Sexuality and Censorship

TAKE Back the Night Week '89, a Radcliffe Union of Students-sponsored series of events designed to highlight the problems of violence against women in society, last week featured a controversial--though disturbing--discussion of the relationship between pornography and rape.

The speaker, sociologist and anti-porn activist Gail Dines-Levi, showed a graphic slide presentation linking male violence to images of women in the media and proceeded to advocate the censorship of most current sexual images of women--in magazines, films and advertisements.

"The one-in-three rape rate is started by Penthouse and Playboy," Dines-Levi said. To combat such connections between pornography and violence, the Take Back the Night speaker implied that women should take militant action to prevent men from buying and viewing pornographic materials.

With such statements, the audience of about 100 in the Lamont Forum room was unwittingly drawn into one of the central debates of the feminist movement--one with damaging consequences to the ostensible purposes of the Take Back the Night events.

By exploiting the emotional impact of rape and sexual violence, Dines-Levi urged her audience to pursue tactics that contradict the fundamental values of the Women's Movement by censoring sexual freedom and repressing sexual expression.

RAPE is a feminist issue--and its occurrence and tacit social acceptance in our society are directly reflected in stereotypical images of women. But leaders of Women Against Pornography (WAP), such as Dines-Levi, do a disservice to the feminist movement's goals of severing the connections between male violence and female sexuality.

Tactics of censorship, violent retaliation and rhetorical hatred will not accomplish those ends, nor will they succeed in furthering the goals espoused by Take Back the Night. Rather, Dines-Levi and others risk alienating those women who have fought to liberate their own sexualities as a means of fighting that very same oppression.

Sexual freedom--the right of women to control their own bodies and create the terms in which their sexuality can be expressed--is basic to the issue of personal freedom in which the Women's Movement is grounded. To assert, as Dines-Levi did, that women are defined solely by their mass-produced and mass-marketed images is to suggest wrongly that women cannot make choices about their own bodies.

It is violence against women--and not images--that prevents women from taking control of their own bodies. It is real, material oppression of women within the law, within our economy, within our social customs that is the issue. Images represent the form, and not the substance, of such oppression, and to pretend that the problem can be solved by violating others' rights of free expression and privacy is an irresponsible and dangerous argument.

ELLEN Willis, in an article entitled "Feminism, Moralism and Pornography," offers an important discussion of the issues raised by Dines-Levi. Her refutation of WAP's platform is based on the recognition that these arguments set back the discussion about violence against women rather than further needed social change.

Moreover, Willis argues, WAP's tactics confirm traditional and puritanical notions of womanhood that are in themselves degrading and disempowering to women.

"If feminists define pornography, per se, as the enemy, the result will be to make a lot of women ashamed of their sexual feelings and afraid to be honest about them," Willis writes. "And the last thing women need is more sexual shame, guilt and hypocrisy--this time served up as feminism."

What is disturbing about Dines-Levi's appearance for Take Back the Night and the attendant discussion she prompted is the refusal to consider the social and political implications of advocating pornography's censorship. Inevitably, comparisons must be drawn about the similar tactics advocated by the censors of the Left and the censors of the Right.

If Dines-Levi's true intention was not to align herself--and an entire movement of women--with the repression of sexuality and Bible-toting book burners, then her analysis of the causes of violence against women would lead to a very different tactical answer.

To support and affirm a woman's right to control her own body and her own life is at the heart of the Women's Movement. Rape and sexual violence against women directly threaten those values; so does censorship of women's sexuality. Neither should be condoned.