Chapter Three
Feminist Offensives Beyond Defending Pornography

In high school in the early 1970s I often felt schizophrenically gendered. During the week, I wore glasses with walnut-colored frames and kept my hair in a severe bun while getting As in math and editing the school newspaper with all the assertiveness of which I was capable. In suburban New Jersey my cowriters and I took what even in those years were iconoclastic positions in favor of "women's liberation" and against war and racism. I was thrilled to read Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, and Anne Koedt, all the while fearing that the movement would be effectively over by the time I could participate. On the weekends, rebelliously but rather guiltily, I shook out my hair and dressed up in short skirts with plenty of makeup, hoping to "make out" with boys at local parties and dances. These two facets of my adolescent persona cohabited, although not very happily; neither was entirely at ease with the other. A more comfortable coexistence would have required knowing that a woman can feel both forceful and sexual. It would have meant believing that commitment to radical feminism had no cost, and that my dreams of social change could include both my desire to be desired and my will to get beyond typical relationships of dominance and subordination.

But I did not believe those two "sides" could make peace—not then. Now, in a supposedly Madonna-certified and postfeminist age (or post-victim feminism, as Naomi Wolf's Fire with Fire maddeningly insists the present juncture ought be designated), I am sure that underlying

problems symbolized by that gendered schizophrenia are not close to being solved. To challenge sexism and feel sexually free still calls for assiduous negotiations, and often unsatisfactory compromises; many women seem unable to realize a comfortable combination. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the years of Faludi-esque "backlash," it has remained difficult to struggle against sexism while simultaneously embracing sexuality as a crucial dimension of being-in-the-world. Yet, for feminism to meet the challenge posed by this ongoing dilemma, both facets of many women's experiences will have to be recognized.

Framing the Problem

This may seem an odd beginning to a discussion ostensibly about pornography, one that takes its inspiration from the publication of New York State ACLU President Nadine Strossen's well-written and thorough Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights (1995 ), an excellent updating of pornography's controversial legal career.^[1] But there is an important sense in which the persistence of a chasm that separates the acts of confronting sexism and liberating sexuality is highly relevant, as will become clear as we consider Defending Pornography within a wider framework of contemporary feminist politics.

As Strossen describes, incorporating a good deal of such contextualization herself, since the late 1970s— an era punctuated by now well-known events such as Barnard College's 1982 Scholar and the Feminist Conference, "Towards a Politics of Sexuality"^[2] —the feminist movement has splintered over a range of sex-related issues. In the shorthand descriptions embraced by the media, these divisions have sometimes been called feminist "sex debates" or "sex wars," reductive formulations whose exaggerations or too-neat oppositions obscure what may be better described as differences in relative emphases . Many feminists who believe that some pornography should be illegal would certainly not characterize themselves (even if others would) as "anti-sex"; many feminists placed in a "pro-sex" camp do not simply celebrate pornography (even if they are against its legal restriction), nor are they blind to or unconcerned about the pervasiveness of sexism.

Nonetheless, in several respects, the sex debates do indeed reflect discrete splits within feminism. For one thing, when it comes to disagreements about pornography (or, to take another instance, about de-

criminalizing prostitution), unambiguous "sides" are bound to develop since either regulation or deregulation by the state is demanded: one is forced to take a stand. When either/or opinions—are we pro- or anti-pornography, for or against legalizing sex work?—are necessarily called forth in a particularly clear-cut legal sense, there is little theoretical or political encouragement to develop subtler positions not so easily reflected in such stark oppositions. In this sense, then, the two groups to which Strossen steadily refers—sometimes as the "procensorship" and "anticensorship" feminists, sometimes as parties holding "anti-sex" or "pro-sex" positions (often I had to pause to recall who was who, and which was which)—are more than merely creations of a media unconcerned or ignorant about nuances of feminism.

Drawing on Strossen's terminology (though it, too, tends to be overly reductive),^[3] we find on the one hand a procensorship faction, familiarly personified in Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin and earlier associated with the group Women Against Pornography (WAP). These feminists have tended to emphasize the Leviathan-like characteristics of patriarchy, particularly sexism and its alleged objectification in pornography. At the same time, however, they have left the ambiguities of sexual existence—of women's needs for and rights to desire and pleasure in the present, not only in some utopian future whose arrival cannot be guaranteed—comparatively underexplored and underemphasized. This is the side that might have indeed adjudged my youthful miniskirted activities potentially traitorous to feminist principles; even today, a woman who enjoys pornography, or claims work within the sex industry as a legitimate occupation, may be perceived as betraying her feminist beliefs.

Moreover, this side is prone to underrate both the costs of sexual repressiveness, once the state intervenes to restrict pornography, and the human risks of strict judgmentalism and unquestionable dogmatisms. In sexuality as in other areas, there are problems created simply by the abjuring of flexibility, and even by the potential loss of a sense of the absurd. Once certain sensibilities are jeopardized, at some definite but hard-to-pinpoint moment, movements that originated against authoritarian structures paradoxically may begin to resemble their former nemeses. Think, as Strossen in Defending Pornography and Ellen Willis much earlier have both observed, of the ironically "strange bedfellows" encountered by MacKinnon and Dworkin as they found themselves allied with otherwise utterly antithetical traditionalists in the interests of

illegalizing pornography.^[4] Such alliances happened first in the United States with the Meese Commission and others hoping to restrict pornography because of the threat it supposedly posed to dominant "family values." They have recurred more recently in Canada, where local authorities have used MacKinnon-inspired antipornography rulings to harass gay and lesbian publications that neither she nor Dworkin had the slightest intention of prohibiting.

On the other hand, we also find an anticensorship perspective. This position has been associated with the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task-force (FACT), formed to argue that antipornography ordinances passed in Minneapolis and Indianapolis in the early 1980s were unconstitutional. Carol Vance, Ann Snitow, and Ellen Willis are among the feminist writers and thinkers linked with this side, which stresses civil liberties. This is Strossen's starting point as well, with which she associates (through quotations) other recent highly publicized books about feminism, including those by Katie Roiphe and Naomi Wolf.^[5] Not surprisingly, the relative emphases here are reversed from those of the procensorship faction: there is no problem with asserting sexual freedom, rights to expression and pleasure, diversity and ambiguities. Rather, on this side of the not-altogether-spurious political divide sexuality is discussed much more optimistically, less repressively, and with a focus more on exploration than judgment.

However, these feminists tend not to stress or explain why and how large numbers of women (though certainly not all) often do feel tremendously alienated by pornography as we know it. Nor does their attention linger on the connections, at once ideological and massively economic, between pornography and the still largely male-dominated businesses that control and profit from the multifaceted, multinational sex industry (which links sex, not merely knowledge, with power in a decidedly Foucaultian fashion). One figure Strossen and others have quoted, and which has been corroborated by the Justice Department, estimates the pornography business to be a $10 billion annual enterprise.^[6] In 1989 Americans bought more than 9 million copies of Playboy, Penthouse , and Hustler each month; more than 400 million X-rated videos are rented each year, and adult video sales and rentals have increased 75 percent between 1991 and 1993 in general-interest video stores alone.^[7] Thus, the patriarchally controlled institutionalization of pornography, still largely in place at an overarching, macrocosmic level, makes a mockery of the assumption that individual men and women can watch a film—in public or private—simply from positions of equiv-

alency, as liberal philosophy insists. It is highly unlikely that sexuality can be explored equally and nonproblematically in a world that remains pervaded by psychological, sexual, and socioeconomic differentials according to gender.

This side would also be less apt to emphasize how I, as a dressed-up teenager—hoping both to be desired and to desire—was more likely in her wanderings to encounter relationships that objectified her than ones that fostered mutual recognition, in and beyond sex.^[8] Such a teenager now as well as then might also experience eroticism as intimidating, as often haunted by a sense of violence and the coercive; moreover, she might learn to fear loss of conventional heterosexual attractiveness as she aged, because only one type of youthful body is valued in virtually all commercial imagery (from Cosmopolitan to Penthouse , Hollywood to pornography). All these reactions and lessons relate to a discriminatory leviathan indeed. However, this side has been less likely to dwell on institutional factors that militate against women's sexuality being experienced with full freedom and without feelings of fear. Thus these feminists have been less likely to insist on the need for the transformations of social structures (and on attendant psychological changes) required to profoundly affect the legacies of the past at the very same time that we attempt to seize what pleasures can be taken in the margins and the niches now. While forums have been held at which feelings about desire, sex, and pleasure are discussed, relatively speaking, this side has not provided many outlets in recent years for the expression of anger at the persistence of sexism and the all-too-frequent problems of still male-dominated societies. This is itself a relatively new development. In the 1970s, consciousness-raising groups, a form of small-scale organization critical to feminism's ascendancy as a political movement that stressed expression of a range of emotions, were not associated with any particular "side."

Broadly speaking, these relative emphases, which continue to separate feminist considerations of sex from sexism for reasons and in ways not altogether attributable to external factors, provide the context for Strossen's Defending Pornography . In this framing, though, I am by no means trying to avoid taking a position about restricting pornography myself. For I quite agree with Strossen's stance, as will soon become apparent: it is foolhardy at best, and dangerous at worst, to restrict First Amendment liberties and women's sexual prerogatives through vague definitions and censorship of pornography. But even if Strossen succeeds in presenting the issue persuasively both in principle and law ,

other theoretical and political questions about pornography's relationship to feminism remain unsettled and unsettling. Other queries need be posed: for one, how serious are the debates, the relative divides, sketched above? Do they indeed affect, largely or at all, whether feminism(s) can move beyond the defensive and worsening impasse of much of the 1980s and 1990s? Moreover, as some feminists have suggested, it may be absurd and inappropriate to be bothering now with sex debates at all. At a time when poor and minority women are being slashed from welfare rolls, continuing to dwell on sex can seem not only tiresome but insensitive, a sign of a movement devoid of a sense of proportion, still centered only on the pressing needs of those women who can afford—literally as well as figuratively—the intricacies of feminist debates turned inward.

There is a final important point to be considered. While I oppose legal ordinances outlawing certain forms of pornography, I also believe that separating sex from sexism diminishes feminism's continuing effectiveness, its confidence, its ability to project collective strength and purpose from an offensive rather than chronically defensive posture. Either/ or dichotomies need not extend beyond questions of law: one can be both against restrictive censorship and just as passionately in favor of transcending the subtle legacies of male-dominated societies; one can, as a feminist, accord crucial importance to issues both outside and inside the realms of sexuality. With regard to this last supposed antithesis, feminist thought and practices need neither obsess about nor abjure sexuality. But to foreclose the topic entirely, rather than to improve our understanding of how it fits within the larger parameters of a movement, would also entail a loss of collective memory, forcing us to forget how certain prophetic ideas—such as sexual politics—have played a critical role in feminism's partial resonance across class and race over the course of its recent history.

With these thoughts in mind, I have divided the following remarks into three brief sections. I first review Strossen's contribution in Defending Pornography; this part treats her book as a thesis before moving in the second section toward an antithesis, namely, the question of why MacKinnon and Dworkin have continued to garner support despite the logical arguments of the anticensorship arguments. Third, and finally, I consider how and whether it might be possible to move beyond what is ultimately a self-defeating and much too dichotomized situation for feminists of all persuasions, ages, and backgrounds. MacKinnon and

Dworkin—along with the issues they favor and the positions they adopt—have become too exclusively connected with the vestiges of radical feminism from the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, ironically, their anticensorship position may restrict rather than expand that early brand of feminism's initial promises and wide-reaching goals—promises and goals that must be revitalized if any third wave of feminism is to be forthcoming.

The Strengths of Strossen's Arguments: A Thesis

In 1988 I wrote an essay reconsidering the pornography debates after attending an April 1987 conference at New York University, "Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Radical Feminism." The conference had been disturbing: several of its featured speakers, from the procensorship side, denounced those "other" feminists who allegedly colluded with patriarchy by failing to join the campaign against pornography. These feminists were portrayed as traitorous "sexual liberals" who had played into the "enemy's" hands by criticizing aspects of earlier radical feminist practices at the Barnard conference of 1982, thereby dividing the movement. By virtue of their pro-sex position and protest against the illegalization of pornography, the women in FACT as well as certain individuals (Ellen Willis was cited by name) had somehow become seen as pro pornography, and indeed propatriarchy. This "reasoning" reached its nadir when Catharine MacKinnon referred to Willis and others as the "Uncle Toms of the movement."^[9]

While these intolerant and, ironically, highly divisive comments were troubling enough in themselves, they were also troubling as an argument, for they failed to address at least three cogent "anticensorship" points.^[10] The first is the potential abridgment of civil liberties: the dangers to First Amendment rights if certain sexual images are censored according to the vague criteria of the proposed ordinances. The second, which draws on Willis's earlier arguments, is a dilemma of sexual repression .^[11] Even if one grants that pornography frequently contains conventionally sexist images, it remains an overdetermined form. For it also contains imagery arguably freeing in effects, especially since it is generally socially taboo to express and acknowledge sexual feelings: how, then, could antipornography ordinances manage to avoid reinforcing a tradition-bound sexual repressiveness, which has often hurt

women? The third is the danger of focusing on a single issue; fighting pornography by itself is no panacea for transforming power relations, which are far more multifaceted and complex in their origins.^[12]

These critiques from the anticensorship side were hardly new in 1995; indeed, they had long been in circulation by 1987 and 1988, when it might well have appeared to an outside observer that the arguments had put the pornography issue to rest—at minimum, again, in a legal sense. As Strossen notes, Dworkin and MacKinnon had drafted their model antipornography law in 1983 , when it was adopted twice by the Minneapolis City Council and vetoed both times by then-Mayor Donald Fraser. In 1984 the ordinance was enacted in Indianapolis, only to be quickly struck down in the courts in American Booksellers Association v. Hudnut , which was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1986.^[13] Moreover, there was certainly additional irony in the key role played by conservative Republican politicians and right-wing groups (opposed to women's rights in the past) in winning passage of the Indianapolis ordinance. MacKinnon had claimed that the sexual liberal side was stacked with those working against feminist causes, but clearly the accusation could be turned back on her.^[14]

Yet as late as 1995 , when Defending Pornography was published, Strossen does not perceive herself as writing about a debate long resolved and past. Quite the contrary. To MacKinnon, the Hudnut decision was "the Dred Scott of the women's movement" and Strossen describes how it energized her side: "Just as the Supreme Court's 1973 abortion rights ruling in Roe v. Wade galvanized the antiabortion movement, so the Court's 1986 ruling in the Indianapolis case motivated the feminist antipornography faction. For the time stymied in the courts, the procensorship feminists redoubled their efforts in other forums."^[15] Even following Hudnut's affirmation by the Supreme Court, laws based on the proposed model ordinance were considered in a variety of locations throughout the United States, from Bellingham, Washington, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Suffolk County, New York. In 1992 the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the Pornography Victims' Compensation Act, which would have allowed suits against pornographers for alleged damages caused, though it never passed the full Senate. That same year and perhaps most momentously, the Canadian Supreme Court in Butler v. the Queen— apparently influenced by a brief MacKinnon coauthored—incorporated the antipornography restrictions written by Dworkin and MacKinnon almost ten years earlier into Canadian obscenity law.^[16]

It was as though the issue simply refused to die; obviously, its proponents were far from giving up. Ironically, those fighting pornography drew continuing strength not only from their desire to surmount legal defeats, as Strossen suggests, but also from the growing conservatism of the environment. Rather perversely, the more reactive the cultural climate was becoming, the likelier it was that some people were swelling local antipornography campaigns because of their outrage over sexual promiscuity, not their concern about sexism's ubiquity. In consequence it was still necessary to "defend pornography," and Strossen proceeds to do so in an admirably exhaustive fashion. In readable, lucid prose, Strossen effectively re-presents the cited trio of themes; she expounds and expands upon them with such care and determination that it is hard to imagine many anticensorship arguments that were not offered by the book's denouement.

I can best illustrate Strossen's thoroughness by briefly presenting a few of her characterizations, as they parallel and embellish those antiordinance considerations already mentioned.

Preservation of General Freedoms

This argument, which corresponds to the fear of abridging civil rights, similarly subsumes the pornography issue within the larger context of general First Amendment rights and freedoms. The now-familiar argument proceeds as follows: adoption of the antipornography ordinance is likely to incur negative consequences for social movements generally (and thus, of course, for the women's movement as well) by placing restrictions on generic individuals. If one were to restrict sexually explicit speech because of its sexism, Strossen asks, why "shouldn't we restrict non-sexually explicit speech" as well?^[17]

But there is a related philosophical argument that is perhaps even more serious. The Supreme Court has ruled that censorship is only justified when a direct causal link can be shown between speech and harm. However, such causality can be admitted in the case of pornography only if we accept a decidedly vulgar view of human beings, a deterministic perspective that leaves little room for the possibility of change. Such existential possibilities arise in what Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1943) calls a "nothingness" intervening between ideologies to which we have been exposed and our responses.^[18] Sexist words and images—like ideology in general—an thus strongly influence, but not strictly speaking determine, our reactions. If not for such "nothing-nesses" separating the ideas to which we have been exposed from our

reactions, how could feminism or other movements promoting radical social change come about at all? Yet modern positivistic social "science," in its most conservative quantitative guise, seeks to avoid all such questions of indeterminateness by treating the actions of human beings as though they were indeed determined and totally predictable. Unwittingly, then, MacKinnon enters this positivistic social scientific terrain—which, feminist philosophers of science would argue, has also been used to women's detriment—by engaging in a protracted argument about the statistical validity of figures correlating rape and pornography; the deeper question of whether such cause-and-effect relationships are ever definitive is thereby bracketed, presumed to be irrelevant.

Once again, it does not appear logical to accuse anticensorship types of being "patriarchal," as though procensorship types thereby emerge unambiguously profeminist by contrast. Furthermore, Strossen predicts a series of deleterious and antifeminist effects— regardless of intentions—that are likely to occur should the latter's goals be realized:

If MacDworkinism should prevail in the courts, it would jeopardize all of the foregoing free speech precedents and principles. The government could outlaw flag burning and the teaching of Marxist doctrine because they might lead to the erosion of patriotism and our capitalist system; white supremacist and black nationalist speeches could be criminalized because they might lead to racial segregation; peaceful demonstrations for (or against) civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, and, indeed, any other potential controversial causes could be banned because they might provoke violent counter-demonstrations. . . . [F]eminist expression could be stifled because it might threaten "traditional family values" and the attendant domestic order and tranquillity; abortion clinic advertising and other prochoice expression could be suppressed because it might lead to the termination of potential life; indeed, feminist antipornography advocacy could itself be suppressed because it could endanger cherished constitutional rights!^[19]

The argument seems, on its face, to be a strong one. But Strossen's case does not rest there.

Threats to Women's Freedom, Particularly Sexual Freedom

This argument, which broadly corresponds with the dilemma of sexual repression, similarly shifts consideration toward the particular risks that anti-pornography legislation poses for women. Strossen paints a history of censorship having been used in fact, rather than hypothetically, against women; whenever and wherever enacted, such state-imposed restrictions have also impeded struggles to attain equality and reproductive rights. From the time of the Comstock Laws of the 1870s, through the

legal harassment of Margaret Sanger, to charges brought against Emma Goldman for providing information on birth control, Strossen argues, banning written and visual materials concerning sexuality has resulted in the restriction rather than expansion of women's options.^[20]

And there is indeed reason for concern that antipornography restrictions, in the name of overcoming women's subordination, will be used to tighten sexual repression. Strossen takes pains to note that while civil liberties in the United States are in general strictly insisted upon, they have been most readily abridged in matters related to sex—that is, in the arena of obscenity law, which specifies permissible exceptions to First Amendment protections. Under such laws, charges have frequently been brought against works by gay, lesbian, and minority artists; Two Live Crew has been prosecuted for rap lyrics, and the Cleveland Art Museum for exhibiting works by Robert Mapplethorpe involving homoerotica and depictions of sadomasochism.^[21]

But perhaps the common element in all of these points is that by the criteria of MacKinnon and Dworkin's proposed ordinances, their own work, images, and efforts to change sexist ideology face censorship . Thus, the legality of pornography needs to be protected to preserve the very rights that have allowed MacKinnon and Dworkin's views to be expressed.

Paradoxical and Self-Defeating Effects

This argument roughly corresponds to the problem of focusing on a single issue, insofar as it too questions whether targeting pornography alone could create benefits that outweigh these other problems, both predicted and actual. But why would regulating pornography necessarily contribute to weakening a still male-dominated society, rather than strengthening the hand of a state that feminists cannot control? And of course, the prospect of some feminists gaining a measure of control poses other problems—for surely other feminists would disagree with their actions. Strossen describes how antipornography restrictions adopted by Canada have been misused by that government: the new regulations are hardly undermining sexually discriminatory controls. Since 1992, in the first few years after Butler , over half of Canada's feminist bookstores have had materials confiscated or detained by customs; most of the literature targeted for restriction have been gay, lesbian, and women's literature. Inland Books, a New York-based company that is the largest U.S. exporter of lesbian and gay literature to Canada, had 73 percent of its shipments detained in 1993. Moreover, with a certain poetic justice (or, more

aptly, injustice), that most ironic of the ordinance's potential ramifications actually materialized: two books written by Dworkin herself—Pornography: Men Possessing Women and Woman Hating —were stopped at the U.S.-Canada border because of obscene pornographic descriptions they were alleged to contain.^[22]

By this point, the argument seems overwhelming. Yet there is more to be said, and Strossen continues: for the preceding paragraph implies that the desired antipatriarchal effects could have been achieved if only the intended texts (say, misogynist works like Bret Ellis Easton's American Psycho ) had been seized rather than unintended ones (publications like Dworkin's Woman Hating ). Let's say for argument's sake, then, that the antipornography ordinances could be ideally interpreted from a profeminist, antipatriarchal perspective; let's say that all American Psychos and no works of feminist theory or lesbian/gay eroticism are restricted. But once the censoring of pornographic images has been perfected, what about those of violence in commercial representations outside pornography, many of which regularly feature the injuring, raping, maiming, or killing of women? What about, say, commercial films (from Basic Instinct to Pretty Woman ) and magazines (from Glamour to Essence ) and music (from the Rolling Stones to Public Enemy) that depict women discriminatorily as well—often as objects but sometimes as perpetrators of violence, and quite regularly as predominantly sexualized characters? Would we have to censor contemporary culture itself in order to prevent the reproduction of such imagery—and could such censorship even be effective? What about the desires, thoughts, impulses, ideas, feelings that are manifest through cultural artifacts and of which those artifacts are in one respect merely symbolic—would they simply evaporate, too, or resurface in altered forms unless they were themselves first comprehended more profoundly and addressed? With this, we return once more to general questions relevant but not limited to the context of feminism: the complicated issues of how targeted symptoms and underlying causes interrelate, and the broader problem of seeking a balance between proposing reforms and maintaining radical visions.

But it is also at this juncture in the present argument that another puzzle, a political/intellectual conundrum, becomes perceptible. It ought be obvious from my admiring recapitulation of Strossen's case that on logical grounds alone, I believe she "wins" the debate: if I were a judge rather than a sociologist, I would see little choice but to rule in Stros-

sen's favor. Even if one agreed entirely with MacKinnon and Dworkin's concerns about the damaging contents and effects of pornography, it is not at all clear how already-noted objections could be answered or the anticipated pitfalls forestalled. This itself is a legalistic assessment; such a ruling would, once again, arise from the practical necessity of thinking in terms of either/ors. And even assuming such a necessity, winning a legal battle is not the same as triumphing in an ideological war: I use such language now deliberately and somewhat sardonically, insofar as these words' own militaristic connotations oversimplify issues much more complex than can be explained in terms of either/or logic alone.

For something else must be going on beside merely logic—or perhaps there are other logics, and additional considerations—to explain the surfacing again and again of antipornography feelings and ordinances. These acknowledged resurgences, as we have seen, explicitly motivated the writing of Strossen's book; yet even though the resultant text is exhaustive, they also augur a future problem that Strossen does not seem able to satisfactorily address in advance, concentrating as she does only on principle and only on law. The fundamental question remains: why and whence the stubborn persistence of antipornography sentiment, despite defeats and the strength of countervailing arguments?

Several explanations come to mind. For one, as already surmised, the conservative tenor of the times leads to a growing number of supporters joining the MacKinnon/Dworkin side, not necessarily for profeminist reasons. A second answer involves playing devil's advocate with my own argument: for perhaps Strossen does provide a response in Defending Pornography . One could say, as Strossen concludes on the final page of her book, that pornography is an easy target, an easy answer: the belief that sexism can be resolved through a single issue, a piece of legislation, gives people hope and makes their involvement with feminist movement politics a more focused and potentially gratifying endeavor than a fight conducted against an abstract and amorphous "patriarchy" much more haltingly.^[23] After all, the procensorship stance suggests something to do while the anticensorship position argues for not doing something. Indeed, each of these points has some validity, but together they do not suffice to explain the phenomenon. In the first place, many women and men have been swayed by arguments made by the MacKinnon/Dworkin antipornography side who have no leanings toward conservatism themselves and who would disagree with Dan Quayle's "family values" brand of imposed traditionalism. Second, it makes little sense to infer that the appeal of antipornography legislation

is entirely a function of single-issue politics' attractions. Rather, certainly for some and perhaps for many, the continuing appeal of procensorship and anti-sex "MacDworkinite" politics may result in addition or exclusively from the belief that there is indeed something objectionable about pornography as we know it, and from the perception that challenging pornography comes closer to challenging still male-dominated institutions and structures than seems politically possible from within the pro-sex side.^[24]

Furthermore, unless this last explanation is taken seriously, we may be left with an appeal to various forms of feminist "false consciousness": that is, women believe pornography is objectionable but this is because the issue is believed to proffer a quick fix, a distraction or displacement from more authentic considerations; women think pornography is "bad" for them, and against their interests, but it really isn't; women may object to, or feel uncomfortable with, pornography, but this is really only because they may be sexually repressed. With this, though, it would be Strossen's argument that would threaten to turn on its head, and to undercut itself rather self-defeatingly. For this is precisely what Strossen does not want to say about women on the pro-sex side of the issue's fence. For good reason, she does not want women who enjoy pornography or work in the sex industry to be told—condescendingly, as MacKinnon and Dworkin have stated or implied—that they don't know what they "really" feel or do while moving through life in unwitting collaboration with patriarchy. But, then, consistency should also demand that the reactions of those women who do feel suspicious toward, or affronted by, pornography not be belittled, dismissed, or too simplistically explained away. To so react would threaten to reproduce aspects of the MacKinnon/Dworkin stance toward the world, just as that stance had itself become ironically linked with the attitudes of its apparent adversaries.

Rather than seeing them as unwitting, then, it is preferable to acknowledge that women on the other side of this issue perceive something of value in the antipornography position, something that resonates with their own experiences. And, consequently, there may be dangers for feminism not only in restricting pornography but in altogether discarding the feelings behind the prorestriction position: what Strossen calls the "MacDworkinite" stance will not simply go away if only out-argued. Once we accept that the antipornography position ought not be thrown out altogether, we are ready to examine precisely what about it continues to resonate for many women.

The Resonance of MacKinnon and Dworkin's Arguments: An Antithesis

In her book Speaking of Sex (1997), legal scholar Deborah Rhode writes, "Most males first learn about sex through pornography, and the messages it sends are not exactly calculated to encourage relationships of mutual respect, caring and intimacy. Selections like 'Cheerleader Gang Bang,' 'Black Bitch,' 'Teen Twits and Twats,' and 'Jap Sadists' Virgin Slave,' link sexual pleasure with female degradation and racial domination."^[25] Rhode suggests that even if intelligent arguments can be made against restricting pornography, their force is weakened if they presuppose that such images have no power.

In this regard, turning to Sartre may again be helpful. At one level, the existential assertion of "nothingnesses" that intervene between causes and effects remains accurate and potentially liberatory: social forces do not have the ability to be fully determinative , however hugely and remarkably influential they may be.^[26] However, to take this assertion to its furthest extreme—namely, that images influence nothing (or nothing significantly )—would be a proposition just as absurd and potentially restrictive as a belief in total determinism. Here, once more, either/or formulations threaten to obscure rather than clarify our analysis and vision. Many theorists have instead emphasized complexity, including Emile Durkheim, mapping the sociological scope and varieties of social facts; Sartre himself, laboring in later philosophical works to show even "nothingness" becoming straitjacketed within structured limitations (consciousness itself hedged in, sometimes hopelessly, by circumstances);^[27] and Stuart Hall, exploring in interdisciplinary work the weight and resiliency of culture: it would be ludicrous to deny the simultaneously ideological and material sway of images and representations.

Indeed, the recent growth of cultural studies as a body of work and a force in the academy, burgeoning at the same time that "backlash" and antifeminist forces have also gained momentum, has been founded on the explicit recognition of mass imagery's powers. Why bother analyzing, dissecting, deconstructing the representational displays and arrays of popular culture—projects engaged in by many feminists and scholars who would position themselves far from MacKinnon and Dworkin's side—if not for an intuitive understanding that cultural imagery matters? Moreover, as Hall—himself a major figure in the development of cultural studies—has noted, the ideological sway of imagined representations is most effective when brought about by persuasion to

social consensus rather than by force or state-imposed restrictions. He explains this notion of hegemony , itself culled from Gramsci:

That notion of dominance which meant the direct imposition of one framework, by overt force or ideological compulsion, on a subordinate class, was not sophisticated enough to match the real complexities of the case. One also had to see that dominance was accomplished at the unconscious as well as the conscious level: to see it as a property of the system of relations involved, rather than as the overt and intentional biases of individuals; and to recognize its play in the very activity of regulation and exclusion which functioned through language and discourse before an adequate conception of dominance could be theoretically secured. . .. Hegemony implied that the dominance of certain formations was secured, not by ideological compulsion, but by cultural leadership.^[28]

Such an analysis is clearly relevant to this examination of pornography. For it follows from Hall's explanation of hegemony that rather than being mutually exclusive, at least two dimensions frequently can and do coexist with regard to the operation of cultural imagery: such images may circulate quite consensually and lawfully while at one and the same time being intimately bound up with the reproduction of dominant/subordinate relations within inequitably structured societies. In the specific case of pornography, Strossen's already-cited arguments make a strong case that these images and representations ought and need to circulate consensually and legally even under such inequitable circumstances: there are particular benefits to pornography's relative lack of restrictions, and severe problems that attend its present or future censorship.

But advocating its legality does not logically require believing that current pornography's forms, contents, and conditions of production are entirely unobjectionable or nondiscriminatory; one need not conclude from an anticensorship position that pornography ought to remain immune to, and unencumbered by, political challenges or gender-related protests. Rather, like most of the popular examples already mentioned—from Hollywood filmmaking to Madison Avenue magazine production, from rock to rap, from MTV to cyberspace—pornography is part and parcel of, and tangled within, cultural webs linked to male-dominated attitudes and institutions still badly in need of feminist transformation. Consequently, it ought be possible to adopt an anticensorship position that does not deny the existence of connections between images and effects, ideas and materiality, representations and structures—between, finally, pornography and patriarchy. These con-

nections, of course, need not be causal. Thus, if we can get beyond the limitations of a too-strictly polarized logic, a feminist position ought be possible that permits pornography to be both defended and criticized and that avoids its becoming either unhappily repressed or mindlessly glorified.

Yet so far this analysis still begs the very question that it posed: is there indeed an ideologically problematic content to much of pornography that partly explains the ongoing objections and discomfiture of many women and men? Here Gramsci's concept of hegemony again can be useful in making sense of the continuing debates surrounding pornography and its relationship with feminism. Surely, particular pornographic images—from film to film, say, or magazine to magazine—vary greatly. However, even taking into account such internal differentiation, there still exists something that could be called a dominant or hegemonic pornography . By this, I mean that as long as a given society remains largely controlled by men in terms of who hold a preponderance of economic, political, and technical power, certain sexual representations are likely to become ideologically predominant over others.^[29] It is likely that accordingly, the forms and contents of the narratives presented in pornography will differentially cater to male desires and fantasies (though again, such influence is not deterministic).

Thus, hegemonic pornography, as I am calling it, is characterized by repetitive themes often interwoven in formulaic fashion through individual examples of this particular mainstream and commercially profitable cultural genre. For instance, it is not at all difficult to discern such ideological threads linking together separate titles like "Cheerleader Gang Bang," "Jap Sadists' Virgin Slave," and "Teen Twits and Twats"; recurrent themes are also easily noticed by anyone glancing at the pornography sections of most video stores, or looking at the posters on a street where a number of porn flicks are playing. Pornography thus manifests a rather remarkable and somewhat ironic homogeneity amid its apparently rich and ultracommodified diversity.

Therefore, not only are "real" erotic pleasures aroused in many people in and through much of hegemonic pornography (the so-called sex side of the debate) but also just as "real" is a texture of domination and subordination in much of what is depicted (the so-called sexism side of the debate). As we have seen, pornography's representational domains continue to be under the sway of a national and international sex industry that is both hugely profitable and still largely run and controlled by men.^[30] But unless that industry becomes much more equally owned,

operated, produced, imagined, and shared by women (as well as by men who are now excluded from power)—and not by only some women, but by women ranging across further complicating divides of class, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation—why would we expect pornography to reveal a wider gamut of sexual images and possibilities, or find its homogeneity "remarkable"? Clearly, women lack equal social powers from which to imagine sexuality; it remains difficult to find equal confidence in giving and demanding pleasure, in desiring and being desired, from positions of social, political, economic, and cultural strength that have not yet become collectively comparable with men's. How or why, then, should the world enacted and then represented within pornography look any less asymmetric, less skewed, than the world outside?

Within what I am suggesting is a dominant or hegemonic pornography, women are indeed recurrently depicted as enacting men's fantasies. Even when reversals of this tendency seem to occur (as in lesbian sex scenes, for instance, often formulaically figured into dominant narratives), they may only further confirm—through the use of titillating variations and temporarily exciting role reversals^[31] —the more usually patriarchal, generally heterosexual pattern of men's desire taking precedence and priority over women's. Moreover, within hegemonic pornography, it is usually only some body types and shapes that are favored—usually young rather than old, thin rather than heavy. Here, too, variations are commonly introduced (not only in body types but also across such other social categories such as race, ethnicity, or class) but again primarily for titillating diversion; divergences generally serve to reinforce rather than to genuinely diversify the conventional range of patriarchal preferences being asserted, enacted, imagined, and fantasized in and through pornography.

This is not the place to provide a qualitative or quantitative empirical account of a "hegemonic pornography" that I am describing, for the moment, in mostly conceptual and theoretical terms. But this brief analytic characterization may have helped clarify why the MacKinnon/ Dworkin procensorship side persists. We now can easily imagine many women feeling alienated both by their lack of control over the production of pornography and by their sense of being somehow left out from the promised pleasures of its consumption . For some women, though certainly not all, their own experiences, sexual needs, feelings, frustrations, and desires do not seem to be tapped or depicted in that hegemonically pornographic movie, magazine, or book. For many, an uneasy sense—and how, after all, could such a sense be deemed altogether un-

founded or inappropriate?—remains that somehow pornography, like patriarchy itself, is indeed not fully in their/our/women's interests.

A Concluding Synthesis

And so it seems reasonable to conclude that, at least in our present social context, still dominated by gender bias, contemporary pornography is not altogether unobjectionable (though perhaps, in a more feminist future, it might yet evolve toward providing pleasures and satisfactions distributed more democratically). But what I am not willing to concede is that anything in the `"antithesis" section negates the arguments of the "thesis." Perhaps the patriarchal character of present-day pornography ought to convince feminists not to jump on a bandwagon of censoring or restricting its proliferation but to do precisely the reverse. Concentrating on one issue abstracted from others all others, as Dworkin and MacKinnon have urged in the case of pornography, paradoxically tends to de-radicalize feminism rather than contributing to its growth or to its ability to realize its earlier and more wide-ranging vision.

Quite possibly, we need to do two things at once. On the one hand, using vague definitions to censor pornography also restricts those who do find enjoyment in and through it; even if hegemonic pornography commonly reflects the dominant/subordinate character of most relations between men and women, many can still find pleasures in niches, in cracks, through reimaginations. A rigidly prorestriction position is not only judgmental and potentially repressive but may take away from some women explicit or implicit imagined vehicles for bodily happiness sometimes experienced in the present , without offering a substitute. Clearly, the anticensorship side espoused by Strossen advocates this first protective measure and makes an important case for not perpetuating sexual repressiveness.

But on the other hand, nothing about an anticensorship position prevents us from raising a second question that, following the first imperative becomes that much more critical if feminists are to stop short of restricting pornography: How can future transformations of sexuality simultaneously be assured of being worked toward? How can we ensure that pornography in its present incarnations does not remain unchallenged, accepted with resignation as though its underlying relations are unchangeable? On this side of things, Strossen seems to have

less to suggest from her feminist perspective; in fact, none of the changes she broaches at the end of Defending Pornography address issues of changes in sexual power per se, though these are extremely important for ensuring that pornography evolves in a more democratic direction in the future.

MacKinnon and Dworkin at first appear to have more to offer on this point. For there can be no doubt that both these feminists fully recognize the depth of interaction between images and effects: "Social inequality," MacKinnon writes in Only Words (1993), "is substantially created and enforced—that is, done —through words and images. Social hierarchy cannot and does not exist without being embodied in meanings and expressed in communications. . .. Social supremacy is made, inside and between people, through making meanings."^[32] They fully realize that gender-biased assumptions pervade society throughout a mind-boggling range of psychic, social, cultural, and fantasized manifestations. But why does that realization lead to the far too limiting and ultimately de-radicalizing conclusion—thereby ultimately thwarting MacKinnon's and Dworkin's ambitious intentions—that campaigns to legally restrict pornography are the best way to confront the still-leviathan-like weight of male-dominated societies?

If we focus instead on the particular cultural manifestation that I have labeled hegemonic pornography, a broader answer comes to mind, one far less confining than antipornography legislation per se. Most important, this approach suggest the need for a multifaceted radical feminist movement in which the issue of pornography would figure as one large question among others, without taking on a decontextualized oversignificance . Lacking such perspective, we are unlikely to make much progress on pornography in the future, and at that second longer-term and more radical level. For people create images, and come to shape desires and experience sexuality, in specific ways, in part because of their socialization regarding gender within nuclear families. Thus, psychoanalytically oriented examinations and critiques of dominant family structures eventually can affect—though perhaps such influence may seem unlikely—the particular form and contents of pornography. Similarly, women's decisions about working in the sex industry, or how or if sexual freedoms are experienced, also must be understood broadly, as largely influenced by questions of economic power and powerlessness; in other words, questions of political economy are involved. Thus activism on issues related to class—such as the effects of 1990s welfare restructuring on women abruptly cut off from social supports—

is indirectly but definitely connected to questions of sexual freedom and pornography's persistence in mostly hegemonic forms. And why should MacKinnon and Dworkin have limited their protests against the sexist content of media to pornography? One can eschew censorship but not hesitate to call attention, in the larger context, to women's still-limited collective access to controlling cultural production overall.

To their credit, MacKinnon and Dworkin have continued, even in the conservative decades of the 1980s and 1990s, to call attention to the persistence of male-dominated structures of power. In the process, they have become associated with radical feminism, a connection that brings them not merely authority and power (as one sometimes senses from Strossen's account) but also a good deal of excessive and disproportionate demonization. But it is wrong to see Dworkin and MacKinnon as representing the sole remaining vestiges of earlier radical feminism, for the movement of the 1960s and 1970s was insistently multi-issued and multidimensional. As MacKinnon came to concentrate so much energy solely on legal resolutions and outcomes, radical feminism itself became too closely associated with the pornography issue, which has too severely limited it. Ironically enough, the turn to law—with its own tendency to espouse either/or positions—may have affected both Strossen and MacKinnon, as their respective positions each show a disconcerting tendency to flip to the other because of their exclusive emphasis on one side of the censorship debate, whether pro- or anti-.

Yet if feminism is to move beyond the divisions of those debates, which at once arose internally and were exaggerated by outside observers, thinking outside the limitations of either/or divides is crucial; it is the first step in resuscitating a movement now splintered and defensive. Sexual pleasure needs to be protected and sexism to be challenged. When both dimensions are simultaneously engaged, women of all ages, colors, and classes—including the teenager I was as well as the wonderful young women I now have the privilege of teaching a generation later—will once more be able to participate in the radical dismantling of gender bias and sexual inequities, the continuing project that all feminists ought to be proud to have begun.