Long-time anti-pornographer Diana Russell takes on Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union and author of Defending Pornography.
Nadine Strossen’s OBJECTIVE in Defending Pornography is to destroy the reputation and achievements of the feminist movement against pornography. To this end, she dishes up the same tired old caricature of us as anti-sex prudes, pro-censorship, and in collusion with the right wing.
Not until the very last chapter does Strossen address the scientific evidence on the harmful effects of pornography, and her discussion of that evidence is a sham. Most of the key researchers on the relationship between pornography and violence against women (Neil Malamuth, James Check, Dolf Zillman, Bryant Jennings, myself) do not rate a single mention in her book…
Strossen makes no distinction between erotica and pornography. Her failure makes it so much easier to identify anti-porn feminists (who have no objection to nondegrading images that turn people on–unless the woman in the image was abused in its production) with the right wing (many of whom do oppose all sexually explicit images).
Over the last 20 years I have been engaged in considerable research and writing on pornography–which I define as material that combines sex and/or genital exposure with abuse or degradation in a manner that appears to endorse, condone, or encourage such behavior…
Strossen charges anti-porn feminists with selecting “overtly violent, sexist samples” of porn for our educational slide presentations. This is analogous to a neo-Nazi arguing that the horror and devastation of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany cannot be judged from photographs of the concentration camps, because a lot of Jews weren’t incarcerated in them.
Strossen devotes a hefty chunk of her book to a vehement and demonizing attack on Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Assuming that all the rest of us agree with everything MacKinnon or Dworkin has ever said, done, or written, Strossen both scapegoats those two and makes invisible many other prominent feminists who have also opposed pornography. Besides me, for instance, she does not mention Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker, Susan Brownmiller, Susan Griffin, Nikki Craft, Kathleen Barry, Florence Rush, Ann Simonton, Melissa Farley, Jane Caputi, Catherine Itzin–all of whose commitment to this issue is public knowledge.
Strossen spends most of the book arguing against censorship, claiming that MacKinnon and Dworkin and the rest of us unmentionable clones are virulent advocates of it. Although censorship appears to be Strossen’s favorite word, she never even attempts to define it. From the examples she cites, though, her definition appears indistinguishable from what most people would consider the exercise of their free speech and civil rights.
Strossen accuses Dworkin, for example, of censorship for organizing a protest campaign against A Woman’s Book of Choices. A particular passage included advice on how women could qualify to get an abortion by falsely claiming to have been raped… When the publisher and the authors claimed it was impossible to revise this passage, Dworkin organized a successful campaign to get them to change their minds.
This incident inspired Strossen to criticize “the censorial impact of such coercive tactics as boycotts.” To call any protest censorship is utter nonsense. In the context of the First Amendment, censorship involves state-based action to prohibit the publication of literature before it reaches the stands. There is a vital distinction between state action and acts of individuals. Dworkin’s campaign involved individuals, myself included, exercising our First Amendment rights to exert pressure on the authors and publisher to change an appallingly misogynist paragraph…
Whether some women get off on what Strossen approvingly calls “rape scenes and scenes dramatizing the so-called rape myth,” that does not mitigate the fact that many other women feel violated by such images, that some are violated by acts inspired by those images, and that some who were used to make those images are exploited or abused in the process. In her myopic individualism, Strossen repeatedly fails to address the consequences of pornography for women or for male consumers in general.
Here is another Strossen gem delight pornographers: “The more unconventional the sexual expression is, the more revolutionary its social and political implications become.” I suppose rape doesn’t qualify as unconventional sexual expression anymore–but would child porn qualify as revolutionary? Or images of sexual mutilation and woman-killing?…
Strossen…thinks the conditions for women in the porn industry are just dandy, and that there is no reason “to believe that force or violence are endemic in the sex industry, or more prevalent there than in other sectors of our society.” In the event that the odd problem emerges, says Strossen, there are a “panoply of criminal and civil remedies for women who have been physically or psychologically abused in the production of sexual materials.” What a bunch of fatuous Pollyanaisms…
Strossen fails to reckons with my theoretical work on pornography as a causal factor in rape. I believe there are many different causes of rape, and the significance of pornography varies depending on its availability, its content, and the degree of its acceptability in a particular country. In nations saturated with porn, as the United States is, scientific evidence shows…[p]ornography predisposes some men to want to rape women, and intensifies the predisposition in some other men already so predisposed…
Many people share Strossen’s opinion that men who consume porn but who have never raped a woman disprove the theory that porn can cause rape. This is comparable to arguing that because some cigarette smokers don’t die of lung disease, there cannot be a causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer. Only members of the tobacco industry and some seriously addicted smokers consider this a valid argument today. Although the scientific evidence that porn can cause rape is at least as strong as the evidence that smoking can cause lung cancer, many people are so ideologically committed to the view that
porn is harmless that they find a multitude of excuses to disregard it. Strossen and the ACLU’s strategy seems to be to ignore information, arguments, and theories that they find too difficult to tackle, no matter how much dishonesty and misrepresentation it takes.