Agree With Much of What

¶ … agree with much of what Catharine MacKinnon says about how women are abused in hard core pornography Web sites, in magazines and elsewhere. She is right to protest that crimes are committed by men who are deeply involved daily in viewing pornography, because some of those men have the idea that it is okay to use women's bodies to relieve their carnal cravings. Violence against women should never be protected by the Constitution. Rape and child pornography are unconscionable acts of felony violence, and should be punished accordingly.

But I do not accept that all pornography should lose its protected status under the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights. Soft core pornography photos and videos and adult films with soft core pornography, using women who are willing to be portrayed in those media and are paid fairly and not harmed or degraded, should be protected. It is a woman's right to earn a living in any way she chooses, providing it is a legal position. If she wants to take off some of her clothing so that a pornographic Web site can draw men who are willing to pay money to view those photos, who has the right to tell her she can't do that?

Also, there are thousands of popular books, movies, TV shows and other forms of media where "soft core" pornography plays a role. Whether it is Joyce Carol Oates, Ernest Hemingway, a TV show on cable or the Book of Solomon (which is very racy and sexy), one could define certain acts in those media as "soft core" pornography. So, I differ from MacKinnon on some of her contentions, as mentioned above, but overall she raises good points and her brilliant style of scholarly writing is very impressive.

What Catharine MacKinnon Has to Say

Catharine MacKinnon starts out her essay by building her contention that there is no equality between men and women; she relates specifically to the feminist movement. MacKinnon says she believes that, first of all (and this has to be a cryptic remark), "feminism is the discovery that women do not live in this world, that the person occupying this realm is a man..." especially if the man is white and has money. The privilege of being a part of this universe, she continues, is based on "gender," and the feminism movement has discovered that the "social content of humanism" has not been the woman's standpoint.

In a more understandable and non-cryptic paragraph on the first page of her essay, MacKinnon says that feminism is the "first theory, the first practice, the first movement," to really take the situation of every woman "seriously." Feminism, she explains, looks at the position of women's social life "as a whole," which is the first time the women's legal and social views have been put forward as a theory of humanism.

It is important for her to establish the definition of feminism, the alert reader can understand, because she doesn't say this but the media has made the concept of "feminism" look sometimes like maybe the viewpoint of a special interest group, or the viewpoint and strategy of lesbians and bisexual women. Clearing this up at the outset of her essay paves the way for a reader to later understand what it is that drives her position on pornography.

Defining feminism "in a way that connects epistemology [the study of the "nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge" according to Britannica] with power as the politics of women's point-of-view," she writes, can be "summed up by saying that women live in another world," and that world is not equality, but it is inequality.

One of the main points that MacKinnon makes is that while pornography is protected (in most cases; but not when child pornography is at issue) by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which is the "free speech" part of the Bill of Rights, there is harm being done to women that has nothing to do with "freedom of speech" or "freedom of the press." That harm is found when you look closely at the First Amendment's application and meaning, she continues. The person who argues that the First Amendment protection for pornography is justified, she suggests, is actually authorizing males and the establishment of laws to have power over sexuality, and as a result, to basically allow a woman's sexuality to be manipulated and abused.

The abuses that MacKinnon talks about are "unspeakable abuses...the rape, the battery, the sexual harassment, the prostitution and the sexual abuse of children"; only in pornography is "it called something else," she continues. "Sex, sex, sex, sex and sex," respectively. In other words she is angry that rape and battery are just referred to as "sexual" issues, and harassment and prostitution and the abuse of children fall under that broad category too.

This next section from MacKinnon is a bit harsh, and perhaps oversimplified, but she goes on to say that pornography "celebrates, promotes, authorizes and legitimizes" those crimes mentioned in the paragraph above. Pornography, she continues basically shows men what a woman wants from men sexually, and so in their twisted minds, men want to believe that women desire "dispossession and cruelty." She carries her argument, as in the beginning, with cryptic narrative very effectively; "We desperately want to be bound, battered, tortured, humiliated and killed," she states on page 190.

Then for the first time in her essay, she mentions the soft core; "Or, to be fair to the soft core," women want to be "merely taken and used." Women exist to be "isolated and possessed," MacKinnon continues, and men exist "to violate and possess us either on screen or by camera or pen on behalf of the consumer."

Her argument gets more into the intellectual and away from the wild accusations when she says that pornography goes "beyond its content." It "eroticizes hierarchy" and it "sexualizes inequality," she insists. There is an "illusion of freedom coming together with the reality of force," she explains. By "freedom" she means the "victim" (woman being shown undressed) must appear to be free, and appear to be freely acting; "choice is how she got there," MacKinnon asserts, and "willing is what she is..."