Anti-Porn Legend Gloria Steinem to Give 2007 Commencement Address at Smith College
Posted by NPNAdmin at 3/5/2007 3:42 PM 
Categories: Feminist Perspective, First Amendment, Northampton News
Categories: Feminist Perspective, First Amendment, Northampton News
We are excited to hear that Gloria Steinem, 1956 Smith graduate and feminist legend, will return to campus on May 20 to give the commencement address. Steinem's early freelance work includes an undercover article for Show magazine on the working conditions of Playboy bunnies. Her stance against porn is clear:
If you have two groups of people and you say one is inferior to the other, which is a lie, then the only way to maintain the lie is through violence or the threat of violence. So where men come to and women come together most intimately in sexuality in the home has become suffused with violence. We have to disentangle sexuality and violence. We have to say no. Rape is not sex; it's violence, which I think we know now. We have to say pornography is not erotica, porn means female slavery. It means the depiction of female slavery. Erotica means love, something very different, very mutual. These are two different things. We have, in a very deep way, to disentangle a sexuality and intimacy and violence.
See also:
Steinem on Flynt: "This pornography is as different from sex as rape is from sex"
[Steinem] asserts that Flynt "has not only the right to say these things, but a lot of money to say them. I'm saying we don't have to support it. I'm just making the radical suggestion women are human beings... The point of the movie ["The People vs. Larry Flynt"] is to be seductive, and that's what's dangerous about it. It's an extension of the pornography-industry campaign, that if you oppose pornography you oppose sex--and that's a lie. This pornography is as different from sex as rape is from sex. They're trying to preclude opposition by saying [anti-porn arguments] endanger the First Amendment. The porn industry has succeeded in positing two alternatives: pornography or censorship."
Linda Lovelace: When people see the movie Deep Throat, "they're watching me being raped" (explicit language)
Steinem: [W]e have a First Amendment right to demonstrate against pornography, to boycott its creators and sellers, to explain that pornography is to women of all groups what Nazi literature is to Jews and Ku Klux Klan literature is to Blacks. It is as different from erotica as sex is different from rape... [E]ros means sexual love, and love implies free choice and mutual pleasure. The point is to separate sex from violence, pleasure from pain...
Get up the courage to say how you feel, to throw pornography out of your life and house at least. Educate your children in the difference between pornography and erotica, between domination and mutual choice. Support the centers that are helping women and children escape this coercion and find self-respect.
I do not see what the problem with so called porn in.
The human body and interaction between two, three bodies in my opinion is a beautiful thing to watch.
All of those against porn should
have been a fly on the wall as per the interaction between your mother and father in which created you.
Many of porn haters see no problem with t.v. shows, movies, videos that depict violence between humans, but it bothers you to see humans enjoying one another.
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We are not against sex. We are against mindless sex, abusive sex, sex without regard for issues like love, fidelity, commitment, pregnancy, disease and children.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to talk about porn separately from filmed violence. We recall Martin Amis's article, "A Rough Trade":
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