Porn, Slavery and Women: The Parallels

Van F. White was the first person of color ever elected to the city council of Minneapolis. He writes about his evolving views of porn in “Pornography and Pride”, published in Men Confront Pornography (1990, p.290-292)…

I’m 59 years old, and I’ve known something about pornography for many years. When I was young, I worked for the Department of Economic Security, in public works, and in construction, and I remember the magazines and the conversations that the men had. They would look at the pictures and make derogatory remarks: “Boy, what I could do to that bitch.” “Look at her–she can’t get enough.” I was part of that at one time, listening and looking and thinking it was a laugh. But now my feelings have changed…

I came up rather hard in this society. I’m not an innocent. I have seen the role models: the pimps, the prostitutes. And I remember that back in 1944, people participating in those activities would tell those of us who were young to do something different. “There are better things in life than this,” they’d tell us…

In the fall of 1983, as chair of the Minneapolis City Council government operations committee, I conducted two days of public hearings on pornography… For over 12 hours, I heard women testify about how men had used pornography to coerce them into sex acts; I heard a woman who had been gang-raped by men who had been using pornography; I heard a women whose husband used a pornography magazine as a kind of handbook for how to tie her with ropes and then sexually assault her. And for the first time I began to think that pornography is something that downgrades women and keeps them in the position of chattel.

Hearing those horror stories made me think of times in the history of slavery in this country in terms of black women–how they were at the bottom of the pile, how they were treated like animals instead of human beings. As I listened to these victims of pornography testify, I heard young women describe how they felt about seeing other women in pornography in such degrading positions, how they felt about the way women’s genitals and breasts are displayed and women’s bodies are shown in compromising postures. And I thought about how during the time of slavery, black women would have their bodies examined, their teeth and limbs examined, their bodies checked out for breeding, checked out as you would check out an animal–and I thought: We’ve come a long way, haven’t we?…

We have 30 million functional illiterates in our society, and many of them spend a lot of money to look at the visual communication in pornographic magazines. What’s going to become of these people? Is this the only model of education they’re going to have–that this is how women are?