by Pete Hamill
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.”
That is the heart of this grim little crusade. They want pornographers to disappear under the threat of civil lawsuits. But Massachusetts obviously is a limited target, the focus of parochial attention. They have grander plans for us all. Like the wonderful people who brought us Prohibition (and the Mob), MacKinnon and her allies among the New Victorians want to impose their vision and their rules on the entire country. The likes of Orrin Hatch, Arlen Specter and Alan Simpson moved Senate Bill 1521 out of committee, thus urging their colleagues in the Senate to make the furious, fear-driven visions of MacKinnon and Dworkin the law of the land.
The bill is officially called the Pornography Victims’ Compensation Act, and it would allow victims of sex crimes to sue producers and distributors of sexual material if the victims can prove the material incited the crimes. The legislation has been nicknamed the Bundy Bill, after mass killer Ted Bundy, who claimed on the eve of his execution that pornography made him do it. If it passes and is upheld in the current right-wing Supreme Court, Bundy’s final victim will surely be the First Amendment.
MacKinnon believes that in America the law is the essential tool of social change. In a narrow sense, this is certainly true. The civil rights of blacks, for example, were more radically altered by Brown vs. Board of Education than by many years of prayer, argument and human suffering. But she goes on to insist that the law is not neutral but male, conceived by men to serve the interests of male power. Today, MacKinnon insists, the law serves the interests of male supremacy. And to change the present power arrangements in the United States, the law must be used against itself.
“Our law is designed to … help make sex equality real,” MacKinnon has written. “Pornography is a practice of discrimination on the basis of sex, on one level because of its role in creating and maintaining sex as a basis for discrimination. It harms many women one at a time and helps keep all women in an inferior status by defining our subordination as our sexuality and equating that with gender.”
Surely, that assigns far more power to pornography than it could ever have. But even if you agree with its claims, the question is whether more laws are needed. MacKinnon knows that if a woman is coerced into making a porno film, the people who abused her are subject to a variety of charges, including kidnapping, assault, imprisonment and invasion of privacy. But MacKinnon and Dworkin insist the present laws are not enough. In a discussion of Minneapolis’ proposed antiporn ordinance, they said of pornographic acts: “No existing laws are effective against them. If they were, pornography would not flourish as it does, and its victims would not be victimized through it as they are.” In other words, because the present laws don’t work, add another law. Maybe that will work.
The world as MacKinnon sees it is now “a pornographic place” and, as a result, women are being held down, tied up and destroyed. “Men treat women as who they see women as being,” MacKinnon writes. “Pornography constructs who that is. Men’s power over women means that the way men see women defines who women can be. Pornography is that way. … It is not a distortion, reflection, projection, expression, fantasy, representation or symbol, either. It is a sexual reality.”
Of course, common sense tells us otherwise. The vast majority of men simply don’t use pornography to “construct” women, because the vast majority of men don’t ever see much pornography. And the vast majority of men don’t spend their days and nights dreaming of inflicting cruelties on women and then carrying them out. If they did, Americans would be up to their rib cages in blood. There are violent men and there is violent pornography (estimated by one study at about five percent of the total produced in the United States). But MacKinnon isn’t attacking only the violence she says suffuses the “pornotopia”; she is after pornography itself, as she and her allies define it.
The word that names that concept, as Walter Kendrick points out in his 1987 history of the subject, The Secret Museum, can be traced back to the Greek pornographoi (“whore-painter”), apparently coined by the second-century writer Athenaeus and promptly forgotten. The word was revived, appropriately, during the Victorian era, and by 1975 the American Heritage Dictionary was defining it as “written, graphic, or other forms of communication intended to excite lascivious feelings.”
The inequality of women and men in this poor world goes back at least to the late Neolithic Period, long before the creation of pornography or its naming. But MacKinnon and the radical feminists insist that such inequality was “constructed” by pornography. And obviously, the current usage of the word was too mild to serve their purposes. They needed to make it more specific. In Pornography and Civil Rights, a 1988 pamphlet that MacKinnon wrote with Dworkin, it is defined as follows:
Pornography is the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words that also include one or more of the following: (i) women are presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things or commodities; or (ii) women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or (iii) women are presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or (iv) women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or (v) women are presented in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility or display; or (vi) women’s body parts — including but not limited to vaginas, breasts or buttocks — are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or (vii) women are presented as whores by nature; or (viii) women are presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or (ix) women are presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.
The use of men, children or transsexuals in the place of women in [the acts cited in the paragraph] above is also pornography.
Obviously, in spite of the specifics, this is a great vague glob of a definition. MacKinnon would most certainly ban Playboy, which she says reduces women to mere objects for the use of men. But her definition of pornography limned in Pornography and Civil Rights could cover everything from the latest Madonna video to the novels of Henry Miller, Al Capp’s Moonbeam McSwine and Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo, acres of surrealist paintings, the Koran and James Cagney hitting Mae Clarke with that grapefruit. We would see the last of Black Bun Busters, but we could also lose Don Giovanni. The great flaw in the antiporn agitation is that it’s based on a mystery: the elusive nature of sexuality.
MacKinnon and Dworkin assume that descriptions of sexual cruelty incite men. They write: “Basically, for pornography to work sexually with its major market, which is heterosexual men, it must excite the penis.” And “to accomplish its end, it must show sex and subordinate a woman at the same time.”
And they follow with an immense leap of logic: “Subordination includes objectification, hierarchy, forced submission and violence.”
None of this elaboration solves the basic mystery of sexual excitement. Across the centuries, men have been excited by everything from high heels and nuns’ habits to veiled faces and the aroma of rose petals. Some find erotic inspiration in Rubens, others in Giacometti; in the complex mesh of sexuality, there are no rules. Some men may get excited at written or visual images of women being subordinated, others may see those images as appalling and many would be indifferent to them.
But to think that banning pornography will bring about the political goal of eliminating human inequalities or hierarchies is absurd. The world has always been composed of hierarchies: the strong over the weak, the smart above the dumb, the talented above the ordinary. MacKinnon may not like the existence of those hierarchies (nor the liberal project of protecting the weak, the dumb and the ordinary), but they are unlikely to be changed by a
municipal ordinance banning Three-Way Girls. Some feminists would tell you that just being a wife is a condition of subordination. There have been hundreds of novels written by literature professors that relate sexual affairs between male teachers and female students; are such works automatically pornographic? The boss-worker equation has been examined in hundreds of thousands of novels, short stories, movies and cartoons. Does that mean that their relationships include “objectification, hierarchy, forced submission and violence”? And if, heaven forbid, they have sex, are they actors in pornography?
MacKinnon and Dworkin allow no room for such questions. Pornography, as they define it, is everywhere around them, the defining presence in American society. They write:
Pornographers’ consumers make decisions every day over women’s employment and educational opportunities. They decide how women will be hired, advanced, what we are worth being paid, what our grades are, whether to give us credit, whether to publish our work.…They raise and teach our children and man our police forces and speak from our pulpits and write our news and our songs and our laws, telling us what women are and what girls can be. Pornography is their Dr. Spock, their Bible, their Constitution.
If that torrid vision were true, you would be forced to lose all hope for the nation; there would be almost nobody left who is not part of the pornographic lodge. But common sense tells us that the assertion is not true. It is an almost clinically paranoid view of reality (try substituting “communists” or “Jews” for “pornographer’s consumers”). Perhaps more important, it is based on a profound ignorance of men.
Like most men I know, I haven’t seen or read much hard-core pornography. I gave up after 90 pages of The 120 Days of Sodom, the alleged masterpiece by the Marquis de Sade. I found the anonymous Victorian chronicle My Secret Life as repetitive in its sexual scorekeeping as a sports autobiography. Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones held my attention more than the average Doris Day movie ever did, but I thought Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee was far more erotic. That’s me. One person.
But in a lifetime as a man, growing up in a Brooklyn slum, as a sailor in the Navy, as a student in Mexico, as a reporter who moved among cops and criminals, schoolteachers and preachers, musicians and athletes, drunks and bartenders, I have never heard anyone celebrate pornography as defined by MacKinnon and Dworkin. Men talk about sex, of course; though the men who talk the most are usually getting the least. And they talk about women, too; but not so often as women think they do. Most S&M books (and acts) are dismissed by most men as freak shows. Even by the bad guys. Every criminal I’ve known (there are many) has told me that in prison the rapist is the most loathed of all prisoners, except, perhaps, those jailed for abusing children. Pornography simply wasn’t central to their lives and usually wasn’t even marginal.
I’m hardly an innocent about the realities of sexual violence. As a reporter for more than three decades, I’ve seen more brutalized bodies of men and women than most people. But their degradation certainly does nothing at all for my penis. I don’t think there is any such animal as a “typical” man. But most men I’ve known are like me: They have no interest in this junk.
My own lack of interest in the hard-core is based on another critique: The people are not people, they are abstractions. In all pornography, men and women are reduced to their genitals.
Oddly enough, that is precisely the way MacKinnon, Dworkin and most of the New Victorians see human beings: as abstractions. They speak of generalized women who are given names and faces only when they are victims. And over and over again, MacKinnon speaks about men as if they all behaved in the same way and were sexually excited by the same imagery. But which men are they talking about? Read this chilly prose and you are asked to believe that Seamus Heaney and Michael Jordan, Sean Connery and François Mitterrand, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Arnold Schwarzenegger, along with auto mechanics, bread-truck drivers, carpenters and guitar players, are all fully covered by the same word, respond to the same stimuli and are equally dedicated to the subordination of women. That is absurd.
But this sectarian narrowness does help define their vision of human life in this world. That vision is descended from a basic Victorian assumption: All men are beasts and all women are innocents. Women fall into vice or degradation only at the hands of cruel, unscrupulous, power-obsessed men. They have no free will and never choose their own loss of grace. Men only see women the way they are presented in pornography and use pornography as a kind of male instruction manual to maintain all forms of supremacy. Women are never brutal, corrupt or evil and they never truly choose to make porno films, dance topless, pose for centerfolds, work as secretaries or, worst of all, get married. Original sin was the fault of men. Eve was framed.
These women claim to know what billions of other women were never smart enough, or enlightened enough, to understand: Sexual intercourse is the essential act of male domination, created by a sinister male cabal to hurt and humiliate all women and thus maintain power over them forever. As Maureen Mullarkey has written in The Nation: “In the Dworkin-MacKinnon pornotopia, there are only the fuckers and the fuckees. The sooner the fuckers’ books are burned, the better.” She doesn’t exaggerate. According to Dworkin, all women are “force-fucked,” either directly through the crime of rape or by the male power of mass media, by male economic power or by the male version of the law.
It doesn’t matter to the New Victorians that the vast majority of women, even many proud feminists, don’t see the world the way they do. With the same amazing knowledge of the entire human race that allows her to speak so glibly about men, MacKinnon dismisses their viewpoints as well.
At a 1987 conference organized by Women Against Pornography, MacKinnon was blunt about the pro-sex feminists who had formed the Feminists Against Censorship Taskforce. That group included such women as Betty Friedan, Adrienne Rich and Rita Mae Brown. “The labor movement had its scabs, the slavery movement had its Uncle Toms,” MacKinnon said, “and we have FACT.” In another enlightening speech she simply dismissed her feminist opponents as “house niggers who sided with the masters.”
Today, absolutely certain of their rectitude, totally free of doubt, equipped with an understanding of human beings that has eluded all previous generations, MacKinnon, Dworkin and their allies have been shaping a Victorian solution to their Victorian nightmares. That solution is, pardon the expression, paternalistic. As MacKinnon writes: “Some of the same reasons children are granted some specific legal avenues for redress …also hold true for the social position of women compared to men.” Since women are, in the MacKinnon view, essentially children, they must be shielded from harm, corruption and filthy thoughts. The savage impulses of the male must be caged. And women must be alerted to the true nature of the beast.
“If we live in a world that pornography creates through the power of men in a male-dominated situation,” MacKinnon writes, “the issue is not what the harm of pornography is but how that harm is to become visible.”
That’s it: Simply make harm visible and we shall live happily ever after. Common sense and wide experience count for nothing. They know that men are loathsome and are clear about how to tame them. Once tamed, they can be subverted, their powers over women will vanish and the grand Utopia of complete equality will arrive for all. That bleak vision of human nature has its own escalating logic, just as Lenin’s sentimental abstraction of the proletariat led inevitably to the gulag. In her bizarre 257-page book Intercourse, Dworkin repeats the theory that MacKinnon and other academic feminists accept as proven: Gender is a mere “social construct,” enforced, in Dworkin’s elegant phrase, by “vagina-specific fucking.”
Once more, the Victorian sense of sexual horror permeates the discussion. If men are the source of all savagery to women, then sexual intercourse with men is itself a savage act. Women who claim to enjoy heterosexual lovemaking are, says Dworkin, “collaborators, more base in their collaboration than other collaborators have ever been, experiencing pleasure i
n their own inferiority, calling intercourse freedom.”
Forget whips, chains and handcuffs. All heterosexual intercourse is disgusting, an act of physical and psychic invasion. As Dworkin writes: “The woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally: occupied even if there has been no resistance, no force; even if the occupied person said yes please, yes hurry, yes more.”
Obviously, this is a total denial of any biologically driven sexual need. To follow the logic to its inevitable conclusion, the only pure feminists, the only noncollaborators with the enemy, would be celibates or lesbians. Alas, billions of human beings, male and female, from Tibet to Miami, don’t see the world — or the nature of sexuality — that way. They keep on doing what men and women have been doing since before history or the invention of religion. To the New Victorians this must be infuriating. And so they will attempt an act of hubris that even the old Victorians, in their imperial arrogance, did not try. They will correct human nature.
As Americans, MacKinnon, Dworkin and their allies have one major roadblock to their crusade: the Constitution. In their attack on “First Amendment absolutism,” the New Victorians want to discard a basic tenet of our lives: It doesn’t matter what we say, it is what we do that matters. That is a mere sentimentality, beloved of the hated liberals and the American Civil Liberties Union. Feminism first, says MacKinnon, the legal theorist, the law second. Or put another way: “The bottom line of the First Amendment is that porn stays. Our bottom line is that porn goes. We’re going to win in the long term.”