual, I had read a lot of
literary pornography and because, as a woman, I had prostituted. In pornography one found the map of male sexual dominance and one also found, as I said in a speech, “the
poor, the illiterate, mar ied women with no voice, women
forced into prostitution or kept from get ing out and women
raped, raped once, raped twice, raped more times than they
[could] count.”
Pornography brought me back to the world of my own
kind; I looked at a picture and I saw a live woman.
Some women were prostituted generation after generation
and, as one woman, a third-generation prostitute, said, “I’ve
done enough to raise a child and not make her a prostitute
and not make her a fourth generation. ”
I found pride - "I got a scar on my hand; you can’t real y
see it, but a guy tried to slice my throat, and I took the knife
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The Women
from him and I stabbed him back. To this day I don’t know if
he’s dead, but I don’t care because he was trying to take my
life. ”
I found women whose whole lives were consumed by
pornography: “I’ve been involved in pornography al my life
until 1987. I was gang-raped, that’s how I conceived my
daughter, and she was born in a brothel in Cleveland, Ohio”;
the child “was beaten to death by a trick - she used to get beat
up a lot by tricks. I’ve often wondered if some of the physical
damage that was done to her simply [was because] maybe a
child’s body wasn’t meant to be used that way, you know.
Maybe babies aren’t meant to be anally penetrated by things
or snakes or bot les or by men’s penises, but I don’t know for
sure. I’m not really sure about that because that’s what my life
was. ”
This same woman has “films of pornography that was taken
of me from the time I was a baby until just a few years ago. ”
I even found women wanting something from the system:
“I wish that this system, the courts and, you know, our judicial system that’s supposed to be there to help would have done something earlier in our life. I wish they would have
done something earlier in our daughter’s life and I wish that
they would do something now. ”
Women in pornography and prostitution talked to me, and
I became responsible for what I heard. I listened; I wrote; I
learned. I do not know why so many women trusted me
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