The Harm of Pornography

by Joan Kolesarek


   Feminists have disagreed for many years over the harmful effects of pornography. One faction claims that to censor the production, sale or use of pornography violates the First Amendment rights of ll those involved including the women in the movies or pictures. Other feminists believe that pornography prohibits the freedom of female citizens to lead lives that are free from harm or the threat of harm. It is their contention that pornography creates acts that discriminate against women by holding the power of sex over us as the construct on which our social reality is based.    
		Before any discussion of pornography can be made, it is important to define exactly what it is that we are calling pornography. For those who oppose pornography, the definition most accepted is that drafted by author Andrea Dworkin and law professor Catharine MacKinnon as a model for the civil rights law introduced in Minneapolis and briefly adopted in Indianapolis. This ordinance stated in essence:
    Pornography is the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words that also includes one more of the following; (I) women are presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities, (2) women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation, (3) as sexal objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped, (4) as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt, (5) in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility, or display, (6) women's body parts are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts, (7) are presente as whores by nature, (8) being penetrated by objects or animals, or (9) in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.    
		In every discussion of pornography, someone inevitably declares that there are some forms of pornography which people have a right to view because it harms no one. There is always someone to jump to the defense of eratica or soft porn. Though few would be willing to admit or recognize it, even these seemingly innocent instances of erotica or soft porn contain one or more aspects of the above definition of pornography. Dworkin bases this theory on the premise that even those instances of pornography that depict heterosexual men and women in supposed states of equality with regard to the sexual acts that they are portraying are harmful to women because of the power--physical, sexual and financial--that the male has oYer the female in our society.    
		In her book, Pornography, Men Possessing Women, Dworkin saysIthat the major theme of pornography is male power; the power of terror, the power of naming, the power of owning, the power of money, and the power of sex. She relates the story of a photograph sent to Hustler magazine by two men after a hunting trip. In the picture, the two men are standing by the hood of their Jeep with their rifles in their arms. Tied to the hood of the Jeep is a nude woman in the spread-eagle position. The rope is twisted around her breasts, pubic area and her hands and feet. The caption states that the men report that "beaver hunting" was very good this season, and that when they got their "trophy" home, they stuffed and mounted her.    
		The physical power of the hunters over their "trophy" is obvious. The terror that the photograph evokes is felt by every woman who views the picture. "That men have the power and desire to make, publish, and profit from the photograph engenders fear. That millions more men enjoy the photograph makes the fear palpable. That men who in general champion civil rights defend the photograph without experiencing it as an assaut on women intensifies the fear, because if the horror of the photograph does not resonate with these men, that horror is not validated as horror in male culture, and women are left without apparent recourse." (Page 27).    
		The caption under the picture is a good example of the power of naming that men have over women. She is a "beaver," not a human being. They are going to mount and stuff her. Thus, she is associated with bird, chick, bitch, dog, pussy, etc. "The power of naming includes the power to joke." The power of owning is expressed through all of the items in the picture. The men stand there with "their" guns, car, and "trophy." They have captured her, she is their's to keep even in death.    
		The fact that the men are depicted as hunters and sportsmen is no accident. Hunting is a leisure sport; it signifies wealth. It also signifies man as hunter; the man who owns the earth and all its resources. It signifies the wealth of man as a class. Dworkin says that this is significant in that it emphasizes the distribution of wealth in our society. The female model who posed for the picture is of a lower economic class than the men who own the picture. She says that the relationship of the men to the woman is not a fantasy; it shows a relationship of rich to poor that actually exists in the larger society. It is an indication of "an industry that generates wealth by producing images of women abjectly used, a society in which women, cannot adequately earn money because women are valued precisely as the woman in the photograph is valued-- both proves and perpetuates the real connection between masculiluty and wealth. The sexual-economic significance of the photograph is so simple that it is easily  overlooked; the photograph would not exist as a type of photograph that produces, wealth without the wealth of men to produce and consume it." (Page 29). She concludes that sex as power is the most explicit meaning of the photograph.    
		The scenario of the photograph is important to the definition of pornography as drafted by Dworkin and MacKinnon. The woman in the picture is presented as dehumanized (beaver), she is portrayed as enjoying pain and humiliation (the joke), she is shown tied up and in a position of sexual submission, servility and display, her body parts are exhibited so that she is reduced to those body parts (the rope twisted around her breasts and pubic area), and she is presented in a scenario of degradation, injury, torture and bruised or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual (spread-
eagle).    
		Nadine Strossen, of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote an article for the Virginia Law Review in August I993 titled, "A Feminist Critique of The Feminist Critique of Pornography." Strossen claims that pornography cannot be defined because the term is not a legally recognized term of art, and that even the Supreme Court has decided to define only what is obscene. Quoting author Walter Kendrick, Strossen writes, ". . . his comprehensive study of the subject suggests that while the term 'pornography' has had differing definitions, throughout modern culture it consistently has been applied to whatever representations a particular dominant class or group does not want in the hands of another, less dominant class or group." It is puzzling, to me, that Strossen seems to be defining the "dominant class or group" as the anti-
pornography feminists rather than the pornography producing and consuming society of white males that we all recognize as the "dominant class or group" in our society.    
		The essence of her thesis is that censoring pornography discriminates against women as well as against the rights of men. She outlines the discrimination of censorship in ten categories--a few of which are: it would censor works that are valuable to women; it would work to the detriment of minority groups such as lesbians and homosexuals; it perpetuates demeaning stereotypes as in sex is bad for women; perpetuates the disempowering notion that women are victims; it would harm women who voluntarily work in the sex industry; and it would deny the human freedom of freedom for sexually explicit expression.    
	There are two major problems, in my opinion, in the arguments between the two factions of feminists in their discussions of pornography. The first problem is in their definition of pornography, and the second problem is in their perception of power. While Dworkin and MacKinnon have spelled out in explicit detail the ways in which pornonaphy is harmful to women, Strossen's theory on the definition seems to be almost as naive as the Supreme Court judge's who said, "I can't tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it."
		Her fear that censorship would discriminate against every person's right to free sexual expression does not stand up to the argument that even some forms of what she calls erotica or soft porn are harmful to women when you consider the inequality of the power that is possessed by the persons involved in the act. From the time that a child is old enough to understand the images that are portrayed in magazine and TV ads, movies and television programming, and now particularly in music videos, the message is clear--female sexuality is an object that can be used and should be used for the pleasure of men and to sell the products that men produce, and that violence is a natural consequence of men's superiority over women. How can we expect the woman in the boardroom to achieve any level of respect from the men around her after they have been consuming the image of a woman spread-eagle on the hood of a Jeep in the Hustler magazine in their desk drawer?    
		Further, Strossen's claim that censorship deprives the women who work in the sex industry of their livelihood is also very naive. "Most obviously, by seeking to ban major aspects of this industry, the Dworkin MacKinnon regime would deprive women of an option that many now affirm they have freely chosen." (Page II6I). What she fails to discuss is that because women are caught in the financial trap that men have constructed for them they are forced into degrading, powerless positions as a means of survival. For the dehumanized, powerless woman trying to survive in an economy that places more value on the power of the image of a female breast than on a woman's ability to produce in the marketplace, there is no freedom of choice as Strossen 
claims.
   	As we have learned from other areas of our culture, as long as men control the power--financially, socially, and politically--women have little freedom. The power of pornography tells male society over and over again that the nude image of young and beautiful women is there for their enjoyment and they have a right to it. There is harm to women in this because men are taught to take what belongs to them. There is also harm to women who don't measure up to these standards of youth and beauty. There is no freedom as long as women are defined by their sexuality rather than their humanity. Dworkin reminds us that the word pornography is derived from the ancient Greek words 'porne' which means whore, and 'graphos' which means writing; so pornography, then, is the graphic depiction of women as vile whores, (Page 200). In her conclusion she tells us, "We wll know that we are free when the pornography no longer exists. As long as it does exist, we must understand that we are the women in it: used by the same power, subject to the same valuation, as the vile whores who beg for more."

Bibliography

		Dworkin, Andrea.  	Pornography, Men Possessing Women.  New York: Penguin Books USA, Inc, 1979. 
		Strossen, Nadine.  A Feminist Critique of "The Feminist Critique of Pornography' Virigina Law Review. University of Virginia School of Law:  Virginia Law Review Association, Volume 79, Number 5, August 1993.