Testimony in Indianapolis: Porn Wants You to Believe Women Secretly Love Bondage and Torture, that “No” Means “Yes”

Indianapolis city officials heard testimony about peoples’ encounters
with porn at a hearing of the Indianapolis City-County Council
Adminstration Committee on April 14, 1984. This account appears in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.283-285).

Testimony of Deborah Daniels, Indianapolis Prosecutors’ Office

I’d like to read you some of the titles of the magazines and their stories. One magazine is called “Bound to Tease”. I think that’s self-explanatory. One is called “Bondage Fever”, and two of the stories in it are called “Unwilling Submission” and “Raging Restraint”. Another magazines is called “Tied Up Tarts”, with a subtitle, “Girls Who Love to Submit”. One of the story titles is “Alma’s Secret Fantasy”. Basically the storyline has to do with a woman who hated to “admit it” but she learned that she enjoyed bondage and discipline, as they call it…

The stories involve “Tanya Learns the Ropes”, “Tanya’s Initiation into the Exotic Joys of Bondage”… This particular story, though most of the magazine had graphic pictures of women, nude women, tied up in obvious expressions of pain, now this particular story didn’t have any pictures, but it was all about a women who had described herself, supposedly, at the outset of the story as an avid women’s-libber, and she said that she’d never had a good sexual relationship with anyone because she was accustomed to going out with what she called wimps who respected her. She went to apply for a job one day, this is billed as a true story, written in the first person, supposedly, by this woman. She went to apply for a job one day, and who should appear at the door but Dirk, who appeared to be an obvious, large, hairy, masculine, ferocious-looking man. Basically, he took her into his study for a job interview, bound her up, though she screamed and was frightened to death, and began to torture her. The whole storyline indicates that she told him she was scared, and she told him she didn’t want to do any of this, and she told him it hurt, and she asked him and begged him to stop and yet, the storyline indicates that secretly she loved it. Secretly, she was aroused and it was the most wonderful experience of her life. This tends to be the story that is retold and retold in this literature. And at the end of the story, of course, she describes herself as the man’s willing slave. All she wants is to do any humiliating tasks he assigns to her. She has learned her lesson.

Another story in the same magazine is called “The Rich Bitch”, and it was about teaching a snobbish female who, this man had felt, put him down in the past, a lesson, by binding her to the wall with chains and inflicting physical pain upon her. The last sentence indicated that, rather than Sally is now going to go [to] the Prosecutor’s Office and file charges against Frank, it said, Sally, from now on, will treat Frank more special because he’s taught her a lesson.

Finally, two more magazines. One is entitled “Tied Up”. And there’s a story in it called “Bound Bitch”, and there’s a lot of reference to bitches, tarts, whores, women who deserve this sort of treatment. Another is titled “Black Bondage”. The two stories featured in the magazines, in this particular issue, were called “Black Bitches: Bound, Gagged, and Loving It”. And the second was “Roped and Raped”…

See also:

Interview of Dr. Edward Donnerstein (by phone) by Catharine A. MacKinnon, January 10, 1984
Donnerstein: “The most interesting thing about the X-rated commercially released market is how the violence is displayed, which I think is the most important thing. While maybe only 25 or 30 percent of them contain overt violence, I think we probably all find that 90-95 percent of the time when a women is sexually assaulted or raped or aggressed against someway in these films, she is turned on and shows pleasure, enjoyment and so on and so on…

The problem is that what you are doing is conditioning sexual release, or relief, which is a very positive thing in men, to violence or to rape. One doesn’t have to be a scientist to understand what conditioning does… I think the whole idea of catharsis really has to be put aside…

I think it is the subordination, degradation, dehumanizing of women, the unequal power relationship which is the issue… Sexual explicitness, no…

Sexually explicit erotica does not include subordination of women… In fact, our material was put together with the help of our rape crisis center, women’s support center and so on. Primarily by women who had their definition of what should be purely erotic and recreated [in] the film… Just like, by the way in a sort of aside, when we had to do research on negative reactions of women to being raped in films, we had to create that film, too, because we couldn’t find a standard ten-minute loop film in an adult bookstore which didn’t show a woman being sexually attacked or assaulted without her being turned on… That’s a common type of scenario…

[I]n the X-rated material, part of our de-briefing to re-sensitize subjects to the issue of women and try to eliminate some of the stereotypes and their changes in the perception of rape, is to go back and say what these films have done is literally treated women as parts rather than as a whole person. In fact, we make it very specific that one of the reasons these X-rated non-violent films, okay, are affecting them is because women are seen strictly as sexual objects and long term exposure to that trivializes women, makes them seem promiscuous, always asking for it, consequently when they now serve as jurors in rape trials they get the usual “oh, she was there for a particular reason, she was really asking for it.” And that leads to a less sensitive attitude about rape and about women.

Published in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.298-308).

Smith Sophian: “Definition of ‘no’ should not be debated in cases of rape”
Why is the meaning of “no” even debated in cases like this? And is this the start of a slippery slope? Will “no” eventually cease to actually mean anything, to have no power? No means no and rape is rape, regardless of when it is said or for what reason.

Certified Sex Therapist Marty Klein Wants You to Believe Porn Is Harmless
“[L]et’s eliminate the urban legend that people who like to spank or be spanked are acting out some kind of abusive background. This is Freud gone wild, the bastard child of Oprah, Dr. Laura, and well-intentioned but misguided child molestation activists.”

Capital Video’s Magazine Rack: Bondage, Racism and More
“The look in her eyes tells us that she would like this bondage session to end pretty soon. Forget it, girl!”

Porn’s “Verbatim” Accounts of the Pleasures of Child Sexual Abuse Don’t Square with Reality
There can be little doubt that these books, most of which are presented as “real”, are entirely invented. They are not, as they claim, taken from psychiatric testimony or from a tape recorder…

What is this, if not the age-old “fantasy” that the child seduces the adult, and where else does this derive except from the imagination of the adult who is burdened with a guilt he will not accept? Of course I am using the words “fantasy” and “imagination” as synonyms of “lies”, which is what they are. The entire narrative is “positive”, that is, Wandella expresses nothing but pleasure and happiness…

Male Attitudes about Rape Can Be Learned…and Unlearned
The subjects’ evaluations of a rape victim after viewing a reenacted rape trial were also affected by the constant exposure to brutality against women. The victim of rape was rated as more worthless and her injury as significantly less severe by those exposed to filmed violence when compared to a control group of men who saw only the rape trial and did not view films. Desensitization to filmed violence on the last day was also significantly correlated with assignment of greater blame to the victim for her own rape…

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