Porn a Cause for Expression, Not War

SOMEHOW, OUT OF the past weekend's flurry of verbal assaults, rude interruptions, angry personal statements, and emotional hyperbole, the audience at the MIT-Harvard sponsored Symposium on Women and Pornography managed to indulge occasionally in laughter, what some French feminists could even call "jouissance," gendered female. Politics after all, as guest speaker Catherine MacKinnon noted sarcastically, is a very sexy business.

Her counterpart, lesbian author Kate Millet, would have agreed wholeheartedly; Millet's talk on "Sex and Censorship" frequently played to the crowd with lines such as "the gay shall lead the way...out of the hetero-straitjacket," which provided welcome relief from tense differences.

Not everyone, however, was turned on by the sexual plays on language that Millet personally defines as "erotica." There were also moments during the symposium's polylogue when frictional energies generated by deeply-personal differences erupted in unatt ractive scenes of hostility. These were the sort of hairpulling impulses, for example, which led one woman to speculate on Millet's promiscuous habits during youth, and Millet in turn to counter with the charge that her accuser probably beats her own kids--over the issue of child abuse. Friday night's free-for-all with "bawdy Kate", the author of the ground-breaking 1968 manifesto Sexual Politics and a leading anticensorship advocate, provoked strong teactions from the crowded audience. Moderator Susan Suleiman's attempt to restore order during the question and answer period was overridden by a Cantabrigian majority intent on using the session as a forum for debating next month's referendum on the MacKinnon-Dworkin anti-porn bill.

The following morning's session began, of necessity, with an announcement of strict game rules for running the talks. Also up for grabs was the related controversy over the oncampus showing of porn movies during MIT's registration week. The generally volatile climate--marked by cheering and hissing--inspired at times vicious perversions in logic whose extremes resulted in hardcore rhetoric. One MIT student asked, "what if a woman doesn't mind being cut up in little pieces?"

ASTRANGE PHENOMENON is occurring within American feminism these days: increasingly, feminist practice has given up the habit of flirting with the familiar Man vs. Woman oppositions that deodorant commercials of the '70's depicted as feminist chic. The prevailing themes of conflict are now heard through a polyphony of women's voices--straight, gay, and other--marking the shift in strategy from reactionary to constructive politics. Millet's comment that women should focus their energies on "creating eroticism rather than fighting porn" drew loud applause from a packed audience consisting of scholars, housewives, critics, social workers, professionals, conservatives, students, and lesbians, in addition to radical feminists and men--strange bedfellows.

In many senses, the two-day symposium had less to say about the subject of pornography than it did about the "women's" controversies surrounding the issue. While moving from the topic of Pornography and Art to that of Pornography and Social Policy, Friday and Saturday's speeches, slide show, and panel discussion raised questions about female sexuality, historically-based inequalities, and domestic concerns.

Nationwide, the issue of "pornography" no longer refers solely to dirty pictures; it's become an organizing theme, a rallying cause for mobilizing the increasingly diverse sectors of the population with vested interests in the issue. It is a reassuring sign for feminism that both the Women's Alliance Against Pornography, which is sponsoring the local referendum, and the New Yorkbased Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force (F.A.C.T.) were on hand to pamphlet the conferences with equal vigor.

Moreover, the burgeoning dissent within the expanding borders of the socalled "women's" realm represents at heart an impressive heterogeneity of social issues at stake. Feminism can no longer be regarded as a single radical ideology composed of socially-marginal elements. With potentially the single most powerful voting bloc at hand--in theory at least--feminist organizations currently serve as clearinghouses for a prolific variety of interest groups, allied with issues ranging from nuclear freeze to minority rights.

Feminism as a grassroots movement serves as a forum for debate on social concerns that have yet to be recognized by the political and legal system. One alternative which arose during discussion following Saturday morning's slide show panel concerned the possibility of unionizing the sex industry. A representative from a group called "No Bad Girls, Only Bad Laws" spoke out on behalf of the prostitutes and porn actresses who would be directly affected by legislation, driving the industry further underground.

THE FACT THAT pornography is an $8 billion a year industry makes a compelling argument for those feminists who insist that legislating anti-porn censorship is a futile effort. Eradicating images of women's subjection to violence and degradation, they argue, overlooks the reality the images represent.

If the pornography issue represents the lynch pin for issues ranging from homosexual rights to marital rape legislation, the pornographic image represents only the surface of an entire sexual mentality underlying social behavior and attitudes. The F.A.C.T. reprint of an L.A. Times editorial points out, "the target should be the coercion, not the sexual nature of the image." Why not, perhaps, both?

Those who disagree with this approach--notably MacKinnon, a lawyer and professor of political science, and co-author of the MacKinnon-Dworkin bill--use the same evidence to argue that a critical causal tie exists between the image and the reality. Pornography's presence perpetuates pornographic minds and violent behavior, MacKinnon argues, relying on psycho-sociological studies.

The question of pornography as cause or symptom becomes, in effect, the dividing line among feminist positions: a question of strategy. While MacKinnon supports direct legal action, critics such as Millet and journalist Marsha Pally, who also spoke at the symposium, favor what they consider to be a more longterm strategy of reforming cultural institutions.

THE PROBLEM WITH the anticensorship position is its vague prescription and its complacency. At one point during the heated exchange, a member of the audience spoke up angrily against Millet's lack of "seriousness," recalling the case of a rape victim in Minnesota who later learned that photos taken during the rape had been sold to pornographers. Millet's unfamiliarity with the incident and forms of legal redress available in such instances appeared to disappoint and frustrate many. The legalistic and practical tone of MacKinnon's forceful argument, in contrast, emphasizes the critical failure of current laws to provide any redress.

The differences in the two women's politics and the opposing strategies they outline come down to differences in style, or language. Compared to the "radical" reputation Millet earned in the late '60s with her groundbreaking book, the mellowed-out tone of her largely-improvised talk carried a sense of uninformed complacency, emphasized by an outdated rhetoric of "sex slaves," "deflated ego," and "male chauvinism." Her message of "make love not war" sounded at times like an apologia for the '70s image of aggressive feminism.

THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION first formulated the equation between individual freedom and sexual selfexpression, thus raising the Freudian lid on both the porn industry and gay liberation. Millet, a self-proclaimed anarchist and lesbian in her fifities, places first priority on "freedom of expression," less out of respect for constitutional law than because she distrusts all legal institutions. She depicts anti-porn legislation as handing over "the power of judgment" to the "puritannical" realm of "patriarchal" authority--not necessarily male--whose legitimacy she mocks.

If "the pursuit of happiness" for Millet is the quest for a new woman-based eroticism, the key to MacKinnon's view of sexuality is gender. A crude distinction one could make between the two structuralist conceptions is the exploitation of women as viewed in sexual vs. economic terms--which translates roughly to the difference between repression and oppression.

It is no coincidence that MacKinnon's analysis relies heavily upon comparisons to racism and anti-Semitism, to highlight the claim of minority oppression. The emphasis of her bill on civil damages rather than on criminal prosecution, for example, identifies "womanhood" as a separate class interest within American pluralism. This is a limited and misleading conception which only perpetuates the myth of feminism's "ghettoed" status as a political and intellectual domain for-women-only.

Furthermore, it aggravates the problem of maintaining an open debate. Her reading of a "supreme court woman judge's" vote against a so-called women's issue as an act of disloyalty contains a dangerously ideological edge to its judgment based on a conception of monolithic gender.

By ironic coincidence, on the same afternoon of the symposium, the Center for European Studies sponsored a conference on feminism whose topics included "Varieties of Feminisms." The pluralism is crucial. Feminism has come a long way from its associations of militant castration tactics and aesthetics of neuterdom; the term itself is an outdated one which cannot encompass the scope of cultural impact its present activity implies.

THE SOPHISTICATION of current-day feminist thinking is slowly leaving behind the tired battlefields of ideological tug-of-wars over sexual libidos. The new challenge it confronts, instead, is one of internal harmony; of coordinating theory and practice within a newly mobilized body hetero-politic. Even the notorious schism between French and Anglo feminisms--one noted for its theoretical avant-garde elegance, the other for its sensible economics--is really a matter of secret vanity; in actuality, it is an intellectualized space for self-consciously trying out new images of both feminists and women, thus transforming their cultural representations through selfexpression.

Freedom of expression implies, literally, the freedom of interpretation of individual process. While Professor Susan Suleiman's textual reading of George Bataille's "The Story of the Eye" as pornographic art may have felt marginal and esoteric to those uninitiated in the Marxist-Freudian syntheses of feminist literary criticism on which she drew, nevertheless the premises of authority and desire questioned had a very practical aim. Such a reading as Suleiman's illustrates how pornography, like art, lies in the eye of the beholder. The process of intellectual questioning is crucial to transforming cultural values and the kind of sexual economy they engender within our personal and social relationships.

THE PROBLEM, therefore, with MacKinnon's bill lies in a sense precisely in its explicitness, "the quick-fix appeal" of coding into law a short-term memory of more deeply rooted, that is, historical inequalities. "Should we burn it?," Suleiman warns, is a trap. Scrubbing away at unpleasant surfaces is a domestic chore. On one hand, one wants to sling mud for mud; on the other, one is then reduced to a similar level of indecency, instead of providing new examples of civil education.

The art of feminist politics requires a delicate balance between playing into oppositional logic and sidestepping difficult political issues. If "the privileged locus of drama" is, in fact, the female subject, it is time feminism's serious play turned its attention to a female as well as male audience.