Andrea Dworkin testified before the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography on January 22, 1986. She writes,
Numerous civil liberties folks, including pro-pornography “feminists”, had already testified in other cities. I spoke to the Commission because my friends, feminists who work against pornography, asked me to. Every effort was made by the pro-pornography lobby to discredit the Commission. A memo dated June 5, 1986, from Gray and Company, the largest public relations firm in Washington DC, with ties to both the Reagan White House and the old Kennedy White House, outlines a strategy to discredit the Commission. The memo was prepared for the Media Coalition, a bunch of publishing and media trade groups, including distributors, that has been very active for many years in providing legal protection for pornography, including child pornography. A campaign costing nearly one million dollars would effectively discredit the findings of the Commission by smearing those who oppose pornography, creating a hysteria over censorship, and planting news stories to say that there is no proven relationship between pornography and harm to women and children.
To the Commission, Dworkin said, “We see pornography used to create harassment of women and children in neighborhoods that are saturated with pornography, where people come from other parts of the city and then prey on the populations of people who live in those neighborhoods, and that increases physical attack and verbal assault….
“We see a major trade in women, we see the torture of women as a form of entertainment, and we see women also suffering the injury of objectification–that is to say we are dehumanized. We are treated as if we are subhuman, and that is a precondition for violence against us.”