Here they come, with their steel faces and inflamed eyes, their fearful visions and apocalyptic solutions: the New Victorians. The Cold War is over and Americans are desperate for a new enemy. The New Victorians have found one and, as usual, it is other Americans.
Look there, in a museum, there are photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. Of naked men! Of sex! And in magazines and movies and video stores, nothing but smut and filth and degradation! The New Victorians tremble at the terrifying sight of the naked female breast, the curly enticements of pubic hair, the heart-stopping reality of the human penis. Disgusting. Degrading. Moral collapse! And if the republic is to be saved, the enemy must be cast into eternal darkness. Or at least returned to the wonderful iron hypocrisies of the 19th century.
The collective public face of the New Victorians is made up of the usual suspects: Senator Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan, the television Bible-whackers. But in the past few years, these yahoo crusaders have increasingly found themselves marching with unfamiliar allies. For there, at the front of the parade, loudly pounding the drums, is a small group of self-styled radical feminists. Sexual crusades indeed make strange bedfellows.
The unlikely Lenin of the feminist wing of the New Victorians is a 46-year-old lawyer named Catharine MacKinnon. She is a tenured professor of law at the University of Michigan, but that is a blurry job description. Basically, MacKinnon is a professional feminist. That is to say that, like a priest, a theologian or a romantic revolutionary, she is exclusively dedicated to the service of a creed. MacKinnon’s feminist vision is not limited to the inarguable liberal formulas of equal pay for equal work, complete legal and political equality and full opportunity to compete with men. Like Lenin, she doesn’t want mere reform. She wants to overthrow the entire system of what she sees as male supremacy. During the past decade, when the country shifted to the right and millions of American women rejected the harder ideologies of feminism, MacKinnon labored on with revolutionary zeal.
That zeal was shaped by the social and sexual upheavals of the Sixties and Seventies. MacKinnon was born in Minnesota, where her father was a federal judge, a major player in the state’s Republican Party. Like her mother and grandmother, Catharine MacKinnon attended Smith College. In the Seventies she went to Yale Law School, worked with the Black Panthers and rallied against the Vietnam war. But when many of her classmates moved on to the real world and its dense textures of work and family, she stayed on in New Haven and found both a focus and an engine for her life in an almost religious embrace of the women’s movement. MacKinnon’s basic formulation was simple: “Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away.”
At Yale, MacKinnon created the first course in the women’s studies program but was never given tenure. For a decade she served as an itinerant lecturer or visiting professor at the best American law schools, including Yale, Chicago, Stanford and Harvard, delivering sermons on the problems of women and the law. As a legal theorist, she is credited with defining sexual harassment and was frequently cited during Justice Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings. As a public speaker, dripping with scorn and cold passion, she was always in demand. The elusive guarantee of tenure was finally granted at Michigan in 1989.
But for all MacKinnon’s passion and occasional brilliance, even some feminists and legal scholars who applaud her work on sexual harassment find the rest of her vision indefensible. She dismisses them all, firm in her belief that she has discovered the truth. In a series of manifestos and lawsuits, MacKinnon has defined the legal agenda of the New Victorians. Their common enemy is that vague concept: pornography. MacKinnon’s basic legal theory is that pornography is a form of sex discrimination. She says that it’s made by men for men, but it is harmful only to women. Therefore, women should have the right to sue those who produce it and sell it. Pornography, in MacKinnon’s view, is a civil rights issue.
Andrea Dworkin (author of Intercourse and Pornography: Men Possessing Women) functions as Trotsky to MacKinnon’s Lenin, providing rhetorical fire to her analytical ice. Dworkin came to speak before one of MacKinnon’s classes at the University of Minnesota in 1983 and the women have been friends and allies ever since. Here’s an example of Dworkin’s style: “Know thyself, if you are lucky enough to have a self that hasn’t been destroyed by rape in its many forms; and then know the bastard on top of you.”
Together, MacKinnon and Dworkin have had some limited successes. Hooking up at various times with such odd fellows as anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, local opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment or various mountebanks from the religious right, they drafted antiporn ordinances for Indianapolis; Bellingham, Washington; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Minneapolis and supported them with articles, interviews and public hearings. These proposed laws were either defeated by the voters, vetoed by local politicians or ruled unconstitutional by the courts. But the New Victorians did not surrender.
Last February, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that MacKinnon’s basic theory on pornography was correct. It upheld a law suppressing “obscene” material that “subordinates” women, stating that “materials portraying women as a class as objects for sexual exploitation and abuse have a negative impact on the individual’s sense of self-worth and acceptance.” Yes, the court admitted, this decision limits freedom of expression. But there was a superseding need to halt “the proliferation of materials which seriously offend the values fundamental to our society.”
This obviously was a major victory for the New Victorians and for MacKinnon herself; she had worked with a Toronto women’s group on the drafting of a brief that supported the Canadian bill. The Canadian court’s decision also provided a legal model for what the New Victorians want to see done in the United States. They are now trying to pass similar legislation in Massachusetts.
MacKinnon told The New York Times: “It’s for the woman whose husband comes home with a video, ties her to the bed, makes her watch and then forces her to do what they did in the video. It’s a civil rights law. It’s not censorship. It just makes pornographers responsible for the injuries they cause.”
That is the heart of this grim little crusade. They want pornographers to disappear under the threat of civil lawsuits. But Massachusetts obviously is a limited target, the focus of parochial attention. They have grander plans for us all. Like the wonderful people who brought us Prohibition (and the Mob), MacKinnon and her allies among the New Victorians want to impose their vision and their rules on the entire country. The likes of Orrin Hatch, Arlen Specter and Alan Simpson moved Senate Bill 1521 out of committee, thus urging their colleagues in the Senate to make the furious, fear-driven visions of MacKinnon and Dworkin the law of the land.
The bill is officially called the Pornography Victims’ Compensation Act, and it would allow victims of sex crimes to sue producers and distributors of sexual material if the victims can prove the material incited the crimes. The legislation has been nicknamed the Bundy Bill, after mass killer Ted Bundy, who claimed on the eve of his execution that pornography made him do it. If it passes and is upheld in the current right-wing Supreme Court, Bundy’s final victim will surely be the First Amendment.
MacKinnon believes that in America the law is the essential tool of social change. In a narrow sense, this is certainly true. The civil rights of blacks, for example, were more radically altered by Brown vs. Board of Education than by many years of prayer, argument and human suffering. But she goes on to insist that the law is not neutral but male, conceived by men to serve the interests of male power. Today, MacKinnon insists, the law serves the interests of male supremacy. And to change the present power arrangements in the United States, the law must be used against itself.
“Our law is designed to … help make sex equality real,” MacKinnon has written. “Pornography is a practice of discrimination on the basis of sex, on one level because of its role in creating and maintaining sex as a basis for discrimination. It harms many women one at a time and helps keep all women in an inferior status by defining our subordination as our sexuality and equating that with gender.”
Surely, that assigns far more power to pornography than it could ever have. But even if you agree with its claims, the question is whether more laws are needed. MacKinnon knows that if a woman is coerced into making a porno film, the people who abused her are subject to a variety of charges, including kidnapping, assault, imprisonment and invasion of privacy. But MacKinnon and Dworkin insist the present laws are not enough. In a discussion of Minneapolis’ proposed antiporn ordinance, they said of pornographic acts: “No existing laws are effective against them. If they were, pornography would not flourish as it does, and its victims would not be victimized through it as they are.” In other words, because the present laws don’t work, add another law. Maybe that will work.
The world as MacKinnon sees it is now “a pornographic place” and, as a result, women are being held down, tied up and destroyed. “Men treat women as who they see women as being,” MacKinnon writes. “Pornography constructs who that is. Men’s power over women means that the way men see women defines who women can be. Pornography is that way. … It is not a distortion, reflection, projection, expression, fantasy, representation or symbol, either. It is a sexual reality.”
Of course, common sense tells us otherwise. The vast majority of men simply don’t use pornography to “construct” women, because the vast majority of men don’t ever see much pornography. And the vast majority of men don’t spend their days and nights dreaming of inflicting cruelties on women and then carrying them out. If they did, Americans would be up to their rib cages in blood. There are violent men and there is violent pornography (estimated by one study at about five percent of the total produced in the United States). But MacKinnon isn’t attacking only the violence she says suffuses the “pornotopia”; she is after pornography itself, as she and her allies define it.
The word that names that concept, as Walter Kendrick points out in his 1987 history of the subject, The Secret Museum, can be traced back to the Greek pornographoi (“whore-painter”), apparently coined by the second-century writer Athenaeus and promptly forgotten. The word was revived, appropriately, during the Victorian era, and by 1975 the American Heritage Dictionary was defining it as “written, graphic, or other forms of communication intended to excite lascivious feelings.”
The inequality of women and men in this poor world goes back at least to the late Neolithic Period, long before the creation of pornography or its naming. But MacKinnon and the radical feminists insist that such inequality was “constructed” by pornography. And obviously, the current usage of the word was too mild to serve their purposes. They needed to make it more specific. In Pornography and Civil Rights, a 1988 pamphlet that MacKinnon wrote with Dworkin, it is defined as follows:
Pornography is the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words that also include one or more of the following: (i) women are presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things or commodities; or (ii) women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or (iii) women are presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or (iv) women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or (v) women are presented in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility or display; or (vi) women’s body parts — including but not limited to vaginas, breasts or buttocks — are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or (vii) women are presented as whores by nature; or (viii) women are presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or (ix) women are presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.
The use of men, children or transsexuals in the place of women in [the acts cited in the paragraph] above is also pornography.
Obviously, in spite of the specifics, this is a great vague glob of a definition. MacKinnon would most certainly ban Playboy, which she says reduces women to mere objects for the use of men. But her definition of pornography limned in Pornography and Civil Rights could cover everything from the latest Madonna video to the novels of Henry Miller, Al Capp’s Moonbeam McSwine and Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo, acres of surrealist paintings, the Koran and James Cagney hitting Mae Clarke with that grapefruit. We would see the last of Black Bun Busters, but we could also lose Don Giovanni. The great flaw in the antiporn agitation is that it’s based on a mystery: the elusive nature of sexuality.
MacKinnon and Dworkin assume that descriptions of sexual cruelty incite men. They write: “Basically, for pornography to work sexually with its major market, which is heterosexual men, it must excite the penis.” And “to accomplish its end, it must show sex and subordinate a woman at the same time.”
And they follow with an immense leap of logic: “Subordination includes objectification, hierarchy, forced submission and violence.”
None of this elaboration solves the basic mystery of sexual excitement. Across the centuries, men have been excited by everything from high heels and nuns’ habits to veiled faces and the aroma of rose petals. Some find erotic inspiration in Rubens, others in Giacometti; in the complex mesh of sexuality, there are no rules. Some men may get excited at written or visual images of women being subordinated, others may see those images as appalling and many would be indifferent to them.
But to think that banning pornography will bring about the political goal of eliminating human inequalities or hierarchies is absurd. The world has always been composed of hierarchies: the strong over the weak, the smart above the dumb, the talented above the ordinary. MacKinnon may not like the existence of those hierarchies (nor the liberal project of protecting the weak, the dumb and the ordinary), but they are unlikely to be changed by a municipal ordinance banning Three-Way Girls. Some feminists would tell you that just being a wife is a condition of subordination. There have been hundreds of novels written by literature professors that relate sexual affairs between male teachers and female students; are such works automatically pornographic? The boss-worker equation has been examined in hundreds of thousands of novels, short stories, movies and cartoons. Does that mean that their relationships include “objectification, hierarchy, forced submission and violence”? And if, heaven forbid, they have sex, are they actors in pornography?
MacKinnon and Dworkin allow no room for such questions. Pornography, as they define it, is everywhere around them, the defining presence in American society. They write:
Pornographers’ consumers make decisions every day over women’s employment and educational opportunities. They decide how women will be hired, advanced, what we are worth being paid, what our grades are, whether to give us credit, whether to publish our work.…They raise and teach our children and man our police forces and speak from our pulpits and write our news and our songs and our laws, telling us what women are and what girls can be. Pornography is their Dr. Spock, their Bible, their Constitution.
If that torrid vision were true, you would be forced to lose all hope for the nation; there would be almost nobody left who is not part of the pornographic lodge. But common sense tells us that the assertion is not true. It is an almost clinically paranoid view of reality (try substituting “communists” or “Jews” for “pornographer’s consumers”). Perhaps more important, it is based on a profound ignorance of men.
Like most men I know, I haven’t seen or read much hard-core pornography. I gave up after 90 pages of The 120 Days of Sodom, the alleged masterpiece by the Marquis de Sade. I found the anonymous Victorian chronicle My Secret Life as repetitive in its sexual scorekeeping as a sports autobiography. Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones held my attention more than the average Doris Day movie ever did, but I thought Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee was far more erotic. That’s me. One person.
But in a lifetime as a man, growing up in a Brooklyn slum, as a sailor in the Navy, as a student in Mexico, as a reporter who moved among cops and criminals, schoolteachers and preachers, musicians and athletes, drunks and bartenders, I have never heard anyone celebrate pornography as defined by MacKinnon and Dworkin. Men talk about sex, of course; though the men who talk the most are usually getting the least. And they talk about women, too; but not so often as women think they do. Most S&M books (and acts) are dismissed by most men as freak shows. Even by the bad guys. Every criminal I’ve known (there are many) has told me that in prison the rapist is the most loathed of all prisoners, except, perhaps, those jailed for abusing children. Pornography simply wasn’t central to their lives and usually wasn’t even marginal.
I’m hardly an innocent about the realities of sexual violence. As a reporter for more than three decades, I’ve seen more brutalized bodies of men and women than most people. But their degradation certainly does nothing at all for my penis. I don’t think there is any such animal as a “typical” man. But most men I’ve known are like me: They have no interest in this junk.
My own lack of interest in the hard-core is based on another critique: The people are not people, they are abstractions. In all pornography, men and women are reduced to their genitals.
Oddly enough, that is precisely the way MacKinnon, Dworkin and most of the New Victorians see human beings: as abstractions. They speak of generalized women who are given names and faces only when they are victims. And over and over again, MacKinnon speaks about men as if they all behaved in the same way and were sexually excited by the same imagery. But which men are they talking about? Read this chilly prose and you are asked to believe that Seamus Heaney and Michael Jordan, Sean Connery and François Mitterrand, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Arnold Schwarzenegger, along with auto mechanics, bread-truck drivers, carpenters and guitar players, are all fully covered by the same word, respond to the same stimuli and are equally dedicated to the subordination of women. That is absurd.
But this sectarian narrowness does help define their vision of human life in this world. That vision is descended from a basic Victorian assumption: All men are beasts and all women are innocents. Women fall into vice or degradation only at the hands of cruel, unscrupulous, power-obsessed men. They have no free will and never choose their own loss of grace. Men only see women the way they are presented in pornography and use pornography as a kind of male instruction manual to maintain all forms of supremacy. Women are never brutal, corrupt or evil and they never truly choose to make porno films, dance topless, pose for centerfolds, work as secretaries or, worst of all, get married. Original sin was the fault of men. Eve was framed.
These women claim to know what billions of other women were never smart enough, or enlightened enough, to understand: Sexual intercourse is the essential act of male domination, created by a sinister male cabal to hurt and humiliate all women and thus maintain power over them forever. As Maureen Mullarkey has written in The Nation: “In the Dworkin-MacKinnon pornotopia, there are only the fuckers and the fuckees. The sooner the fuckers’ books are burned, the better.” She doesn’t exaggerate. According to Dworkin, all women are “force-fucked,” either directly through the crime of rape or by the male power of mass media, by male economic power or by the male version of the law.
It doesn’t matter to the New Victorians that the vast majority of women, even many proud feminists, don’t see the world the way they do. With the same amazing knowledge of the entire human race that allows her to speak so glibly about men, MacKinnon dismisses their viewpoints as well.
At a 1987 conference organized by Women Against Pornography, MacKinnon was blunt about the pro-sex feminists who had formed the Feminists Against Censorship Taskforce. That group included such women as Betty Friedan, Adrienne Rich and Rita Mae Brown. “The labor movement had its scabs, the slavery movement had its Uncle Toms,” MacKinnon said, “and we have FACT.” In another enlightening speech she simply dismissed her feminist opponents as “house niggers who sided with the masters.”
Today, absolutely certain of their rectitude, totally free of doubt, equipped with an understanding of human beings that has eluded all previous generations, MacKinnon, Dworkin and their allies have been shaping a Victorian solution to their Victorian nightmares. That solution is, pardon the expression, paternalistic. As MacKinnon writes: “Some of the same reasons children are granted some specific legal avenues for redress …also hold true for the social position of women compared to men.” Since women are, in the MacKinnon view, essentially children, they must be shielded from harm, corruption and filthy thoughts. The savage impulses of the male must be caged. And women must be alerted to the true nature of the beast.
“If we live in a world that pornography creates through the power of men in a male-dominated situation,” MacKinnon writes, “the issue is not what the harm of pornography is but how that harm is to become visible.”
That’s it: Simply make harm visible and we shall live happily ever after. Common sense and wide experience count for nothing. They know that men are loathsome and are clear about how to tame them. Once tamed, they can be subverted, their powers over women will vanish and the grand Utopia of complete equality will arrive for all. That bleak vision of human nature has its own escalating logic, just as Lenin’s sentimental abstraction of the proletariat led inevitably to the gulag. In her bizarre 257-page book Intercourse, Dworkin repeats the theory that MacKinnon and other academic feminists accept as proven: Gender is a mere “social construct,” enforced, in Dworkin’s elegant phrase, by “vagina-specific fucking.”
Once more, the Victorian sense of sexual horror permeates the discussion. If men are the source of all savagery to women, then sexual intercourse with men is itself a savage act. Women who claim to enjoy heterosexual lovemaking are, says Dworkin, “collaborators, more base in their collaboration than other collaborators have ever been, experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority, calling intercourse freedom.”
Forget whips, chains and handcuffs. All heterosexual intercourse is disgusting, an act of physical and psychic invasion. As Dworkin writes: “The woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally: occupied even if there has been no resistance, no force; even if the occupied person said yes please, yes hurry, yes more.”
Obviously, this is a total denial of any biologically driven sexual need. To follow the logic to its inevitable conclusion, the only pure feminists, the only noncollaborators with the enemy, would be celibates or lesbians. Alas, billions of human beings, male and female, from Tibet to Miami, don’t see the world — or the nature of sexuality — that way. They keep on doing what men and women have been doing since before history or the invention of religion. To the New Victorians this must be infuriating. And so they will attempt an act of hubris that even the old Victorians, in their imperial arrogance, did not try. They will correct human nature.
As Americans, MacKinnon, Dworkin and their allies have one major roadblock to their crusade: the Constitution. In their attack on “First Amendment absolutism,” the New Victorians want to discard a basic tenet of our lives: It doesn’t matter what we say, it is what we do that matters. That is a mere sentimentality, beloved of the hated liberals and the American Civil Liberties Union. Feminism first, says MacKinnon, the legal theorist, the law second. Or put another way: “The bottom line of the First Amendment is that porn stays. Our bottom line is that porn goes. We’re going to win in the long term.”
For the past few decades there has been a growth in the making and distribution of pornography. The reasons are complicated: the liberalizing of obscenity laws, the development of cheap offset printing and desktop publishing, the triumph of the VCR, the fear of women among some males that was caused by the ferocious oratory of the early days of the feminist movement itself and, lately, the fear of AIDS.
But there is no proof that pornography — even as defined by MacKinnon and Dworkin — causes all human beings to act upon the bodies of women. As MacKinnon herself points out, pornography is essentially an aid to masturbation. And as Gore Vidal once wrote, masturbation is “normal” sex, in the sense that it is surely the most frequent practice among all the world’s billions. Certainly the old Victorian belief that masturbation itself is a loathsome evil, a mortal sin, underlies much of the public rhetoric about pornography. But there is one effect that it may have that the New Victorians can’t admit. Rather than inspire men to loathsome acts, pornography may actually prevent them. For every rapist who is discovered to have pornography at home, there may be a thousand men who are content to look at the pictures, read the text, whack off and go to sleep. Nobody can prove this, but MacKinnon can’t prove that pornography creates monsters, either.
At the various public hearings she and Dworkin have staged, MacKinnon has brought fcfrth a number of women to relate tales of horror. Some were forced into the making of pornography, others were forced by lovers or husbands into imitating the sex acts described by pornography. Those stories were painful and heartbreaking, and their narrators were clearly damaged by their experiences. But it is unlikely that any future hearings will present balancing testimony from a man who says that he lives a perfectly respectable life, except when he gets off a few times a week in private with a copy of Water Sports Fetish. As far as I know, even Geraldo hasn’t done a show on the joys of masturbation and its amazing social values.
The Meese Commission on Pornography, called into existence by the antiporn forces of the Reagan administration, asserted in 1986 its belief that pornography causes sex crimes. But the fine print in its 1960-page report showed that it couldn’t prove it. Six of the 11 commissioners were committed to the antiporn position before studying the evidence and they still could not make a convincing case. They heard from many experts, including MacKinnon. But even an examination of those incidents where pornography was found in the homes of rapists couldn’t prove the longed-for assumption.
The reason wasn’t elusive. It is a classic error in logic — heightened into an ideological certainty by the New Victorians — to confuse correlation with causality. A survey may discover that 97 percent of heroin addicts consumed white bread in grade school, but that would not prove that white bread caused heroin addiction. Pornography, as defined by MacKinnon and Dworkin, may inspire a small percentage of men to experiment with more elaborate forms of their own preexisting sexual deviances. But it is just as likely that if they had never seen the material, they would have committed sexual crimes anyway. Alcohol is probably involved in more sex crimes than pornography is, and there have been many cases where religious or social repression led to the explosion, particularly among the young.
But one legal and social principle that the Bundy Bill and other New Victorian legislation casts aside is one of the most cherished conservative beliefs: personal responsibility. In a court of law, you can’t go free by saying that your upbringing made you do it, or your environment, your mother, father or friends. Still, many try to make that case. Whining has become one of the most widespread characteristics of Americans, even among criminals. In my experience, the classic excuse of the amateur American murderer has been “God made me do it.” Guys shoot up post offices or obliterate entire families and claim that God was in the getaway car giving orders. Charles Manson said he was inspired by the Book of Revelations. John Hinckley said he knew he had to shoot President Reagan after reading The Catcher in the Rye, and though J. D. Salinger is God only to a small number of fans, the reasoning is the same. When Ted Bundy said that pornography made him do it, the New Victorians cheered. But he was still only copping a plea. He did it. Nobody else. Murderers are responsible for their murders. And in every country on earth, rapists do the raping, not some collective called men.
The legal theory that endorses pornography-made-me-do-it, if accepted, would have no limits. Someone could claim that his family was destroyed as the result of published feminist theories attacking the family, and that feminist writers and their publishers must pay for the damage. Environmentalists could be sued for articles and speeches that place the spotted owl above the jobs of loggers.
And it could go beyond such possibilities. Violence permeates American society, and most of its victims are male. If the producers of Debbie Does Dallas can be held responsible for the crimes of someone who watched the video, why can’t the same be done to the producers of Terminator 2 or Halloween 5 or The Wild Bunch? You could go after the Road Runner cartoons, too, or Hamlet or the opera Carmen, In order to cleanse the American imagination, you would need to eliminate the works of Hemingway and Faulkner, along with hundreds of thousands of other novels and theoretical works that could make violence socially acceptable, thereby causing murder and mayhem. You would end up abolishing boxing, hockey and football. You would be forced to censor all war reporting, perhaps even the discussion of war, on the grounds that Nightline is the theory and war is the practice.
Obviously, this is pushing the argument to the frontiers of the absurd. But there is an absurd assumption behind the suppressionist argument: that men are a kind of collective tabula rasa on which the pornographers make their indelible marks. An innocent lad from Shropshire picks up a copy of one of the books that MacKinnon cites — say, Enemas and Golden Showers — and goes rushing out into the night, enema bag in one hand, cock in the other. That might have made a glorious scene in a John Belushi movie, but common sense tells us that it doesn’t happen very often in what we laughingly call real life.
One minor problem with this theory of human behavior concerns MacKinnon and Dworkin. They’ve obviously pored over more pornography than the ordinary man sees in a lifetime. “Look closely sometime,” MacKinnon writes, “for the skinned knees, the bruises, the welts from the whippings, the scratches, the gashes.” If human beings are so weak and pornography so powerful, why aren’t MacKinnon and Dworkin playing the Krafft-Ebing Music Hall with the rest of the perverts? There are two possible answers. The first is that MacKinnon and Dworkin (and other researchers for the New Victorians) are morally superior to all men and most women and are thus beyond contamination. The second is more likely: The material is so vile that it is a psychological turnoff to all human beings except those with a preexisting condition. Those people do exist. They have been shaped by many variables, none of which are excuses for what they do. But from the experience of the Victorian era, we know that if such people can’t find their preferred reading at adult bookstores, they will not give up their sexual fantasies. The fantasies will simply fester in the dark. And they will use what such people use in countries where pornography is now banned — their imaginations.
In such countries — say, Saudi Arabia, Ireland or Iran — the equality of women hasn’t been established by banning pornography, but I’m certain that the sexual impulse, and the instinct to dominate, remains alive. Those instincts are part of human nature, and in spite of centuries of effort by archbishops and commissars and even a few philosophers, they are not truly alterable by the power of the state. The sexual impulse, including sexual fantasy, is not subject to the force of reason. Recent history teaches us that most tyrannies have a puritanical nature. The sexual restrictions of Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany and Mao’s China would have gladdened the hearts of those Americans who fear sexual images and literature. Their iron-fisted puritanism wasn’t motivated by a need to erase sexual inequality. They wanted to smother the personal chaos that can accompany sexual freedom and subordinate it to the granite face of the state. Every tyrant knows that if he can control human sexuality, he can control life. In the end, every tyrant fails.
MacKinnon, Dworkin and their allies in the American right insist that they speak for freedom, for the liberation of women from the demeaning or disgusting images of pornography that motivate the male ruling class. They would not be the first human beings who limited freedom while proclaiming allegiance to its virtues. All of these Utopians would benefit from a study of the first Victorian era. There was a legal ban on pornography, but women had no rights at all (they were later won by a coalition of brave suffragist women and liberal men). Pornography certainly existed, but it was rarefied, expensive and available only to rich “gentlemen.” Official London adhered to the supermoral antisexual codes, but in real London syphilis and gonorrhea were rampant. Some 80,000 women were engaged in prostitution, virgins were sold to the highest bidders and the most infamous character of the era rose from the festering sexual underground and called himself Jack the Ripper. What reasonable man or woman would go back to that future?
In a way, the work of MacKinnon and Dworkin is some of the saddest writing I’ve ever read. It’s narrow and sectarian, often vicious and totalitarian in its insistence on submission by other feminists. But it is also thoroughly without joy or wonder. In this bleak house, nothing else matters except the cruelties of sex and power. Not laughter. Not love. Not the simple luminous pleasure of a summer afternoon. There is no room in this dark vision for Fred Astaire or Buster Keaton, for Lucille Ball or Maria Callas, for Betty Comden or Willie Mays. There is no fantasy or magic, no awe in the presence of human beauty, no desire for spiritual or carnal union. Nobody closes the door for a night of joyous, heart-busting, time-bending, mind-obliterating full-out human fucking. Nobody goes to the racetrack, either. Nobody dances at the midnight hour. Nobody plays the blues. In this airless, sunless world, we don’t encounter the glorious moment when a child learns to walk or to read. We hear nothing of decent husbands and loving fathers, of families that have triumphed over poverty, or mothers who have lived hard lives with their intelligence, heart, sensuality and pride intact. Such people exist, in the millions, but they are not in this fiercely correct world of rules and anathemas. Above all, in the sad and bitter world of Catharine MacKinnon, there is no wide tolerant understanding of a species capable of forgiving our endless gift for human folly. There are only the lacerated and the harmed and the odor of the charnel house. I don’t envy their dreams. And I hope I’m never forced to live in their fearful new world.