p@9 %  L$MUST BOOT FROM SLOT 4, 5 OR 6CJJJJ \  i=l x ? L N9 +i C* ɭЅ?0ȱ L Ѕ?iȱi L CPlg and radical feminist efforts is part of 0Bthe current landscape. The arguments differ but the ends - total ,elimination of pornography - are identical. measures to guard e d :Abstract:om using their services. Uncollected bills have forced 1, pp 31-34. , p 5.  ? Author:Jean Bethke Elshtain[š C?/צ Abstract:tty Wein, Editor!.[G&TEXT; Despite disavowals from both sides, an implicit coming-on. d ?together of right-win0 THE VICTIM SYNDROME (PART I) UNISHMENT RKS S C:[.,, Jean Bethke Elshtain 1, pp 31-34.ry 1992, : Society, Vol. 28, No. 4, May/June 199ES23.TXTr f1PORN3{3 PORN16.TXT f13a PORN17.TXT f1a PORN18.TXT f1 PORN19.TXT f1 PORN20.TXT f1 PORN21.TXT f1 PORN22.TXT f1PORN23.TXT f1 before transfer compl+`FG8`0($ p,&" COPYRIGHT APPLE COMPUTER, INC., 1984, 1985 C.LEUNGh&Y&&Y& 꽌ɪ\8`&&꽌ɪɖ'*&%&,E'зЮ꽌ɪФ`+*xH&x'8*7Ixix&&    ') +!  &п  x) +莶莸L莸LNO FILE SYSTEM.APPLE SYSTEM.APPLEJ) (jJJ>Lx "?I  `  C x Nx G .x- `V0^*^*>` aI꽌ɪVɭ Despite disavowals from both sides, an implicit coming-his , 9A Why is pornography so hard to deal with? Why does it create *@such divisiveness? Why does the debate get framed by the issue l TEXsubstantive morality are concerned. This may account foride, either by politicizing d >"the private" or by claiming that privacy is being eroded and .S. danmust be restored. should also be submitted to your local FBI ect agent for investigation. nothing more than that other persons < The pre s, bAindividual rights, choice, and "freedom from." They must "prove ume ;damages" to get the machinery of civil society moving in a aw; s Apunitive or positive direction. They must also attempt to break :?down the liberal public-private divader framework was officially agnostic. The y f @important point - in the context of the pornography debate - is e :that lacking a language of public morality, reformers are David obligation. Certain aspects of our moral experience, such as ʅAfriendship, family, and community life, fall through the grid of threatened may call upon civil society for protection and may 90% @challenge that society should it threaten the rights it is duty- is=bound to protect. This bracing ideal requires that politics o nd ":touch only externals. Behavior alone cds or no god - it neither picked his pocket nor >broke his leg - captures the governing ethos well. Religious o 6@belief is private; the morality or amorality of others is their =business unless it impinges on other people. A person being dn them a public morality Holding as self-evident the view of the person as a bearer of st ܾbut to sexual pleasure itself. One writer, in a call for the V@unrepressed society, termed masturbation a "right," goies, or responses and strategies that have anti-democratic implications. learn of the gruesome exploits of e the serial killer Ted Bundy, who, after spending more than a y. , @ These are controversial points requiring detailed defense. d y as a model for a Bfeminist politics that looks to democratic renewal. Not only are Athe arguments posed by radical feminist anti-pornographers crude @as an analysis of the problem, they require and invite specific y Aanti-democratic responsornography, is a form of politics. Such discussions create se Bpolitical space. To insist that we know all there is to know and @what we must do is to close ranks and to fight - as the radical , Bfeminist anti-pornographers demand - is unworthies. ere among at least some of the ne. A It may be helpful to heed Hannah Arendt's insistence that we Bfind some way to "think what we are doing." For thinking what we 8are doing, considering how we think when the subject is under nd =p- have become. -8-@Tossing off these constraints in the name of freedom opened the e 7floodgate to a new coarseness and brutalization in the eed for s #representation of human sexuality. ry by law enforcement and at t consumer protection agenc main street of middle-sized towns is a story of an aesthetics Bof mechanistic and sometimes cruel sexuality, and of profit. Its ?proliferation tells how ineffective the old unwritten rules of g Ainternalized constraint - taboos, shame, scandal The metaphor suggests that heir sex VerApornography has become a natural force, akin to an epidemic, and ers6that we are unable to inoculate ourselves against it. found 220 &?Pornography's progress from the twilight zone of the cities to Bthe grow rapidly s ?filled after they had sampled all the pornographic consumables e $Bavailable - and pornography would fall back into some unspecified  >but limited proper place.) In 1976 Time magazine ran a cover ct 8story on the "Porn Plague."he explosion of pornography that got underway, in its new can find no other effective way to press a case for political , t Achange ng on to ;argue that once that right was either seized or granted an ings -9individual's development of new and better "masturbatory tention ̂e7techniques" might well be a way of making a "political s made an this nature as depending for its pleasure and identity on the r =remorseless victimization of women. A direct implication of k @these arguments is a patronizing view of women's passivity, one Ain which women have neither agency nor complicity in any complex Bsocial or sexual intere Bpresented as sexual objects, things or commodities; (2) women are ?presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; (3) >women are presented as sexual objects who experience pleasure ve Bbeing raped, (4) women are presenteicit subordination of women, graphically depicted, whether in pictures or words." recently become an issue, history is dotted with the exploits of such individuals. Some, such as > Included were one or more of the following: (1) Women ae law. The ordinance - e ?passed by a 7-6 vote of the Minneapolis City Council, December of B30, 1983, and vetoed January 5 of 1984, by troubled liberal Mayor ?Don Fraser - defines pornography in the broadest terms as "the at @sexually expl f @proposed an amendment to the city's civil rights ordinance that r ?would classify pornography as "a form of discrimination on the ow Bbasis of sex," hence a violation of the civil rights of women and =a denial of equal protection under thct. Embracing the radial feminist argument that A"pornography is the theory; rape is the practice," protestors in >Minneapolis, led by Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, a tic >radical feminist legal scholar and a polemicist respectively,on of a purified sexuality 7possible after demons, equal in horror to totalitarian it be used @genocidists, are eliminated. These extreme representations are ?not really opposites, but require one another and help to hold @each other intar ;are silent about his analogue, Hefner, thereby promoting a w a o 6"holocaust" against women. The utopian vision of the kground and =pornographer, who represents a world without limits, is here Bcounterposed to an equally utopian visiat vapid trio of sexual liberationists - Hugh k, AHefner, Bob Guiccionne and Larry Flynt - "every bit as dangerous ?as Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito." She then goes on to trash - Aliberals - "the very same liberals" who spoke out against Hitlelations between men and 6women: "It is what women are in theory and practice." in , he But is there in fact a causal connection between the rials r. : One author in the collection Take Back the Night, for iolent ?example, calls th Bis seen as a form of violence. At work is a simplistic theory of that pornography causes violence, whether it is implicated in . @direct physical harm or not. The mere existence of pornography sm. me (unless child ly 8 One of the most disturbing features of current anti-edy in g ;pornography efforts is the move to close-out politics. To urch =dissent from the radical feminist view is, by definition, to a ng >betray women. If o=disturbing that the best publicized feminist critiques of an tors :important topic like pornography are based on such simple-as to mindedness. VICTIMS WIN CASE also cunning as a fox. He often r, coordinated his own defense in the courtrooraction. All social evil, in this scheme of =things, comes from the "other" in its collective guise, Man, e n. 6dominated by evil intent, and arrayed permanently and d access TV buttocks - are exhibited such that women are reduced to those s Bparts; (7) women are presented as whores by nature; (8) women are ?presented being penetrated by objects or animal; (9) women are :presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, abasement,e of August 27, 1979, as proclaiming Bthat "women who would have the government ban sexist material are ?the new McCarthyites. It's the same old censorship in radical nd ?garb." Aryeh Neier, in The Nation of June 21, 1980 termed the ;w> But the battle lines were drawn long before Minneapolis. AAlan Dershowitz, Harvard constitutional law professor, is quoted >in a Time magazine articlsorship and threatens liberty. By promulgating a definition >of pornography so broad it might indict an Updike novel along :with a smut film, feminist protestors confirmed the civil keep libertarian's worst fears. cript: n the courts. way to the Supreme Court. To First n, @Amendment absolutists, this anti-porn crusade confirmed a world-l Bview that no doubt comes to them too easily: Any attempt to curb 8or regulate the new, more pervasive pornography invites n sense @censful. The A Predictably, the scope and language of the ordinance aroused =the ire of civil libertarians. The Minnesota American Civil f @Liberties Union entered the fray in opposition to the proposal, ?vowing to fight it all the sue. The First Amendment is seen as an impediment to the ?achievement of desired ends and the question, in that case, is 0the instrumental one: How can we get around it? ed in an effort to discredit the Commission, but it proved unsuccesin First Amendment concerns: "I @find the civil liberties stance to be bourgeois hypocrisy a lot =of the time." The ordinance offered a wide-ranging answer: the BAnytime a woman determined her civil rights had been violated she @couldose he d B Statute proponents insist that pornography by definition sets 8up a clash between First Amendment guarantees and equal a moral Dworkin shows scant interest I'm a woman." As the injured party, the woman could @bring suit under civil law against "a particular person, place, distributor, exhibitor." ave no sympathy for Bundy, but his nk execution did not bring back the innocent lives of thizen are violated because those y supermarket is that you or I go into the supermarket to buy a may ?dozen eggs. My rights as a citrdinance dramatically tried to extend the notion of harm Awith the proclamation that pornography constitutes a form of sex Adiscrimination; hence compromises by definition a violation of a Awoman's civil rights. Dworkin, a writer who proclaims a "woman...could claim that she ?had been injured, or coerced," including for example, a chance ? Aencounter with an "offensive" magazine cover in the supermarket. Can capital punishment be considered a deterrent to crime? Or B The o @torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised or hurt =in a context that makes these conditions sexual. Leaving no ew ;stone unturned, the statute extended the notion of harm to ay t a Aencompass any situation in which omen's campaign against pornography a feature of "the new >censorship." Let us make certain the censors are labeled for :what they are," Neier concluded, "that is the best way of stian Bimpairing their ability to attract adherents to their cause." In :addition to the American Civil Liberties Union, outspoken force ;opposition to the Minneapolis ordinance was voiced by such boy, s =liberal newspapers as the Minneapolis Tribune in the name of e s. ?"free expression, constt APornographers and their radical feminist opponents seem to share 6the same worldview. For Dworkin and anti-pornography In Apolemicists, as for pornographers to a man, the phallus function @as synecdoche - it stands for the mal world that is structured by narrow proceduralism =and bereft of any animating vision of a political community. environment, in my neighborhood, in my church, in my school...I : This becomes evident when one considers this paradox: ainal version of their ually 7proposal. Inflated rhetoric and claims of unrelenting being =victimization, together with a proposed remedy that features Bsingle, aggrieved women going to court, shows how difficult it is Ato get out of a. BOne major difference is the more explicit attention conservatives 9pay to the portrayal of men and children in pornographic rape Brepresentations. The Minneapolis ordinance framers added men and ;children somewhat grudgingly to the fins from both sides, an implicit coming-together Bof right-wing and radical feminist efforts is part of the current Blandscape. The arguments differ but the ends - total elimination Bof pornography as defined broadly by each group - are identicaleeping women in a @subordinate position through humiliation and degradation, it is 8hard to figure out why "right wing men" would not favor get bored Cpornography, if it can serve as a weapon for their self-interest. @Despite disavowal=staked on their dominance" for feminists to see them even as 2tacit allies in the struggle against pornography. prostitutes, Bundy: In the beginning it fuels this kind of thought process, ; If pornography's explicit intent is kctive or interest with conservative Acampaigners since they believe that conservative groups have the Aheaviest stake of all in maintaining male dominance. MacKinnon, Decency through Law. Feminist protestors vehemently deny any ll 7mutuality of perspe@their bodies, insisting that "the nut who hates women" can find 5legitimacy for his sexism in such visual and written selling. Brepresentations." His position is identical to that of the Women ?Against Pornography broadside: "The essencing crusaders against pornography as our al ;worst forms of modern vice. For example, Joseph Sobran, a ow Asyndicated voice of the conservative right, launched a broadside =against films and magazines that degrade women and objectify e the somewhat 4unsavory silent partners of the civil libertarians. Bundy: Yes, and this is something I want to emphasize. The most A Feminist anti-pornographers often find themselves in a tacit >alliance with right-w@American Booksellers Association, all lobbied for defeat of the Aordinance. The porn industry itself was an invisible interested Bparty to the Minneapolis dispute. Although the pornographers did reality the fantastic scenarios the pornographers present - a s @vision of atoms bumping against one another. Pornographers and 8their opponents alike extend the image of dominance and Asubordination from the pornographic movie theater to the avonnects at the base reflections on how cket nor =pornography may be symptomatic of wider features of American o 6Bsociety. We have reached a point where the rights of children to ?have sex with anyone they like, if they can only be freed from ot treat the complex ity Bquestion of relations between sexual and political moralities and @identities, nor those between public virtue and private ethics. l ?Their notion of freedom precludes consideration of substantive rd 8morality and disc ?individual victims and litigants, and that extend the atomized t ܾ@vision of human beings into all areas of social life, reinforce Athose features of our lives that gave rise to the porn plague in >the first place. Civil libertarians cannnd a background of historic desexualization ur T8(or hypersexualization) of the female. To transfer our uals th Texagreement on this issue is impossible, communities must leave tal Bspace for putting pornography in its place rather than seeking to :eradicate it altogether. ervices. Uncollected bills have forced 2, pp 34-38. , p 5.  ? Author:Jean Bethke Elshtain[š C?/צ Abstract:tty Wein, Editor!.[G&TEXT7 The bottom line for anti-porn advocates is whether ing-on. d >pornographic fantasie0 THE VICTIM SYNDROME (PART II) UNISHMENT RKS S C:[.,, Jean Bethke Elshtain 1, pp 34-38.ry 1992, : Society, Vol. 28, No. 4, May/June 199ts reserved. unately became CHE shock and horror to my dear friends and family years ago when I was first arrested was [that] there was no clue. They looked at me l 8Reproduced 1992 with permission. Copyright (C) 1992 by sic of .Transaction Publishers. All righ offers the voyeuristic consumer a vision that normal Aattracts because it signifies to "public man" what he is not, in Apublic or in private, a man with the power to bend others to his will. and didn't let anyone know about. And part of the and more a playing out of =themes of loss of control and efficiency in a world in which the Ahuman beings in general, and males in particular, see themselves =as objects of social forces over which they have no control. t. :Pornographyerage Aheterosexual bedroom. Their runaway rhetoric of cruelty insists Bthat violence is everywhere and pornography is telling the bitter 9truth of it. But if pornographic representations mirror he fight >anything, its scenarios become more ٕrecent celebrant of pedophilia. Civil libertarians challenge nd "@this view with the language of consent - children not being old ?enough to choose to be sodomized or otherwise gratified. They t W?cannot get beyond a picture of essential isolates, bound up in t. ʅBtheir rights and their "freedom from," going through the world en Agrande against egies - s in צ6conservative cries to return to real community and an etween eck  :@overreaching and deep reaching public morality; first amendment e @absolutists and pornographers in a wary alliance to prevent any ?inroads at all into constitut constellation of reactions that keeps the overall ich we ;structure of the moment intact becomes a distention of the inner =language of rights and the pursuit of political ends through them ard=individual litigation rather than broad popular stratn as the civil libertarian y ay-ty ockBalternative is unable to speak about communal concerns or freedom at all. he fact that our society is moving in this direction and  can find no other effective way to press a case for political , t : Theto all o ?spheres, is to lose a central feature of our political society -?and to threaten the real gains made by women and others in and n ̂eBthrough the prism of rights. The conservative option situates us :too deeply inside community evethe excessiveness of the liberal present, historically =disallowed women full civic identity. To hope to strip away y y @individualism and immersion in rights, rather than to challenge V>instances of their inflation and unwarranted extention point - an important point - om @about the difficulty of expressing "collective concerns" in our e @hegemonic liberal language. But he forgets (perhaps not!) that d V@traditional communities for these serve as an implicit contrast ted@model to express 2@the doctrine that law should be indifferent to the evolution of @the nation's character" and takes the Minneapolis protestors to l 9task for rattling "on and on about individual rights and re of d >equality." Certainly Will has a degrees pornographic fahrenheit - in "the logic" of rs 5liberal society's jurisprudence which "requires such trates x can Bunreasonableness before reasonable action can be taken." He then Bleaps to a blanket condemnation of "libertarian laws thatt claims. He astutely locates ;the need for a rhetoric that sees violence in every erotic nd .S. dan@representation, and insists that pornography causes actual acts Bof violence - as if human beings were so many pots put on to boil ?at so many s, bindividual rights, choice, and "freedom from." They must "prove ume @ Will places the moral question centrally, but in a way that s >liberals deem, and most feminists must find, problematic. He ak :Bnotes the "extravagance" of feminis"moral" concept. By repudiating a moral dimension Aaltogether, anti-porn protestors mirror the official agnosticism :(of ACLU, among others) on matters of public morality and David &competing visions of "the good life." rough the language ofthe tone and texture of a e &?policy. Will adds an explicit moral dimension the Minneapolis - :ordinance sponsors had rejected. According to MacKinnon, nicity, áBprotestors were disinterested in the feminist notion of obscenity @or any other in  Aa column on the Minneapolis case is, in contrast to liberalism's ʅ5official agnosticism in these matters, attractive in the grid of Aacknowledging that the inner life matters and that the character ?of citizens has something to do with possible constraints from aroused and potentially /"repressive" communities. ublic and private, the political ned gn language of liberalism celebrates individual choice and rights t A The conservative alternative, as presented by George Willional guarantees. Visible is the e P(Arelationship at work between pornographers, their clients, their K, There are multiple explanations why pornography fills, or ors ;seems to fill, a particular need of which the compensatory s to Adynamic is one. Todd Gitlin, in a discussion of pornography and ?the left, argues that the need for pornograd oppressed. (Dworkin, for example, has of ?stated that sex with a man is okay as long as his penis is not n. erect.) d by evil intent, and arrayed permanently and d access TV relentlessly against the collective category, Woman. It is ice . She is not a r 6pornographic subject; nor is she acceptable to either ion of k feminist anti-pornographers who see robust heterosexuality in ex >terms of oppressor an@independently enjoying themselves. This implies that a brassy, =sexually provocative harridan like Mae West, for example, is eory Aunsuited for a pornography of submission and domination for West =not only admitted her sexuality but vamped ite, the denial, in pornographic that have ;representations, of human response in the female object of s of e ?desire. She goes on to suggest that pornographic images would , ?not have been called into question if women were explicitly or d ly, and social r a >order. She claims that pornography represented a retreat for are Aupper class men from the burden of a growing self-consciousness, 9a search for the absolute "feeling self" in the absolute ecific y 6"unfeeling thing," hencheila Rowbotham, in her book Women, Resistance and Revolution, ;notes that pornography in the eighteenth century expressed ow and @unrestrained sexuality or "nature" breaking bounds of "culture" , >and despising the constraints of religion, famitrued as a liberating force - breaking @through the crust of social convention and scoffing at official Bsanctities - while to others it is perversity and always presents changing social form. Authoritarian right-wing societies and s Bsocialist revolutionary societies have been sexually repressive. @Pornography has been consneapolis ordinance it would "have been laughed out of this ics Bliberal town," it does not discredit all efforts to come to grips :with pornography. One reason why pornography has been so s of g Adifficult to deal with historically is not only t The metaphor suggests that heir sex Verpornography has become a natural force, akin to an epidemic, and ers= While it may be true, as a columnist for the Wall Street 20 &>Journal proclaimed, that "had the Moral Majority" written the >Mindance to the s 8same tune of woman, dominated, enthralled, pliable, the mables e $Bpossibility of a different theme song recedes into the distance.  @Nor does the heavenly chorus hummed by Will promise a change of tune in the long run. gue." Badvocates is whether pornographic fantasies have any right at all ?to exist. Need anything be demonstrated beyond the content of om Apornography itself for porn to be outlawed or curbed? "No," say Afeminist protestors and those on the right. "Yes," insist civil ?libertarians. Liberals, or radical democrats, unable to lurch :wholly one way or the other, find themselves increasingly ials r. Auncomfortable straddling a fence between "rights" and "community Aprotection." Ourre human >eroticism in opposition to patriarchal evil, as an attempt to out ?push the view that sexuality is a continuous natural object of historical discourse. u or I go into the supermarket to buy a may dozen eggs. My rights as a cit" identities become the central part of being, the harm Aprivileged site in which the truth of ourselves is to be found? >These questions locate that feminist discourse which poses an a @antimony between female desire, an unspoiled pool of puy, "Homo Sexualis," asks the he >question: Why is sex so important to us anyway? Why has the ? ;late twentieth century culture of narcissism embraced homo rket. ?sexualis as its definition of human essence? Why have sex and <"genderedebate Aabout cause involving a correspondence theory between porn X and outcome Y. t that makes these conditions sexual. Leaving no ew stone unturned, the statute extended the notion of harm to ay t a > Michael Ignatieff, in an essathe face of which we cannot remain indifferent." What >is attractive about this argument is the explicit distinction are ?between forms of representation and the possibility of raising ?moral concerns without launching a dubious and inflated derior, and it creates limits r @which it is not licit to go beyond. The whole problem of porno- truth about human beings, by reason of their bodies and their ve @sex, is especially personal and intf self-giving to another who can respond in an ed, equally personal way." words." recently become an issue, history is dotted with the exploits of such individuals. Some, such as A By turning what belongs to intimacy, to privacy, into p the mass media by its very 9nature offends human dignity when the body's intimacy is ember of @withdrawn from interpersonal relations and exposed to a general r @or unknown audience. "The human body is a manifestation of the t the body," between textural representations and what the Pope t r ?calls "porno-vision?" The term distinguishes films and videos ow =from pornography, which refers to literature or writing. He and Aargues that social communications anddeed require, serious reflection. argument that "pornography is the theory; rape is the practice," protestors in @ Can and ought we to distinguish with John Paul II, speaking c ?as the philosopher Karol Wotyla in a piece on the "theology o"major artists" sexuality @suppressed, to determine that something should be done to drive d >porn back underground. Concern about pornography need not be e @couched in apocalyptic analyses and solutions. A few questions 1will invite, inr Bconstitutes benign sexual representations, holistic and harmless, @invite repression. Concerned citizens need not share the views d @some feminist anti-pornographers would have few compunctions at 7seeing the pornographic productions of political language is not up to this task. We ?lack a vocabulary to deal with the question in some clear, non-s 8repressive way. And those who seek pornography's final trash - 8elimination and some uniform, approved standard of what t Hitleizen are violated because those y 9 Susan Sontag's illuminating essay, "The Pornographic ct to >Imagination," challenges our tendency to see pornography as a ses Bmalady to be diagnosed and an occasion to be judged: as something Aone must be for or against. She insists that human sexuality is Band always will be "a highly questionable phenomenon and belongs, Aat least potentially, among the extreme rather than the ordinary Bexperiences of humanity." Pornographic literature drnography campaign curiously aligns with the @civil libertarian in a wholesale dismissal of localism. To the 9former it is insufficient; to the latter it is too much. oadside against films and magazines that degrade women and objectify ricting pornography, Aincluding "the interest of the public in the quality of life and Btotal community environment." In expressing dissatisfaction with Bavailable efforts, including education and consciousness-raising, Athe feminist anti-por:that the people of Maine or Mississippi accept the public f the >depiction of conduct found tolerable in Las Vegas or New York ed @City." In the 1973 decision Paris Adult Theatre versus Slaton, d Bthe Court articulated state interests in reststandards were not to be defined on a e e existence as a sexual being..." Most of us, most of the time al ?neither seek nor want it. But some do - they want to lose the >"self" in obsessive sexual fe9 Repudiation of local initiative explains much of our n find Bpolitical discontent. Radical critics and theorists, like Seldon AWolin, John Schaar, and Harry Boyte, have frequently pointed out Athat the eclipse (in Boyte's words) of "localist, voluntary, and Bhistorically grounded institutions has all too often been seen as Bunimportant or even beneficient" by reformers committed to grand, ;overreaching visions or to non-popular strategies. Hannah ny ll AArendt's prescient ome when @the remorseless fantasies of pornographers will no longer carry Bthe force of the present moment because such fantasies will cease @to speak to our fears, our fragmentations, and our resentments. Transaction Publishers. All righorts to force a consensus. In this way we might break :free from the unacceptable alternatives our civil society ot, in @consistently throws up; freedom versus community, virtue versus Bvice, liberty versus constraint. Perhaps the time will cral values is impossible, Bcommunities must leave space for putting pornography in its place :rather than seeking to eradicate it altogether. Here the selves =language and reality of the First Amendment freedom chastens t. Bzealous effts in @which the least powerful (especially children) suffer the most, =it becomes an appropriate target for action, regulation, and tter =reproof. But with this proviso: Knowing that a return to a ight =harmonious way of life of shared mon any woman finds offensive, is endorsed. nt - a s vision of atoms bumping against one another. Pornographers and @ To the extent that pornography is symptomatic of, and helps Ato further, modes of social disintegration, creating contexke with all points of view @in the community taking part in the debate. Legal remedies are ?available if this, rather than the elimination of all forms of :pornography, defined so broadly as to sweep up any sexual as I 7representatioe ?the power to regulate and curb open assaults on human dignity, e ?but they should not seek to eradicate or condemn either sexual Bfantasies or erotic representations. The process must invariably @be one of open, political give-and-tanufactured mass pornovision cannot be dismissed. =Nor should a casual link to actual behavior be necessary for ;communities to take some action to prevent an aesthetic of ...I ?cruelty from taking over Main Street. Communities should havtarian focus on eir ually >"externals" only, citizens should recognize the extraordinary ;power of visual images to shape identity and to open-up or s 9squeeze out space for moral reflection. The brutalizing lt it is Apotential of ma ?that does not patronizingly brush aside the difference between es ?"normal" heterosexuality and pornographic cruelty is central. BRadical feminists conflate the two and anti-sexual moralists deny 7the former. Second, at odds with liberin in a number of ways. First, because gether @communities are formed from the coming-together of diverse men, t 6women, and children, of young and old, of friends and elimination @antagonists, a defense of erotic intimacy between men and womenong haul is to bring the periphery back to life. ough humiliation and degradation, it is hard to figure out why "right wing men" would not favor get bored ; Citizens acting as civic beings, if pornography is the erest. 9question, can beg>The point is that force can, indeed must be centralized to be Beffective, but power cannot and must not. If the various sources @from which it springs are dried up, the whole structure becomes Bimpotent." A project for the political lcomments are worth recalling: "Liberals," she Awrote, "fail to understand that the nature of power is such that ?the power potential of the Union as a whole will suffer if the , @regional foundations on which this power rests are undermined. ts reserved. unately became CHEoverwhelmed at times. SYSTEM.EDITORb98V SYSTEM.FILERb9VAbout the Author: b9|}SYSTEM.MISCINFO}SYSTEM.CHARSEB Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Centennial Professor of Political STE?Science and Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. a 7?Her books include Women and War (1987) and most recently Power an b2Trips and Other Journeys, a collection of essays. aperless Donald ER.Duck. Such absurdities are somewhat like being asked ts n  @faster than an auctioneer. "A reporter?!" he said, pulling his ʅAhand away as if it had been bitten. The quiet homeless men, who hood larger than a Benedictine monk's stood under the "Men's" t. ʅ?light to fashion a drug pipe from a plastic straw and tin-foil en packet. gainst ٕ>went to the Cameo Cinema and found Sodom and Gomorrah in full 90% Aswing. A condom-vending machine hung on the lobby wall, ignored isBby all. Missy, a young man with Peter Frampton curls and a heavy "?touch with mascara, asked if I wanted ausse and string-bikini tans looked like they or could ball forever. ymptomatic of wider features of American o 6society. We have reached a point where the rights of children to ? Sleeping people don't offer much copy, so the next night I to sleep. They were the Aragged rejects of our society, men with plum-colored eyes, sooty >chins, feet almost painful to walk on. Up on the screen, the . l >hyperhealthy studs and mares dressed only in gold watches and rd >earrings, hair mo ? At seven in the morning a janitor arrived with a bucket of t ܾBindustrial-strength ammonia that woke everyone up nose first, and Athe destitute men filed out of this side of the twin cinema into Bits neighbor, where they went right back men kept slipping into a synchronious snore so T@loud I imagined a 20-toot-tall Cyclops sleeping off a hang over Texin the back sets. change the broader context in which they ty is Noccur. Given that context, strategies that can only set us up as Apple Theater, where צ This author takes a stab at the efforts of fundamentalist d =Rev. Wildmon to boyco2 A FREE SPEECH FROM THE WILD, MAN ISHMENT RKS S C:[.,' Will Nixon April 3-9, 1991, pp 18-, ? In These Times, Vol. 15, No. 17, April 3-9o believe [that a ban against playing loud rock music at 3 a.m. in the midst b8Reproduced 1992 with permission. Copyright (C) 1992 by of the CHARS.Transaction Publishers. All rights reserved. P.CODE9br S keep half-awake so their e &@pockets wouldn't get slashed for change. They disappeared like - Bwallflowers into the boisterous crowd that was now passing around á$a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. feminist notion of obscenity or any other "moral" concept. By repudiating a moral dimension ? I came back in the morning to talk with the young manager, m @who was rolling down the metal grate at six. He felt sorry for Bthe homeless men, not for the rest. A regular came dashing The metaphor suggests that heir sex VerEYE OF THE WITHHOLDER a natural force, akin to an epidemic, and ers While it may be true, as a columnist for the Wall Street 20 &7 "The reason the media will not expose 2 Live Crew, en the AMapblication of s Bhis American Family Association, AFA Journal, and in his frequent $fundraising letters. erent theme song recedes into the distance.  Nor does the heavenly chorus hummed by Will promise a change of tune in the long run. gue."quickly realize that the pornography lies not in the art but =in the feverish language used by the fundamentalist right to y . e tBdescribe it. For a true taste of Wildmon, it's worth letting the @man speak for himself, as he does in the monthly puional guarantees. Visible is the e P(relationship at work between pornographers, their clients, their K, B Anyone who has seen Robert Mapplethorpe's classical portraits (amBor Andres Serrano's color-drenched photos of submerged crucifixes Bwill go Wildmon n צChit media gold when he found the National Endowment for the Arts. :@But the reporting on him hasn't quite conveyed his truly bitter e >flavor, probably because the rhetoric of his anti-pornography y crusade is so sordid. nstitutCameo, but by his thinking, he hardly needs to go. ch we BPornography lurks around the corner of every mall, is found right >out in the open of Playboy magazine, comes on television even hem ard@before you've had time to digest dinner. Two years ands of Rev. Donald Wildmon of y-ty ockTupelo, Miss. unable to speak about communal concerns or freedom at all. he fact that our society is moving in this direction and  B Wildmon may never have been inside the likes of the Big Apple ;or the hen the =bedraggled homeless swept onto our steam grates in the early y -A'80s. Meese retired to ignominity - even his New York publisher ̂e>lost interest and rejected his memoirs - but the church bells us =clang on, now in the furious hathe excessiveness of the liberal present, historically @ Attorney General Edwin Meese, who rang the church bells for y @Ronald Reagan's commission on pornography, was the same man who V?had defiantly claimed hunger did not exist in America wwas the real story here, not m =the rabbit-work up on the screen. But the moralizers always ur e ?prefer to stick to the celluloid; it saves them the trouble of d Vreal people, real problems. these serve as an implicit contrast tedmodel to . All s 2;of the grand arguments about pornography, from violence to n of >freedom of speech to the degradation of women, looked awfully o l @abstract and irrelevant from the seats of the Big Apple Theater ?and the Cameo Cinema. The crowd D MEN s pornographic fahrenheit - in "the logic" of rs liberal society's jurisprudence which "requires such trates x can @ The porn world of Times Square came as quite a shock to the n @uninitiated - me - and I've never been tempted to go back told me moments later. "He's 7probably got every kind of disease there is in there." tic nd .S. danrepresentation, and insists that pornography causes actual acts of violence - as if human beings were so many pots put on to boil OF MEESE AN up as bBthe grate closed, claiming he'd left his lighter in the theater. me ;His electric-blue nylon coat draped his body like a cape - that s BCaptain Blow Job, it seemed. "I don't want to smell his breath. :BI turned my face away," the managerplethorpe or abortion is that they realize if the public knew Athe horrible nature of these things, they wouldn't stand for it. ?As long as the media talk about choice instead of babies, free g Bspeech instead of damaging vaginal walls, and artistic expression -8-:instead of a photo of one man urinating into the mouth of the e ;another, then they don't have to answer for their advocacy nd s go away: hotels that offer "adult movies," convenience stores nds Bthat carry "adult mAtelling them that while there was nothing pornographic about the =air fresheners, 'when you allow the Playboy/Penthouse empire to Aspace on your shelves you keep the pornography gears turning.'" 8The Food Lion soon dropped the offending aito clean up pornographic America. And no of ?act is too small. "When Linda Clements of Palmello, Fla., saw n. Athat Food Lion...was selling Playboy air fresheners," begins one @of his heartwarming little-people items, "she wrote the company . She is not a r pornographic subject; nor is she acceptable to either ion of k A The layout owes more to a stodgy encyclopedia than anything Byou might find on a newsstand. But each month continues the saga ?of Wildmon's crusade coverup in Mighty Mouse cocaine scene" was a classic headlineaid Jeff Rogart, Waldenbooks vice Bpresident of merchandising. "But frankly, due to declining sales we stopped buying them." der more aware of it," inviting us to e participate. an determined her civil rights had been violated she @ Rives a wedge > "I'm not optimistic," Rosset said. And indeed, though he ets @hadn't heard the word yet, Waldenbooks had stopped ordering the >specific titles Wildmon mentioned, if not the entire series. ?"They are not kiddie porn," sing has felt the general recession like anyone else. is AAdding Wildmon's complaints on top of these problems could spell trouble. potentially, among the extreme rather than the ordinary experiences of humanity." Pornographic literature drian Era," first launched to ose y ?generate cash for Blue Moon Books that could be spun into more ;serious books such as a new poetry series, had spawned bad a ses Bimitators that Rosset fears could drag down the whole niche. And =publishre human eroticism in opposition to patriarchal evil, as an attempt to out = Censorship doesn't always stare you eye to eye: often it f Acreeps in among a host of considerations so you can't be sure if ;it's there or not. "The Victoro have fantasies - or don't have them - even when I know ?everybody does," he said. Of course, the AFA Journal reeks of @fantasy, the fantasy of a sinful world, but Rosset took Wildmon quite seriously. female desire, an unspoiled pool of puy, "Homo Sexualis," asks the he = The publisher of "The Victorian Era" at Blue Moon Books, ? ?Barney Rosset, fought countless anti-censorship battles during . headline you may have missed last September. The AFA Journal ory 7story said, "According to the Montgomery [Md] Journal, such as =Waldenbooks carries cartoon books showing men engaging in..diary Waldenbooks to s very Bwithdraw Playboy and Penthouse takes it on the chin time and time again. wn from interpersonal relations and exposed to a general r or unknown audience. "The human body is a manifestation of the t @ "K Mart a f ;several years back. Or "Miss America told to stop singing pe t r ?Christian rap songs." But the unintended humor that fills the ow ?AFA Journal suffocates under its relentless tone. K Mart, for nd :instance, which won't force its subsiogart certainly sounded sincere, and Waldenbooks continues >to carry other adult books, giving Wildmon fresh copy for his ot @January AFA Journal. ("The written pornography they contain is @so perverse that we simply cannot even attempt to describe it. @The books contain depictions of children having sex with adults =and animals, and incidents of perverted activities involving ges priests and ministers.") guages of absolute (or nearly so) sal, freedom of expression and fBcourse, does not approve. "Most advertisers I know wouldn't want 9to be involved in any kind of program, pro or con, about sources @abortion," Wildmon told the Los Angeles Times. In mid-May, ABC =should earn his wrath with an Ann-Margaredocudrama, Absolute Strangers, about a Long e BIsland man who had to fight a horrendous legal battle to save his ?wife's life by aborting her 17-week-old fetus when she slipped , >into a comatose state after a car accident. The reverend, of ust about no American corporation wouldn't duck." utions has all too often been seen as unimportant or even beneficient" by reformers committed to grand, ? This spring Wildmon has fresh chickens to pluck. On April l ?24, CBS will air a A "He's a master manipulator of the media," says Christ Finan, Bwho watch-dogs Wildmon for the Media Coalition. "He knows how to Bexploit the fears of major American corporations. Faced with the Aprospect of being called pro-pornography, jrefully to what they say, and I urge you to @do the same." Corporate figures may not speak so naively these ,days, but the effects can be just the same. is too much. oadside against films and magazines that degrade women and objectify eaders for nography, 9Responsible Television, Wildmon's group at the time, was ife and 8"expressing very important and broadly held views about tion with Bgratuitous sex, violence and profanity. I can assure you that we Aare listening very caAwatching some very un-Christian TV shows, doesn't seem to suffer >by blurring distinctions between the two. Back in 1981, Owen ed @Butler, the chairman of Proctor and Gamble, told the Academy of d 8Television Arts and Sciences that Christian L the difference between Waldenbooks and e in Washington, D.C., last month took encouragement on several ed isAfronts. President Bush and top administration officials pledged "Bstrong government action against illegand we find that very encouraging," says Deen or 9Kaplan, vice-president of public policy for the National can o 6&Coalition Against Pornography (NCAP). e the rights of children to  Sleeping people don't offer much copy, so the next night I to sleep. They were the @ DeWitt may have been trying to rally his own troops, but it Bwas the antipornography activists who took his remarks to heart. A"Lately, we've seen a lot of stuff from them that has Armegeddon >language in it, a >outlets, where is the public going to get adult product? Not t ܾtake heart from high-level government support and press their to :Aefforts. Grassroots efforts in communities across the nation are , 1991, pp 18-19. .  ? 8 Vol. 35, No. 14, November 25, 1991, pp 42-44. C?/צAuthor:Kim A. Lawtonditor!.[G&TEXT This author takes a stab at the efforts of fundamentalist d  Abstract: on to boyco2 PORNOGRAPHY: BANNED IN THE USA? ISHMENT RKS S C:[.,( Kim A. Lawton 14, November 25, 1991, pp + Christianity Today, -9tarian focus on eir ually 9Reproduced 1992 with permission. Copyright (C) 1991 the nary +Institute for Public Affairs, Chicago, IL. d to open-up or s squeeze out space for moral reflection. The brutalizing lt it is About the Author: onizingly brush aside the difference between es 1 Will Nixon is a writer living in New Jersey. is central. Radical feminists conflate the two and anti-sexual moralists deny the former. Second, at odds with libere optimistic belief that a new momentum is tially />building to make the situation DeWitt fears become a reality. gn  Up on the balcony, where the real action was, a man reached = "We believe we're seeing the team grow up across America s n  ?that's going to win this effort," said Jerry Kirk, chairman of ʅAthe Religious Alliance Against Pornography (RAAP), a broad-based @coalition of Catholic, mainline Protestant, evangelical, Mormon and Jewish leaders. lone and tried toquickly realize that the pornography lies not in the art but CITIZENS' MOVEMENT guage used by the fundamentalist right to y . e tdescribe it. For a true taste of Wildmon, it's worth letting the B While official support is necessary, Kirk emphaadding that this is the first time e P(@in his eight years of involvement that the movement has enjoyed K, such broad official support. t Mapplethorpe's classical portraits (amor Andres Serrano's color-drenched photos of submerged crucifixes will of Wildmon n צ=broadcast, material that is actionably indecent or obscene." rts. :But the reporting on him hasn't quite conveyed his truly bitter e < Kirk called the combined support from so many levels of y y @government "truly exciting," er Justice Department officials also addressed the group, Duggan, who called for a society-wide recovery of virtue. He hem ard8promised to use his position "to regulate in matters in our commitment. The Child -ty ockBExploitation and Obscenity Section does have and will continue to 7have the full backing of the department's leadership." ction and  Wildmon may never have been inside the likes of the Big Apple A Othut where >he stands. "I want to assure you that child exploitation and -Bobscenity [prosecution] remains a high priority at the Department ̂e@of Justice," Barr told the group. "There will be no slackening s >in our effort and no diminution section, the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CT, Dec. 15, 1989, p 48). Meese, who rang the church bells for y Ronald Reagan's commission on pornography, was the same man who V@ Barr used the opportunity to allay any concerns aboncerned this summer when not m AThornburgh resigned to run for the Senate. As attorney general, AThornburgh had led the Justice Department to take a tough stance V=against illegal pornography, including the creation of a new st ted@permanent All s 2of the grand arguments about pornography, from violence to n of = Joining the President was William Barr, the man Bush has o l >nominated to succeed Richard Thornburgh as attorney general. r :Antipornography activists were coho has met privately with RAAP leaders in the past, rs =pledged that his administration is committed "to the fullest can ?prosecution of obscenity and child pornography crimes," and he n :added that "this will remain a priority" under his watch.imized by crimes whose "He's Aconsequences are beyond imagination," the President said. "This danhorror must stop." insists that pornography causes actual acts of violence - as if human beings were so many pots put on to boil ? Bush, w draw bAthe most encouragement from a White House speech by George Bush, me developments in t ?initiatives would be announced during the White House meeting, ll Abut none were introduced. Muller said some initiatives were "on :the drawing boards," but he added he did not want advance sons. >publicity because it might make the packathat never leaves us." But he assured the the 6group that "at the top levels...commitment is there." he blandest of corporate giants: K Mart, RJR Nabisco, Philip Morris General e 9 Conference organizers had also hoped that new policy nographyr freshener. porary ly society is both "authentic and degraded," fulfilling an authentic ; Speaking to those concerns, Robert Muller, head of the quite AJustice Department Criminal Division, acknowledged that "this is >a continuous issue Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Kaplan thinks the movement, some of whose ing =members are often at odds with feminist views, has a "decent al orientation." Billboards across the city proclaim, "Julie Drake says local churches y ?pick a month to campaign against hard-core pornographic videos Band then "pass the torch to another church in the next Zip Code." imitators that Rosset fears could drag down the whole niche. And @ Porip Code at Ba time. Participants within a designated Zip Code mobilize their >neighborhoods with a rally, distribution of fliers, and voter- 8registration drives. Greater Orlando Coalition Against sure if ?Pornography executive director o have fantasies - or don't have them - even when I know @ Zip Code campaign - Concerned citizens in Orlando, Florida, Bhave organized the "Zip Code Coalition," an alliance dedicated to Beliminating obscene video material from the city, one Zcal newspapers, and video-store ?managers. It also includes voter-registration deadlines and a ? @"personal legislator listing and voting record," where citizens 4can fill in the voting patterns of their officials. are not nd allowed tbook, B"What Can One Person Do About Pornography?" The manual, which is Bbeing widely distributed in churches and Christian organizations, @gives guidelines and addresses for writing letters to local and a Anational government officials, locross the country: of gay porn did indeed land at a t store somewhere - and was returned as soon as corporate ction are @ One-person possibilities - The California Care Coalition is . ?mobilizing grassroots action through its instructive handss of the efforts of the ion r BJustice Department and national organizations, we'll never finish @the job," says Deen Kaplan, vice-president of public policy for ?the National Coalition Against Pornography. Among the efforts s under way aof ic their battle. sexual activities. Also stocked are a series of e books with titles such as Meat, Wad, and Raunch. These books are : "Without people active on a grassroots basis in every , and community efforts are in many ways the most important part * ary Waldenbooks to s very 0 COMMUNITY ACTION AGAINST PORN hin time and time again. wn from interpersonal relations and exposed to a general r > In setting up its three-pronged test to determine illegal e t Aobscenity, th f ;ultimately prevail. "We're not there yet, but we're a lot pe t r further than we used to be." e unintended humor that fills the ow AFA Journal suffocates under its relentless tone. K Mart, for nd ' *********lot of momentum going, and we are making good at Aprogress, but this is the kind of battle where you can never let Byour guard down," Kaplan said. Nonetheless, he is optimistic his 9movement has the kind of staying power that will help it line obscenity and ion when ty @racketeering trial of another major distributor of pornographic s films. newspapers saying, in part, "Burger King wishes to go on record as supporting traditional American values on television, = "We have a Real men dge ?don't use porn," and bright yellow garbage bags with the words ts ='pornography destroys' attempt to associate pornography with he Btrash. But CAP-KC executive director Chris Cooper says theirs is ?not just a campaign against adult businesses. CAP-KC has also ;developed "sex-aholic" support groups, victims' assistance sales -programs, and date-rape prevention seminars. ," inviting us to e participate. an determined her civil rights had been violated she < O Aof nudist periodicals. Publication of an updated edition of Lee ܾ ography it. @activists say those efforts have produced dramatic results. In ?1984, thee were 13 pornographic bookstores, 11 peep-show booth s 5operations, 75 topless/bottomless bars, 21 houses of y so) sal, =prostitution, and three XXXut of business - More than five years ago, citizens in ues @Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, led by retired grocer George Harper, >began pressuring officials to crack down on sexually oriented s ;businesses in their community. Today, the antipornernment's wrath. ere the  DeWitt may have been trying to rally his own troops, but it < There was good reason to worry. Consider the ordeal of art. Ainternationally known photographer Jock Sturges. The FBI called Bon him one day, with a van. Into it they loaded all his darkroom Bequipment, computer equipment, business records, and thousands of 6Bnegatives - damaging many of the negatives by careless handling. @Meanwhile, an associate of Sturges, phototechnician Joe Semien,anti-nudity laws were repealed. y ockAConsider, for instance, the "pragmatic" argument for these laws. have the full backing of the department's leadership." ction and  Wildmon may never have been inside the likes of the Big Apple THE PRA...that @is, crimes by virtue of violating public opinion rather than by -Avirtue of harming another human being? It seems to me to be the ̂eBlatter, although many a prude has tried to convince me that there @would, indeed, be "victims" if hat needs exposing is the logic behind the legislation: Ajust what kind of "crimes" are these acts? Is walking down Main >Street in the buff comparable to murder? Rape? Robbery? Or o V?more like smoking marijuana, burning flags, or gamblingre" on the local level, barely >scratch the surface. The U.S. abounds in laws against public l, @nudity. The crime is often referred to as "indecent exposure." Vagainst illegal pornography, including the creation of a new st tedB But wnd bars 2until they could make bail. pornography, from violence to n of Joining the President was William Barr, the man Bush has o l ? The Reagan-Meese Act on the national level, and North Lido @Beach's ban of "anal cleft exposulorida's North Lido Beach, for the crime of wearing a @string swimsuit known as a thong. The five had violated a city can Aordinance banning exposure of the "anal cleft." After mug shots Aand fingerprinting, the dangerous criminals were put behis can be in for a rough time s in some jurisdictions. imagination," the President said. "This danhorror must stop." insists that pornography causes actual acts 9 In May 1990, police arrested four men and a woman on to boil ASarasota, Fg raw b?cover for lawmakers intent on patently unconstitutional ends." , me who, for the first time, publicly linked himself with their hat s > State and local governments are no more hospitable toward . :@nudists. In fact, even semi-nudistrepresentatives enacted legislation that could cost >honest publishers and booksellers their business and sentence m ?them to prison for publishing and selling mere nude pictures. ss =Child pornography was just the excuse, a respectable-seeminonstitution. "The federal e &;law books already boast 32 obscenity and child pornography like - 8statutes; another is hardly needed. But pressed by the ng around á:censorious Reagan administration and the religious right, scenity Asenators and that  the Act attacks. It's nudism. ," said Jerry Kirk, chairman of ʅthe Religious Alliance Against Pornography (RAAP), a broad-based B "[The Act] is not about protecting children at all," observed @columnist Tom Teepen in the Atlanta Csexual, mind you, but they were nude. Under the />vague Reagan-Meese Act, that's evidently all it takes for law gn ?enforcement agencies to consider photographs "child porn." It Bisn't child molesting or the sexual exploitation of children Believe it or not, it was walking on the sand. Neither the grown-ups nor the kids were en @doing anything ٕ6was arrested by the FBI. Semien was incarcerated and hy meeting =interrogated for two days, before being released at a habeas ed is@corpus hearing. What had caused the FBI to subject Sturges and "ASemen to this Gestapo-like treatment? GMATIC PRUDE partment officials also addressed the group, as did Federal Communications Commission commissioner Ervin right > "If the government allowed naked people to walk down Main hem ardAStreet," so the argument goes, "motorists would be distracted by צ(the sight and accidents would results." ndecent or obscene." rts. :But the reporting on him hasn't quite conveyed his truly bitter e B I fail to see how this argument differs from that of a racial Abigot, who claims: "Seeing aAbias against the flesh (and its traditional bias for humility). for anti-nudity laws, then we should face the fact that these s Alaws are nothing more than the product of religion's traditional th societies, the r @government's message is: politicians have the right and duty to ?enforce, at gunpoint, the church's hostile attitude toward the flesh. ht find on a newsstand. But each month continues the saga While they find mAveiled. In both Islamic and Christian dictatorships, the church ?holds that certain portions of the human anatomy, because they e 7are sexually appealing, are therefore "evil," "dirty," ade wrong ?"dangerous," and should be hidden. And in bop their faces covered in public. at have ;Similarly, in our Christian theocratic state, women, under talist >penalty of law, have historically been required to keep their e-, >breasts covered, and both genders to keep their genital areas d that "virtue" at the point of a gun. about the veracity of those allegations, but he said he was pleased by the "broad spectrum of the liberal d to @ Thus, historically, in Islamic theocracies, women have been 9legally required to keeikewise be in for a rough time from churches and states. Cover 9up your mind, cover up your body, don't show off, is the the and In truth, of course, ifivil rights people won't like it, but let's be pragmatic; ut $such a law will prevent accidents." fundamentalist right to y . e tdescribe it. For a true taste of Wildmon, it's worth letting the A To both the bigot and the prude, I would answer mixed couple holding hands as they P(Astroll down Main Street, would distract and upset me, as I drive K, a naked female body were a sign of freedom, of liberation ns, + from moral and ideological strictures. letters to local and a national government officials, loes were banned or even burned. Should we take at a t 9 that response as a sign of socialist concern for the tion are < humiliation of women? Again, no. Sexual repression is is . 9 the hallmark of patriarchal authoritarian societies. s one of the signs of he ion r : democratization and greater freedom of the press, and finish @ that process did not occur without bureaucratic resistance. < There were cries for censorship, and some issues of the ts s : magazinof ic 9 nudity, first in low-brow magazines, like Adam i Eva ies of e 3 and Cik, and eventually in serious newspapers, hese books are 6 including Vjesknik, the bulletin of the Socialist ery , and 9 alliance of Croatia. Nudity wans to be seen, but she is skeptical, for the , made 7experience of Yugoslavia in the 1960s reveals just how he nal ory revolutionary nudism can be: ipornography leaders say local as 7 In that decade, the press was hit by a wave of art exploitation of women. "A Bwoman is deemed a worker and a mother first, and a woman second. ?A unique female identity is not recognized; its emergence must r Bawait better times." Whether or not glasnost will unravel Soviet :prudery remai f 1breasts and returned the magazine to its owner." 're a lot pe t r further than we used to be." e unintended humor that fills the ow B But she does not believe that this censorship is motivated by @typically Western concerns about the ugoslav political journal Nin went to the Soviet ?Union. He brought with him a magazine that had on its cover a t ;picture of a woman sunbathing topless. A customs official ic his >snipped off the portion of the picture displaying the woman'sonsidered pornographic and ;are confiscated at the borders of the Soviet Union and the phic s 6Eastern bloc countries. But even relatively innocent to go on ?publications are suspect. Last summer a colleague of mine who @works for the Y1, Ajust how antisex Eastern bloc countries are: "The puritanism of ;the Soviet media has thus far forbidden any representation iews d 9whatsoever of female sexuality...Playboy and other men's t month Bmagazines featuring female nudity are ct is no surprise to find communism differing not 8at all from other faiths in its attitude toward nudism. ry's t s decision to seize more than $10 million in assets from one of the ? Slavenka Drakulich, a Yugoslav political writer, has noted ge "lose some of its me ? As do other religions, communism preaches humility: don't ?show off, don't display the pride of thinking for yourself and r. >questioning the party line. Being so like other religions in ty Bthese respects, i Aits rituals, its dogmas, its liturgy; the communist claims about Adialectical materialism and Marxism-Leninism being a science are just so much more mumbo-jumbo." d he did not want advance sons. publicity because it might make the packa things, encourage the development of a consciousness ow < of female sexuality apart from childbearing? Was it in da, : the pages of the male chauvinist press that women for ated to < the first time were publicly granted the right to their de at ; own sexual identity - closely linked to male pleasure, their 8 of course, but still an autonomous entity? Did it, voter- ; perhaps work to women's interest, however odd that may re if 7 sound? And in that case, dAbars, for pornographers and perhaps, at some point, even nudists ?and naturists, but it is highly unlikely that women as a class d will benefit." irman of Proctor and Gamble, told the Academy of d Television Arts and Sciences that Christian Lr case would address." She prefers to use =the fourteenth amendment to fight anti-nudism laws, because, and ?"These first amendment arguments will win even more rights for ] =the commercial exploiters of sex, for proprietors of topless e r chests covered. ?This unmistakable gender discrimination, based on male-defined Amores and a sexist definition of 'nudity,' is the issue that our man is not "nude," then neither is a bare-chested woman. The ria ACape Cod National Seashore's anti-nudity regulation treats women Bdifferently than men by requiring us to keep oucompatible legal strategies when used in >the same case. In a case where the plaintiffs are shirt-free are ?women, a first amendment challenge must begin by accepting the d Bpresumption that a bare-chested woman is "nude," but the logic of Bgic. s for ldn't itself," Macy told members of Congress. ography are inadequate; A Explains Nikki Craft, one of the six: "Some of us have come @to realize that shirt-free rights for women and first amendment Brights for nudists are iniolation of freedom of expression. But six of the plaintiffs Awanted the regulation fought on fourteenth amendment grounds, as @discrimination against women. After all, the regulation forced 5women, but not men, to cover their chests in publ theaters. According to Oklahoma t n, ? Most of the funding for the fight came from Lee Baxandall, -l Feminist nudists have objected to anti-nudity laws on the ry >grounds that these laws entail gender discrimination.oesn't the Soviet Union hurches y  need a nude glasnost? gainst hard-core pornographic videos and then "pass the torch to another church in the next Zip Code." imitators that Rosset fears could drag down the whole niche. And THE LAWeaders for nography, ; While Ms. Craft's objection to the law's definition of e and ?"nudity" is well taken, she's mistaken that women "as a class" th Adon't benefit from the first amendment approach to fighting anti- Anudity laws. Freedom of expression benefits women "as a class," @unless Ms. Craft thinks it's a class whose members have nothing Bto express. And she seems oblivious to the possibility that some Bwomen might be, or might like to be, proprietors of topless bars. ral values is impossible, @Reproduced 1992 with permission. Copyright (C) 1991 by Liberty e "Publishing. All rights reserved. t altogether. Here the selves d's n BThe Fountainhead. "Howard Roark laughed." But how many remember ;the second line? "He stood naked at the edge of a cliff." d tter reproof. But with this proviso: Knowing that a return to a ight harmonious way of life of shared mon any woman finds offensive, is endorsed. nt - a s vision of atoms bumping against one another. Pornographers and ? Nudism and a freedom-loving spirit often go hand-in-hand. ?Virtually all libertarians recall the first line in Ayn Raneks to awe and rule? A ew ?naked Hitler might have generated giggles, not obedience, from =the German masses. In my view, there's nothing wrong with a f >Saddam, Castro, or Qaddafi that a public de-pantsing couldn't cure. entatioe @ If the emperor truly had no clothes, perhaps he wouldn't be >an emperor. Without his majestic robes or sparkling military ?uniform, what scrawny, wrinkled, or obese dictator would be as ly =impressive as the brawny worker he senufactured mass pornovision cannot be dismissed. Nor should a casual link to actual behavior be necessary for THE CLOTHED ROAD TO SERFDOM ion to prevent an aesthetic of ...I cruelty from taking over Main Street. Communities should havying nudist the right to ?order the tax paying prude to disrobe. Any facility that both ?nudists and shy folks are compelled by law to fund should be a clothing-optional facility. reflection. The brutalizing lt it is potential of mand @recreational areas, they have a natural right (or, if you will, s @an au naturel right) to use these facilities sans apparel. The ?shy taxpayer, it seems to me, has no right to order the nudist ny @taxpayer to cover up, nor has the taxpaonto the Cameo Theater screen, we could all see the whole revolting show. m the coming-together of diverse men, t < But in a mixed economy, such as ours, where nudists are ation Bforced, via taxation, to pay for various buildings, vehicles, anstance, would likely he ;offer clothing required facilities, and some would operate s son ;exclusively nude facilities. Others would offer "clothing bored =optional" areas, just as some restaurants offer "no smoking" est. areas. his mind ?buses, subway trains, buildings, a parks, and beaches were not nt Bonly privately owned but not regulated, the owner of a particular Benterprise would decide whether to allow customers to go about in ?the buff. Many park entrepreneurs, for idocudrama, Absolute Strangers, about a Long e A PROPERTY RIGHTS ISSUE ght a horrendous legal battle to save his wife's life by aborting her 17-week-old fetus when she slipped , = Public nudity is ultimately a property rights issue. If olerant of business n ;activity on anyone's part, and thus blinded to some of the een as /legitimate interests of members of her class.) ommitted to grand, This spring Wildmon has fresh chickens to pluck. On April l 24, CBS will air a AIn any event, all women should be free to go into that business, ?so the freedom of such proprietors is in the interest of women to >"as a class." (Though Ms. Craft's snide use of the adjective the ?"commercial" indicates that she is very int: PORN ADDICTION GROWS...AMERICA'S SOCIAL DILEMMA! RKS S C:[.,& MiM Staff lson pp 41-43, 50. 1991, pp 0 Morality in Media, May 199ines, videotapes and films. slation that could cost honest publishers and booksellers their business and sentence m ? That is why your continued support of Morality in Media is ss Aessential. We have defeated pornography pushers on many fronstitution. "The federal e &? It's clear that hard-core pornography is a dark underworld - Band, if left unchecked, has the potential to strip our country of áBdecency and goodness. The only remedy is to wipe out the sale of )obscene magazof t  =pornography stashed in a van, shed and his mobile home. One f ʅApornographic videotape depicted a brutal, perverse act which was >subsequently inflicted by the murderer on one of his victims. ved columnist Tom Teepen in the Atlanta Csexual, mind you, but they were nude. Under the /;5. Wilmington, Delaware: A man stood trial on charges of aw gn Atorturing, murdering and mutilating three women between November @1987 and September 1988. Detectives found a huge collection ld man was sentenced to 20 clinical psychologists conclude that pornography addiction is ly >indeed a social dilemma, but newspaper headlines screamed the to :@shocking stories of sex crimes committed against innocent women 0. 1-43, 50. -19. .  ? Author:MiM StaffDanielson, November 25, 1991, pp 42-44. C?/צ Abstract: A. Lawtonditor!.[G&TEXT> The link between hard-core pornography and sex crimes has d Abecome more and more onts, b@but we need your help to continue our momentum and gain victory me in the 1990s. irst time, publicly linked himself with their hat s State and local governments are no more hospitable toward . :nudists. In fact, even semi-nudists can be in for a rough time s THE STAGES OF PORN ADDICTION nation," the President said. "This danhorror must stop." insists that pornography causes actual acts ; Studies and clinical case histories show that repeated o boil @exposure to990 by Morality -8-in Media, Inc. ost religions teach, is a virtue. Translated into stitutional means. She said the campaign will focus on c knew educating women about the harms of pornography and encouraging . CHURCH AND STATE A primary goal will be the elimination of child AReproduced 1992 with permission. Copyright (C) 1 public nudity were legalized, the gn, VerAbout the Author: edestrian would very quickly lose its novelty ersA Morality in Media is a national, interfaith, non-profit, tax- &Bexempt organization working for the elimination of pornography by conMorality in e s ?Media is committed to this task, and your continued support is e $vital. , someone more mature and self-controlled than you. nce.  activism. In an effort to revitalize that element, NCAP nge of  In truth, of course, ifivil rights people won't like it, but let's be pragmatic; ut ? If morality and decency are to be preserved, our country's . e tAobscenity laws - Federal, state and local - must be aggressively ?enforced to eliminate obscenity from our society. le today suggests that all sexual y P(?deviations are learned, and none is inherited. The models for e K, ="imitative learning" are found in pornographic magazines and aits (amvideos. should be prohibited by law from holding hands in public. The cs to act out צBsexual behaviors they viewed in hard-core pornographic material - :>from frequenting prostitutes to molesting children and women. r e I fail to see how this argument differs from that of a racial ? The best evidence availablace. In their minds, deviants legitimize the sexual up, :activity they witness, no matter how gross and perverted. n right "If the government allowed naked people to walk down Main hem ardB4. Acting Out: Eventually addicts exhibit tendencieal high." y laws were repealed. y ockConsider, for instance, the "pragmatic" argument for these laws. >3. Desensitization: Addicts reach the point where shocking, nd  =repulsive and immoral sexual behavior becomes acceptable and pple =commonp...that is, crimes by virtue of violating public opinion rather than by -@2. Escalation: With the passage of time, a pornography addict ̂e:requires more explicit, rougher and more perverted sexual t there )material to give him that "sexuhat needs exposing is the logic behind the legislation: ?1. Addiction: Pornography addiction is the first step in the n Bsyndrome. Pornography provides a very powerful sexual stimulant, V(followed by equally powerful fantasies. gs, or gamblingah, determined that exposure to ;pornography led to their deviant behavior. Dr. Cline also ic l, ?discovered a near universal four-factor syndrome among the 240 V individuals. al pornography, including the creation of a new st ted But wto bars 29pornography often results in sex crimes. After treating o n of ;approximately 240 sex offenders or individuals with sexual s o l expresses more love in relation to a female partner following of ?sexual arousaver  )seem even more attractive and desirable. s mobile home. One f ʅpornographic videotape depicted a brutal, perverse act which was A In an article entitled "Effects of Erotica Upon Men's Loving @and Liking Responses for Women They Live the incentive to call forth a dormant libido /=after a hectic day. It can embellish and make more exciting gn ;routine sex. It is capable of diverting the mind from the ember Aunattractive aspects of a sexual situation. It may make a lo the curlers she had on 20 @earlier and the pimples and blemishes which have been carefully t WBtoned out. As the made-up image of something sexually appealing, ʅ:erotica can give the harried mother or tired man or woman ere en @business execut ٕattack. The rapist admitted to becoming addicted to pornography A As the image of something sexy, erotica is capable of making is?sex seem even better than it is. Like a provocatively made-up "?woman, the image she creates transcendsd removed her bra in Flashdance, what they did m Asee was very arousing. Because a movie involves imagery and the 6audience didn't see Kim Basinger actually masturbate in 9 1/2 l AWeeks, Michael Douglas and Glenn Close have intercourse in Fatal ?Attraction, or Jennifer Beals's breasts when she reached under @her sweatshirt an Adirector of Flashdance, 9 1/2 Weeks, and Fatal Attraction, in an ܾ?article in the September 1988 issue of Psychology Today, said, nd ;"I've always thought that what you imagine you see is more ied o in Vogue rarely seem to look as good in person. Adrian Lyne, ers when I took a course צ=in "motivation." I learned an interesting concept which has en ?stuck with me over the years. It was this: often the image of ly ?something can seem more interesting or stimulating than if one ic =were to actually exAbstract:ren. etween hard-core pornography and sex crimes has s. 9 Erotica, not pornography, serves as a mental stimulator that *@ My interest in the subject of erotica had its beginnings at TEXAthe University of California at Los Angelesography, serves as a mental stimulator that 0=enhances sexual experiences. Subtly provocative images that ly ;offer adventure, fantasy, and excitement are beneficial to he to :#marriages, relationships and lives.itted against innocent women 0. 1-43, 50. -19. .  ? < Vol. 49, No. 5, September/October 1989, pp 12-13, 49. /צAuthor:Donald E. Olsontor!.[G&TEXT Abstract: nk between hard-core pornography and sex crimes has d A Erotica, not pornonts, b?tediously explicit in portraying sex, it would be difficult to me @give it a good review - just as it would be difficult to give a s >good review to a play that bombed on Broadway. However, just . :Abecause the pornography is explicit or the play "bombs," doesn't Bmean they should be banned. Every adult should be able to see or danBread whatever they choose - however boring or in bad taste it may =be. This proposition had a venerated champion in William O. boil ?Douglas, dea person who, y -8-Bbeing hungry, wants to eat but instead decides to wait a bit - to Bcontemplate the various restaurant and culinary possibilities and to later dine. ind, your creativity, your industry - if you show the world just how productus. Instead of merely feeling physical sensation, humans ew coiing raised e s ?dogs, I know their sex life is limited to a very short rutting e $which distinguishes human beings from beasts." Havigious right's frenetic anti-erotic P(>crusade in America today, erotica can be healthy and valuable e K, ?adjunct to a person's sex life. Eroticism brings the mind and ts (amAimagination into sex and accordingly is one additional attribute @whichry classics, צAone of the ministers reportedly replied, "Sin is not a classic. : Sin is sin!" ing prostitutes to molesting children and women. r e I fail to see how this argument differs from that of a racial A Viewed apart from the rel books such as Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and East of ?Eden are no longer available to students unless they get their ht ;parents' permission first. When one of the town residents in hem ardBcommented that a ban on Steinbeck was a ban on literaw. A school board in Panama City, ockBFlorida, recently banned Bronte's Wuthering Heights. In Anniston, >Alabama 50 fundamentalist Baptist ministers recently demanded nd  @that seven books be removed from the high school library. As a e Bresult,e books >from school libraries. At one time or another, the Christian-y -9fundamentalists' "hit list" has included Lee's To Kill a addict ̂e@Mockingbird, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, and Steinbeck's Of e BMice and Men, to name just a feol libraries. sing is the logic behind the legislation: 1. Addiction: Pornography addiction is the first step in the n @ During the 1987-1988 school year alone, there have been 157 , V?incidents of extreme pressure on school boards to removrnography rarely does. osure to BUnfortunately, the religious right finds everything even remotely Bsexual to be "pornographic" and wants to ban it all. Many school V?boards are caving in under the pressure and are removing books tedfrom schoto bars 28 It has been my observation, both professionally and o n of ;privately, that the most distinguishing feature separating s o l 9pornography from erotica is that erotica leaves a little nd do 8something to the imagination. Poceased associated justice of the Supreme Court. He 8said,"The idea to use censors to bar thoughts of sex is a city can ;dangerous. A person without sexual thoughts is abnormal." shots  One study proved conclusively that repeated exposure tive you can be - the government will < Webster defines erotica as "literary and artistic items ering mental stimulator - much as a coach fires up hiy, but if you allow or encourage sexual thoughts >at periods other than those you've set aside for lovemaking, t Ayou'll be in a more sexual frame of mind when that time comes." 9Marc and Judith Meshorer, coauthors of the book Ultimate an'super sex" concerns a c and ="marriage of minds and not the connection of bodies." Helen ic s "think sex!" She says, "Physical desire can't be switched on @like electricit1, Bmarked an "overdue return of eroticism." In the March 1988 issue Aof Reader's Digest, an article appeared entitled "The Secrets of :an Erotic Marriage" by Paul Pearsall, Ph.D. Dr. Pearsall month it as "filled with delicious eroticism." Time said the movie "pale with repetition," 3or furtive nonmarital encounters laced with guilt. ity: don't show off, don't display the pride of thinking for yourself and r. A Fortunately, that bleak prospect is being rejected by a more 7rational element Ato forbid all sexual thoughts. I'm convinced that, if the mind, Aimagination, erotic thoughts, and eroticism are removed from our =sexual life, all that would be left would be either physical s. Aconjugal matings, which could eventually spired word of God, including Christ's Sermon ?on the Mount: "But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman st @lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart" e B(Matthew 5:8). Taken absolutely literally, the Sermon would seemlists and their ary ly Avehement opposition to any erotic depiction, one can assume they ?wish to keep the mind entirely out of sex - and not only their e Bminds but ours as well. They take the Bible and every word in it Aliterally as the inBcalls sexual foreplay, oral sex, and coitus "square sex" and says *that they tend to "pale with repetition." of Separation of tiate Church and State would seem to require the repeal of laws against ; From the record of Christian-fundamentaty is seen largely in terms of ornography of Bmanipulations, pushes and pulls." He concludes, "We must get the ?whole human involved in sex as well as a pair of complementary ?genitals...sex is too important to be left to the glands." He l aginative Sex. He Bdescribes the best sex as the "thinking variety in which a couple ?mentally entice each other prior to sexual contact." He says, @"We are now still, in the hydraulic stage of sex, in which this a 4glorious human capaci: Dr. Ruth Westheimer is fond of saying on her numerous church Atelevision appearances, "The best orgasm is between your ears." ?Another Ph.D. and university professor, who uses the pseudonym g @"John Norman," has written a book entitled Imafter a hard day at work, revives. After ?an erotic session, the culminating orgasm may seem more like a st (final chapter than a mere introduction. equired to keep their e-, breasts covered, and both genders to keep their genital areas d s team at half-at @time. If the coach does it right, the players play even beyond ;their physical abilities. Erotica can make a plain sexual l d to Bsituation seem more interesting and arousing. Desires rise; even Aa tired body, worn out f =Pleasure: The Secrets of Early Orgasmic Women, conclude that t r Bwomen can achieve satisfaction more readily during intercourse if Bthey start on what the authors term "warm." The women can get to 7that receptive state by indulging in erotic fantasies. men. "A woman is deemed a worker and a mother first, and a woman second. ? In a comprehensive study of the subject of erotica and its r Brole in sexual behavior, psychologists Don Byrne, George Smeaton, @and Kathryn K= CENSORSHIP OR EDUCATION? FEMINIST VIEWS ON PORNOGRAPHY S C:[.,) Mary Ellen Ross o. 8, March 7, 1990, pp - The Christian Century, e Wee Herman's. If one bare-chested for both Culver City and Inglewood from 1958 until 1977 and a And @lectureheir de at own sexual identity - closely linked to male pleasure, their of course, but still an autonomous entity? Did it, voter- About the Author: o women's interest, however odd that may re if B Donald Olson is a graduate adults to improve their sex lives as much as possible. ?For many, erotica can do just that. Erotica, therefore, has a @value. Not only can it help marriages and relationships, it may o also safeguard lives. e publicly granted the right to t your sex life, but conceivably 6 it could reduce your chances of contracting AIDS. drawing a surprising (if unpopular) moral from this analysis: re citizens < In a free country, we should be able to permit and even nd Bencouragebook, ; have an appetite for some sort of sanctioned and safer ich is > sexual outlet. This may be found in the form of fantasy, ns, < through films. This is the value of erotica. Not only and a A may it improve the quality of epidemic people are talking about sex more openly. t He says: response as a sign of socialist concern for the tion are humiliation of women? Again, no. Sexual repression is is . 9 Perhaps the fear of contracting AIDS has made us s one of the signs of he ion r 8 Laurence Roberts, a social psychologist at Syracuse d finish @University, has spent the past three years studying the effects Bof pornography and erotica on society. He concludes that because @of the AIDSrs and Noting that many Christians and feminists disagree on the at 0>most effective means of opposing pornography, Mary Ellen Ross ly and Catholic churches have been addressing the degradation of may Ahuman sexuality and especially of women that pornography entails =rather than of , b>speech, the mainline Protestant churches have shied away from me Aefforts to restrict expression, tending to recommend that church 7members register their objections with distributors of , just . ::pornographic material (boycotting ticit materials that demean men and women. Unlike t Areligious right groups and the Catholic church, which insist the Bfreedom of expression is not absolute and that human dignity is a ?greater good than the right of the pornographers to freedomss to pornographic Dermer e &?materials. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), in an exhaustive l @and exemplary report on the subject in June 1988 ("Pornography: f á?Far from 'The Song of Songs'"), condemned the proliferation of of >sexually explon,  :the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the United ne f ʅpornography and have also called for telephone and television ng 8companies to do more to restrict acceeport with its call for stricter and tougher ido /:enforcement of already existing laws against pornography. ng gn routine sex. It is capable of diverting the mind from the ember A Some denominations, such as the Southern Baptist Conventicent resolution on the 20 >subject, the Episcopal Church declared in July 1988 that hard-y t W?core pornography abuses the self-images of women, children and g, ʅ>men, and urged congregations to support then-Attorney General en the common social good. In its most reches have sought to reverse the proliferation of Aexplicit and degrading depictions of human sexuality. But their 6>approaches have varied considerably. Groups on the religious at Bright have focused on the sexually explicit and sexually arousigmentation of our e the 3culture, but also our ambivalence about sexuality. e in 9 1/2 l Weeks, Michael Douglas and Glenn Close have intercourse in Fatal : To the religious, no images are neutral. Liberal and nder Bconservative chur Aand phone sex. Pornography is no longer confined to the seedier ܾ=sections of town. It is readily available to all, including , nd ?children, and in the privacy of our own homes. It reflects not o ;only the increasing privatization and frastries combined. This surge is due in part to TAthe discovery of new markets. While adult bookstores, peepshows Tex@and movie theaters still thrive, the fastest growing sectors of s NAthe industry are pornographic video cassettes, cable television, ting at a remarkable צ?rate. What was a $5 million-a-year enterprise merely 25 years >ago has boomed to a $7 billion to $10 billion-a-year industry ly @today. Pornography turns a larger profit than the conventional c Bfilm and music indueducation, not censorship. ore pornography and sex crimes has s. 9Abstract:ca, not pornography, serves as a mental stimulator that * Noting that many Christians and feminists disagree on the t TEX@ Pornographic images have been prolifera emphasizing as the religious right groups do the e =inherent objectionableness of sexually explicit and sexually ty can stimulating material. ithout sexual thoughts is abnormal." shots  One study proved conclusively that repeated exposure to bars 2A The traditional definition of pornography - material that is Bsexually arousing or appeals to prurient interests - is no longer >satisfactory. The critical feature of all pornography is not 9that it deals with sexual themes,nd Dworkin have stated they will continue their campaign against 6pornography through all available channels. Thus the hand can nd -Indianapolis ordinance remains a live issue. terial may act as a mental stimulator - much as a coach fires up hiooksellers Association) went as far as 7the U.S. Court of Appeals, which ruled in favor of the tems ering @booksellers. The U.S. Supreme Court, by refusing to review the @case, confirmed the lower court's decision. But both MacKinnon Baing of the o, y -8->offending material. The ordinance, which the city government to >passed and the mayor approved, was opposed by a group of book and @publishers, distributors and sellers. The resulting court case @(Hudnut v. the American Bmitted any woman who felt degraded or victimized by a piece of =pornographic literature or pornographic film to have a court g . ;injunction issued against the booksellers, theater owners, s and pornography. The antipornogrlarly in Kate Millett's 1970 book Sexual Politics, which f @analyzed some of Henry Miller's limited and negative portrayals t Bof women. The antipornography fight gained its greatest momentum ard:in 1975 with the appearance of "snuff" films in the Un learn from their discussions. y, ockFlorida, recently banned Bronte's Wuthering Heights. In Anniston, A The objection that much of pornography is demeaning to women  6surfaced early in the contemporary feminist movement, ry. As a e @particue books ? The debate over the appropriate response to pornography is -@not limited to the churches. Since women are the most frequent ̂e