Testimony in Massachusetts: Porn and a Hostile Living Environment at M.I.T.

Massachusetts legislators heard testimony about peoples’ encounters
with porn at a hearing on March 16, 1992. This account appears in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.412-413).

Testimony of Jean M. Moran

My name is Jean Moran. I’m currently a graduate student in nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During my sophomore year living at a dormitory at M.I.T., I was forced to deal with not only how pornography affected women’s lives in general, but how it affected my life as well. In December of 1988, some residents decided to throw a bachelor’s party for one of the residents. This included beer and pornography videos being shown in one of the common areas of the dormitory. For the pornography viewing, a door was pulled closed and secured… Despite the closed doors, women on the third floor were able to hear the video. When I found out right after, I became outraged. I felt violated. I felt unsafe. I went to the third floor and was even more disturbed to find one of the three graduate residents of the dorm still in the lounge. This magnified all of my earlier feelings of outrage and distress. Whom could I trust? The showing of pornography had been at the very least condoned and viewed by a figure of authority in the dorm. After this, the group decided to continue showing the pornography in one of the resident’s rooms.

I was one of the few women who spoke out and attempted to explain to men and women why pornography hurt me. Rumors spread quickly throughout the dorm about me, and people I once considered friends gave me nasty looks. While visiting a friend, I was verbally harassed by three men. The same graduate resident who had been present at the pornography showing silently watched me being driven to tears, reaffirming the men’s stance and their abusive treatment of me. A friend of mine was threatened by the house president that she would have the lab partner from hell if she did not quiet down and silence me. For about two weeks, I was followed around the dorm by one of the men. He would be at most two steps behind me, encroaching upon my feeling of personal space and my sense of safety. He would wait for me outside of people’s bedrooms trying to listen to conversations, in places he was not known to frequent. When the housemaster was made aware of the situation by a friend, all of the proposed actions seemed unreasonable. It felt as if I was only setting myself up for retaliation. After feeling the anger from people while speaking out against pornography, I did not feel strong enough to face more intimidation and harassment from my peers.

The whole experience created a lot of pain, anger, fear, and tears in me. It affected my schoolwork, and it’s amazing I made it through the semester and still made it through M.I.T. I can still feel all of this. No one should feel uncomfortable in their own home.

See also:

Testimony in Massachusetts: Porn and a Hostile Learning Environment at M.I.T.

…despite requests by women students that pornographic films not be shown
in common living rooms, some male students insisted on their right to
show the films. In two cases, a male student insisted on showing Deep
Throat, a film which presents Linda “Lovelace” Marchiano, who we talked
about earlier today, despite women students in the dorm telling this
particular man that it was offensive to show Deep Throat since it has
been documented in her books–Ordeal and Out of Bondage–that
she was tortured and terrorized into [making it]. Secondly, they told
him that at least one of the students who was a resident of that
dormitory had been throat-raped in that particular way, and she felt
particularly traumatized by the showing of that film. Despite her
efforts and other women’s trying to talk to him about showing the film,
he showed it anyway to a whole group of students from the dorm. As a
result, she and other students lost sleep, she lost a lot of school
time. The one student was a doctoral student, and felt extremely
harassed. She tried to address this through the M.I.T. administration
and go nowhere because they refuse to take an active stance around
pornography. And then she was further harassed in that dormintory
through threatening notes, etc., for trying to stop the showing of that
film…

A number of instances have occurred at M.I.T. in labs
where pornographic pictures are displayed, and there are only one or
two women in the lab. When the women complain about it, instead of
taking the pornography down, the response has often been defensiveness,
anger and more pornography has been put up… Another example is the
computer pornography where the students are trying to write their
papers in computer networks and they’ll have pornography right next to
them being shown on the screen, and again making it difficult for them
to do their work…

“Sex-Positive” Debate-Killing Tactics Stretch into Their Fifth Decade
Our opponents profess extreme devotion to free speech, yet in reality many of them freely employ debate-killing tactics such as disrespect, ridicule, misrepresentation and intimidation.
Tactics like these have a history in this debate that stretches back
for nearly half a century. They have been effective at skewing the
public dialogue over issues of love, sex, relationships and the rights
of communities, even as the evidence of the harm of porn and adult enterprises piles up into a mountain.

Behind the Scenes of Deep Throat with Linda Lovelace
[Explicit language:] “Marchiano traveled to campuses to speak out about
her two and a half year imprisonment by her husband/manager Chuck
Traynor. Linda’s speech encouraged women on the campus to protest
outside the fraternity-sponsored showing of Deep Throat. She said that
in this movie there are visible bruises all over her body that attest
to part of her torture. The fraternity brothers’ response, was to shout
out during Deep Throat: ‘Fuck her, hurt her, rip her.’ Toward the other
females on the screen they screamed comments such as ‘Ugly bitch and
whore.’ They chanted, ‘Bruises, Bruises, Bruises!’ continually during
the film.”

Testimony in Minneapolis: Role of Porn in Child Sexual Abuse; Pornographers Perpetuate, Profit from Dysfunction
“Unfortunately, when individuals who have survived human rights abuses
as a result of pornography speak out, they are most often attacked
again for having the nerve to speak out. For example, after pornography
survivors appeared before the City Council in Minneapolis to describe
their personal stories [of] horror and torture, a nationally
distributed pornography magazine published an article identifying the
women by name, using their direct quotes and highlighting the graphic
testimony of sexual violence. Without exception, these women were
harassed by obscene phone calls, followed, spied on, tormented,
threatened by letters.”

Testimony in Minneapolis: Porn and a Hostile Work Environment
I got to the point where I couldn’t put up with it any more. And being
one of the only two women on the job, and being rather new at it and
not knowing that I had any alternatives, I got pissed off one day and
ripped all the pictures off the wall. Well, it turned out to be a real
unpopular move to do. I came back in at lunch time and half the
pictures were back up again. They pulled them out of boxes and stuck
them on the wall and proceeded to call me names, and just basically
call me names or otherwise ignore me…

…I have encountered pretty much hostility in the last six years being
the only woman on the job doing men’s work. On that particular job, I
was a legal threat because I had replaced one of the other men who was
causing trouble, who was one of the good old boys. And I think they
were doubly angry at me on that job and they wanted to get rid of me.