XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography (9 page)

Most pornography is bad art. Indeed, pornography probably contains less artistic value than any other genre of literature and art. The reason for this is simple. Whenever a genre is stigmatized (or criminalized), the best writers and minds tend to abandon it. Those authors-such as D. H.

Lawrence or James Branch Cabell or Henry Miller-who persist in bringing their genius to bear are persecuted without mercy. No wonder the industry is dominated by those who rush to make a quick profit rather than a profound insight.

Nevertheless, I believe the quality of pornography is often maligned. Pornography tends to be judged by the worst examples within the genre. Anti-pornographers do not hold up copies of D.

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H. Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover
or Erica Jong's
Fear of Flying.
They choose the most repulsive examples they can find and call them "representative." What other genre could withstand being judged by its poorest instances?

CONCLUSION

To repeat: The definition used in this book is:
Pornography is the explicit artistic depiction of
men and/or women as sexual beings.
No area of human psychology needs exploration and understanding as much as sexuality does. At the turn of the century, Freud revolutionized the world's view of sex. Suddenly, it became a popular topic. It became almost a social duty to discuss and examine sex. Now antipornography feminists are trying to turn back the clock and shut women's sexuality away behind the locked doors of political correctness. Their first line of attack is to define the debate in their own terms.

The first line of defense is to flatly reject such maneuvering.

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"Comstockery is the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States. Europe
likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that
America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all."

-
George Bernard Shaw

Sexually correct history considers the graphic depiction of sex to be the traditional and immutable enemy of women's freedom. Exactly the opposite is true.

Historically, feminism and pornography have been fellow travelers on the rocky road of unorthodoxy. This partnership was natural, perhaps inevitable. After all, both feminism and pornography flout the conventional notion that sex is necessarily connected to marriage or procreation. Both view women as sexual beings who should pursue their sexuality for pleasure and self-fulfillment. Indeed, most of feminism's demands have been phrased in terms of women's sexuality: equal marriage, lesbianism, birth control, abortion, gender justice....

In the nineteenth century, critics of feminism yelled from pulpits and soapboxes that feminists were corrupting the sanctity of the family and motherhood. Similar charges were also hurled at pornography, then called "obscenity." A century later, rightwing critics of feminism and pornography sound strangely similar to their early counterparts. Perhaps this sort of criticism endures because it contains truth. Both feminism and pornography
do
call the traditional institutions and assumptions of sexuality into question.

The similarity does not end here. Both feminism and pornography flourish in an atmosphere of tolerance, where questions are encouraged and differing attitudes are respected. Not surprisingly, both feminism and pornography are suppressed whenever sexual expression is regulated.

The current backlash of censorship is an alliance between the Moral Majority (the Right) and the politically correct (the Left). This alliance is threatening the freedom of both women and sexual expression. The Right defines the explicit depiction of sex as evil; the Left defines it as violence against women. The result is the same.

The censorship net has been cast so widely that feminist classics, such as Susan Brownmiller's
Against Our Will,
are in the same peril as such porn icons as
Debbie Does Dallas.
This is inevitable. Both works address the same theme: sexual freedom in a sexually repressive world.

They merely arrive at antagonistic conclusions.

Why are feminists linking hands with the Right? Perhaps they believe themselves to be in a position of power, at last. Perhaps they dream of having their view of sex become the status quo.

It is a realistic hope. Radical feminists have been successful in establishing sexual correctness as a form of orthodoxy in the university system, where no one currently dares to question concepts like sexual harassment. The media now censors itself to avoid sexually incorrect references. The workplace has turned into halls of paranoia. Antipornography feminists have good reason to believe they have a shot at becoming the new power structure.

Meanwhile, pornography is left as a lonely voice to depict the less popular sexual choices that women have available to them. Feminists desperately need to reacquaint themselves with their own history. What passes for feminist scholarship these days has too often been filtered through ideology. Feminists must come to terms with two of the important lessons that history has taught over and over again:

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1. Censorship-or any sexual repression-inevitably rebounds against women, especially against those women who wish to question their traditional roles. Freedom of sexual expression, including pornography, inevitably creates an atmosphere of inquiry and exploration. This promotes women's sexuality and their freedom.

2. Censorship strengthens the position of those in power. This has never been good news for women, who are economically, politically, and socially among the weakest members of society.

Freedom of speech is the freedom to demand change. It will always benefit those who seek to reform society far more than those who wish to maintain the status quo.

A CAUTIONARY TALE

Recently, some scholars have seemed more receptive to the rather commonsense idea that there could be a connection between sexual liberty and women's rights. They have considered the possibility that denying one may hinder the other. A proximate cause for this may be the much-quoted scholarly book by Judith Walkowitz, which examined the Contagious Disease Acts passed in nineteenth-century Britain. [1] These laws were ostensibly intended to prevent the spread of venereal disease in the military. They were also viewed as a means of protecting women (especially young girls) from prostitution by regulating that profession.

The result was disastrous for poor working women.

In 1864, the British Parliament passed the first of the three statutes collectively known as the Contagious Disease Acts. This law mandated "the sanitary (or surgical inspection" of women suspected of being prostitutes in specific military areas of southern England and Ireland. Since the Act affected few people -- and was only expected to inconvenience whores -- it aroused little public comment. People did not seem bothered by the fact that diseased women were confined, while diseased soldiers were returned to duty.

The main difficulty in enforcing the law lay in deciding precisely who was a prostitute and who wasn't. After all, this was a period of history during which servant girls and other laboring women commonly sold their bodies on the side in order to supplement their starvation wages.

The solution: The police were given unlimited power to pick up any and every female they consider suspicious.

In the wake of two other Contagious Disease Acts (1866, 1868), prostitution became virtually a state-run industry. The government issued cards to women who were medically checked our and "registered." Then, they were allowed to work the streets. With unlimited powers of arrest, plainclothes policemen picked up women at random. Often, the police proceeded on the basis of gossip or reports from people who had grudges. Women who refused to be surgically examined could be detained at the magistrate's discretion and imprisoned at hard labor. Of course, a well-placed bribe or sexual favor could work miracles.

In the guise of protecting vulnerable women, the law created card-carrying prostitutes, who were at the mercy of the authorities. Girls who used to worry about white slavers now dreaded being sexually abused by the police.

Then, a thunderbolt rocked the prim and hypocritical Victorian world. W. T. Stead's exposŽ of child prostitution in London appeared in the
Pall Mall Gazette
in the summer of 1885. His ensuing book on the same subject,
The Five Pound Virgin,
so electrified public opinion that a demonstration in Hyde Park drew an estimated 250,000 people. They demanded that the age of consent for girls be raised from thirteen to sixteen. This was part of a growing "social-purity"

campaign, which focused on youthful sexuality.

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In this campaign, feminists stood side-by-side with those who had been their loudest critics, Anglican bishops. There was no question: Hideous sexual abuses were occurring. But the solution that evolved did not punish those who forced women or girls into prostitution; it regulated the women who were in the profession. Police yanked suspected prostitutes off the street at will, and subjected them to humiliating internal exams.

Such methods lead to the conclusion that the state wanted to control women, rather than to protect them. (This is similar to the situation with pornography today, where the thrust is not to prosecute the individuals who truly coerce women, but to regulate the industry. This is not protection; it is control.)

The Criminal Law Amendment Bill of 1885 raised the age of consent-for girls only-to sixteen. It also gave police summary jurisdiction over impoverished working women and girls, who could be asked at any moment to prove they were not prostitutes. A difficult task, at best.

The bill was used to control the "bad" habits of the working class, especially their social and sexual habits. For example, under the Bill, "fairs" were banned. These were traditional entertainments where working class men and women socialized freely. The fairs were said to ruin girls, who then brought disease and immorality into the well-to-do homes where they worked as servants.

The social-purity crusade was essentially conservative in nature. It represented a retreat from earlier progress toward women's sexual freedom and equality. Yet few reformers raised so much as a whisper against this brutalization of working-class women.

The French radical Yves Guyot could not understand how anyone who believed women were capable of determining their own best interests could dictate to those who "erred." He remarked: "It is no less strange that many of the very women who have braved insult and calumny in demanding these rights were among the first and loudest supporters of the measure for their furthest restriction."[2]

A century later, Judith Walkowitz asked a similar question: "Why did male and female repealers, who were advocates of personal rights, anti-statist in their political ideology, and even knowledgeable of the realities of working-class prostitution, permit themselves to be swept up in a movement with such repressive political implications?" [3]

An equally good question is: Why are reformers doing so now?

A CASE OF SEXUALLY INCORRECT HISTORY

Antipornography feminists need not look across an ocean to find dramatic confirmation of the relationship between sexual freedom and women's rights. Nineteenth-century America provides its own cautionary tale.

In the social turbulence following the Civil War, thousands of men and women enlisted in a purity campaign. They sought to establish a single standard of sexual morality for both sexes.

This was not a drive for greater freedom; it was a puritanical campaign to narrow the choices of individuals down to socially acceptable ones.

These crusaders considered a free and open sexuality to be a reflection of the selfish appetites of men, who disrespected women. After all, women were naturally chaste. They were the mothers and the wives and the cornerstone of the church. Purity -the curbing of men's appetites-required social control. Thus, the purity crusaders rallied for laws against prostitution, alcohol, and pornography-then called obscenity.

Many female and male reformers climbed on the purity bandwagon. In doing so, they destroyed a small but growing feminist movement. That movement was virtually the only voice of its time 38

crying out for women's sexual rights. It focused on the twin goals of marriage reform and the distribution of birth control.

The story of how this movement was coldly killed is one of the most tragic episodes in feminist history. Yet it has been virtually ignored by modern feminist scholars. The tale is as follows: By 1865-the year the Civil War ended-the U.S. Congress had adopted its first law barring obscenity from the U.S. mails. The mailing of obscenity was officially declared to be a criminal offense. But there was an enforcement problem: The post office had no legal right to refuse to deliver anything. Penalties could be imposed only after the obscene material had gone through the mail. This was awkward, both legally and tactically.

In 1868, the New York branch of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) began to urge the state legislature to outlaw "the traffic in obscenity" in order to keep corrupting material out of the hands of impressionable young men. In this cause, the YMCA found a zealous champion named Anthony Comstock.

Born in 1844, Comstock was one of ten children-three of whom died before reaching majority.

One might think this background would make Comstock pro-birth control. But Comstock was deeply religious and seemed to blame man's animal nature, rather than poor medical techniques, for his family's tragedies.

A passionate rejection of sexuality led Comstock to attack the dime novels, popular in his day, as "devil-traps for the young." Indeed, one of his early slogans was "Books Are Feeders for Brothels."

Affluent members of the YMCA provided their crusader with an annual salary of $3,000 plus expenses. This allowed him to quit his employment as a dry-goods clerk and devote full time to anti-obscenity work.