Bad Art Friend to Bad Law Legacy
This week's hot takes, from the risks of digital gossip to the anti-porn legal legacy in the Texas anti-abortion strategy.....
While at work on a review of Amia Srinivasan’s The Right To Sex, I’m taking a break to post two hot takes for this week:
1) Social media is at the saturation point with responses to the Robert Kolker’s New York Times piece “Who is the Bad Art Friend?” And oh my god it is full of cringe inducing exposures of the lives we live, as reflected in and through social media. The point that hit me hardest immediately was expressed by the headline on Claire Lampen’s “Niche Drama” column in New York Magazine’s The Cut, “Hell is the New York Times Publishing Your Group Chat.” Because the NYT actually published the Mean Girl text messages of a writing group, dissing an outsider who thought she was an insider in scathing terms. The texts were produced under subpoena as part of the discovery phase of a lawsuit. This could happen to any of us at any time! I immediately got on my phone to my fav gossip texting comrade, Anna. We gossip in the name of art too! Our writing draws on our texts! So we got to work clarifying for any future court, adding caveats: “The mentions in these texts of ‘Bob’ and ‘Joe’ [etc] are references to fictional characters—any resemblance to living assholes is purely coincidental.”
The article reminded me of all the small affinity group splits of decades past, and how much simpler it was before we all left digital records of our in medias res snarky jibes and putdowns. In the late 1970s, I belonged to a Gay Socialist Salon that met on the upper west side of Manhattan. We were half gay men and half dykes (we eschewed the term “lesbian” at the time—the story of the many shifting categories over time is for another post)—and the dykes were the stalwarts of the “pro sex” wing of the so-called feminist “sex wars.” We decided to devote one Sunday to discussing intergenerational sex, but we didn’t get far before we had a blow up. We went around in a circle each telling about our own experience—the rules were, without interruption. Before long it became clear that there was a pattern. The men nearly all told stories about positive experiences of sex as young teenagers with older men outside their families, while the women were nearly all telling stories about unwanted sexual attention as younger children from male members of their own families. This was unexpected and interesting! We didn’t think such a strong binary distinction would emerge. But before we could even get around to thinking together about it, a few of the men went off on the women, telling us we “shouldn’t” be narrating our experiences as negative. Uh oh. The men knew these women were not those interested in writing melodramatic scripts to undergird a carceral politics! We were more interested in thinking about these experiences before reacting with moralizing tirades; none of us would have assumed that the pattern in this little group was even necessarily generalizable. But these few men started to try to shut us down before we even described the pattern, much less analyzed it. They began to instruct us on how to feel about what had happened to almost all of us. So, well, of course……. The Salon blew up and never met again. Bad Feelings persisted for a long time. Imagine if we had been texting? Imagine if our texts could have been pulled into a lawsuit and made public? Oh God. No. This dispute needed a lot of processing and framing before it was ready for publicity!
In the current revisiting of the “sex wars” in many venues (stay tuned for Srinivasan review) there is a flattening of the “pro sex” vs “anti sex” sides that feels SO distorting for those of us who were there. As the story above shows, the narrated split covers over so much. This fact led me to revisit some of my writing from that time period, to help me remember what was up then. Which leads us to:
2) Recently, a federal appeals court reinstated the Texas abortion ban, after it had been lifted only two days earlier by a lower court. How in the fucking hell is that possible? The lower court was clear that the ban blocked pregnant people in Texas from exercising their constitutional rights—so, ipso facto, the ban is unconstitutional. On what possible grounds could the US Supreme Court initially refuse to suspend it until a court determination, and then an appeals court overrule a compelling lower court decision? The trick is in the enforcement mechanism. Because the law allows any citizen to sue any abortion provider, or anyone who assists someone seeking an abortion, technically “the state” is not the enforcer and can not be enjoined by the court. Hahahaha. This is a transparent ruse. But it is not a new one! This strategy was tried out by anti-pornography activists led by law professor Catharine MacKinnon in 1983-84 in Minneapolis and Indianapolis. The municipal ordinance that finally passed in Indianapolis allowed any person “harmed” by pornography (defined as a form of sex discrimination) to sue producers and distributors—a wide open call allowing the legal harassment of anyone involved with sexually explicit representation (in Canada, where a related effort succeeded, the first prosecutions were of a historic gay and lesbian bookstore). The ordinance was struck down by the courts on first amendment grounds, so the question of the novel mechanism of enforcement never came up. legally. Thus the Texas abortion law’s mechanism, substantially similar if not identical, has not been vetted though the courts yet. And that is the excuse given to leave it in place while it winds slowly, slowly through the judicial process.
In 1984 I wrote about the anti-porn ordinance in the Village Voice. I traced its weird progress through the political process in Indianapolis in particular. This is now ancient history! The landscape surrounding porn is vastly different in the internet era. And the politics of a resurgent right wing were different then than they are now. I would probably not call the antiporn campaign “censorship” now, and would have some different things to say about the rhetoric and law of “free speech.” But there are some overlaps from that time to this, and a few points of interest. Porn, abortion, sex work—these remain overburdened signifiers for a wider political economic conflict, as this article works to show. And the legal strategy here is now back with us…….
Censorship in the Name of Feminism (1984)
Indianapolis is an unlikely place for an antipornography crusade. Its busy, immaculate downtown is free of porn shops; even convenience stores and newsstands carry only an occasional copy of Playboy or Penthouse. Hardcore pornography is hard to find. During a recent visit to the city, it took me three days to locate the local porn district—a pathetic collection of “adult businesses” at 38th Street and Shadeland Avenue, in a depressed commercial area of empty parking lots, boarded-up storefronts, and small shops about twenty minutes east of the city’s center. Adult Toy and Gift, a heterosexual porn shop with live peep shows, sits alongside the Annex, a gay men’s porn shop, and the Doll House, a go-go bar. There are other porn shops scattered in outlying areas of the city and surrounding Marion County. There are also adult movie theaters, and an occasional massage parlor. But these are few and far between. For a city of a million and a half, Indianapolis is remarkably porn-free. Yet in the last year Indianapolis has become the site of an extraordinary antipornography effort. It is the first American city to sign into law an amendment to its civil rights ordinance defining “pornography” as a form of sex discrimination. The legislation would allow individuals to sue in civil court to ban specified sexually explicit materials and to collect damages for the harm done by the pornographers. It was written by radical feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. The Indianapolis action was extraordinary because an ostensibly feminist initiative was supported not by local feminist groups but by neighborhood associations, conservative Republican politicians, right-wing fundamentalists, and members of the Moral Majority—a coalition unique in American politics.
The new law is not yet in effect. Less than ninety minutes after it was signed by the mayor, a collection of publishers, booksellers, broadcasters, and librarians, joined by the ACLU, challenged the measure in federal district court on Constitutional grounds, as a violation of First Amendment protection of free speech. Judge Sarah Evans Barker’s decision is pending, and it is likely to have a wide impact. Scores of other U.S. cities are awaiting her decision before enacting their own versions of the law. Regardless of the judicial outcome, the passage of this law in Indianapolis is a landmark event. It constitutes the first success of a new legislative strategy on the part of antipornography feminists. For the first time, organizations such as Women Against Pornography (WAP) are advocating state censorship of films, books, and magazines deemed degrading to women. In doing so, they’ve provided traditional procensorship forces with a new way to attack the First Amendment. They’ve also allied themselves with the most antifeminist forces in the culture, those who are opposed to ERA, abortion, gay rights, and affirmative action (the list could go on). That this has been done is appalling—that it has been done in the name of feminism is frightening.
Like that of many American cities, Indianapolis’s downtown has gone through a renaissance in the last few years. Steel and glass office towers stand next to restored townhouses. Chic restaurants line up next to theaters and galleries offering sophisticated urban entertainment for the city’s young professionals. But away from downtown, Indianapolis begins to feel like a Southern city—more like Louisville, say, than Chicago. Residential racial segregation is the rule; voices slow to a drawl; tract houses, bowling alleys, dreary commercial strips, and dramatically designed evangelical churches abut one another. The Bob Evans Restaurant serves grits and honey biscuits for breakfast. Political conflict takes place within an overwhelming context of Republican conservatism. The basic contrast among white politicians is the equivalent of that between George Bush and Jesse Helms—slick, sophisticated conservatives versus right-wing populists. What Democratic strength there is exists primarily among black politicians, though the city has a sprinkling of embattled white liberals as well. Since the election of Ronald Reagan and the growth of the New Right as a force in national politics, the fundamentalist right wing in Indianapolis has been strengthened. Consequently, public morality campaigns of various sorts have appeared with a confident vigor. Two years ago, Reverend Greg Dixon, pastor of the Indianapolis Baptist Temple and a former Moral Majority official, led the Coalition for a Clean Community on a march against immorality in the city’s downtown. About two and a half thousand marchers cheered when Republican Mayor William Hudnut III declared Clean Community Day. In Indianapolis, reactionary extremists enjoy a degree of political legitimacy almost unimaginable to most Northeasterners. The religious right in Indianapolis opposes pornography on scriptural and moral grounds as propaganda for promiscuity. But they are not the only antipornography campaigners in the city. Neighborhood groups have organized against porn for a mixed bag of reasons. Some are angry that commercial interests have the power to determine what goes into their neighborhoods. Some are motivated by fear and bigotry, and express concern that pornography promotes interracial sex and homosexuality. Some would like to close only the porn shops in their own neighborhoods; others would eliminate all sexually explicit materials from the face of the earth. Ron Hackler of the Citizens for Decency of Marion County, for example, explains that his group was founded to oppose the little complex at 38th and Shadeland on behalf of the residents of the adjacent neighborhood. But the citizens have branched out since then. They plan to ally themselves with the national organization, Citizens For Decency Through Law, a group that advocates the elimination of porn through vigorous enforcement of obscenity laws. According to the group’s brochure, pornography causes crime, venereal disease and “dangerous societal change,” through its depiction of “everything from beastiality [sic], sodomy, rape, fornication, masturbation, piquerism, orgies, homosexuality and sadomasochism.” It’s quite a leap from a desire by residents to gain some control over their neighborhoods to a vision of sex leading to Armaggedon. Pressure this past year from the motley collection of antiporn groups in Indianapolis led Mayor Hudnut, a Presbyterian minister, to look for new ways to battle pornography. Obscenity laws had not proved effective. Although the city’s zealous antivice prosecutor and police department had been willing to make the arrests, their cases repeatedly failed to persuade juries, or were thrown out on technicalities. The zoning law used to restrict “adult businesses” had been tied up in court challenges as well (there is now a new zoning law, however). Mayor Hudnut finally received inspiration from an unlikely source—the progressive city of Minneapolis, and radical feminists Dworkin and MacKinnon.
Dworkin and MacKinnon did not plan to write a new municipal law against pornography. In the fall of 1983, they were teaching a class at the University of Minnesota, presenting and developing their analysis of the role of pornography in the oppression of women. Each woman is known for her advocacy of one of the more extreme forms of antipornography feminism—the belief that sexually explicit images that subordinate or degrade women are singularly dangerous, more dangerous than nonsexual images of gross violence against women, more dangerous than advertising images of housewives as dingbats obsessed with getting men’s shirt collars clean. In fact, Dworkin and MacKinnon argue that pornography is at the root of virtually every form of exploitation and discrimination known to woman. Given these views, it is not surprising that they would turn eventually to censorship—not censorship of violent and misogynistic images generally, but only of the sexually explicit images that cultural reactionaries have tried to outlaw for more than a century. Dworkin and MacKinnon were invited to testify at a public hearing on a new zoning law (Minneapolis’s “adult business” zoning law had been stricken in the courts also). When they appeared, they testified against the zoning strategy, and offered a surprising new idea instead. Dworkin railed at the City Council, calling its members “cats and dogs” for tolerating pornography; MacKinnon suggested a civil rights approach to eliminate, rather than merely regulate, pornography. City officials must have enjoyed the verbal abuse—they hired the women to write a new law and to conduct public hearings on its merits.
In Minneapolis, Dworkin/MacKinnon were an effective duo. Dworkin, a remarkably effective public speaker, whipped up emotion with sensational rhetoric. At one rally, she encouraged her followers to “swallow the vomit you feel at the thought of dealing with the city council and get this law in place. See that the silence of women is over, that we’re not down on our backs with our legs spread anymore.” In contrast, MacKinnon, a professor of law, offered legalistic, seemingly rational, solutions to the sense of panic and doom evoked by Dworkin. In such a charged atmosphere, amid public demonstrations by antiporn feminists—one young woman later set herself on fire to protest pornography—the law passed. It was vetoed by the mayor on constitutional grounds. Indianapolis, though, is not Minneapolis. When Mayor Hudnut heard of the Dworkin/MacKinnon bill at a Republican conference, he did not think of it as a measure to promote feminism, but as a weapon in the war on smut. He recruited City-County Councilmember Beulah Coughenour—an activist in the Stop ERA movement—to introduce the law locally. A Republican conservative, she is a member of the lobbying group Pro-America; she sent her children to Reverend Dixon’s Baptist Temple schools. Although Coughenour has much in common with Phyllis Schlafly, she does not share her flamboyance—she does not challenge or antagonize. Instead, she emphasizes her listeners’ points of agreement, smoothing over any possible conflict. A city council member for nine years, Coughenour had been considered a minor figure in Indianapolis politics, but she displayed unexpected skill in overseeing the passage of the antiporn bill. How else could she have gotten radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon and right-wing preacher Greg Dixon to work together to pass legislation she sponsored, without ever running into one another?
Coughenour’s first smart move was to hire MacKinnon but not Dworkin as a consultant to the city in developing the legislation. MacKinnon was the legal brains behind the law, after all (and is probably still the only person to fully understand the legal theory behind it). MacKinnon is also “respectable.” She wears tailored suits and gold jewelry; her hair is neatly pulled back in a bun. She looks like a well-heeled professional, and sounds like an academic. Of the law’s coauthors, she was most likely to be accepted by Indianapolis’s conservative city officials. Dworkin’s style would not have gone over in Indianapolis—there are no crowds of antiporn feminists to galvanize into action, while there are innumerable tight-laced conservatives to be alarmed by the feverish pitch of Dworkin’s revival-style speeches, not to mention her overalls and unruly appearance. MacKinnon worked closely with Coughenour from the start. She advised city officials in the drafting of the law, but by her own admission she made no contacts with local feminists. In addition, she accepted Coughenour’s claim that right-wing fundamentalists were not involved with the law and its progress through the council.
In talking to MacKinnon, one gets the impression of someone so immersed in the theory of the law that she never noticed the local politics behind it. When she gave her testimony at the public hearing on the antiporn bill, she went so far as to describe Indianapolis as “a place that takes seriously the rights of women and the rights of all people. …” Apparently, she did not know that her supporters in the police department had been involved in the videotaping and beating of gay men in the city’s downtown only weeks before. Many local feminists were surprised to discover that Indianapolis was a place that took “seriously the rights of women,” and they responded angrily to MacKinnon’s distortion of their situation. An outsider had been brought in to represent “the” feminist position, and this had been done by their political adversaries. Sheila Suess Kennedy, a Republican feminist attorney, submitted written testimony to the council in which she said: As a woman who has been publicly supportive of equal rights for women, I frankly find it offensive when an attempt to regulate expression is cloaked in the rhetoric of feminism. Many supporters of this proposal have been conspicuously indifferent to previous attempts to gain equal rights for women. In 1980 Coughenour had attacked Kennedy in a local political race because of her feminism. Kathy Sarris, president of Justice, Inc., an Indiana statewide lesbian and gay rights organization, and another feminist opponent of the measure, commented, “It has not occurred to Mayor Hudnut to put women in leadership positions in city-county government; why is he now so concerned with the subordination of women in pornography?”
During his tenure, Hudnut has refused to meet with lesbian and gay rights advocates. Even a local feminist attorney sympathetic with the law expressed surprise that she had not been informed about the public hearing, given that she has been contacted in connection with nearly every other women’s issue that has come up in the city council. In organizing the public hearing on the law, Coughenour was careful to make sure it would not turn into a circus, but rather be a forum for rational exchange and sympathetic testimony. This was in direct contrast to how she would stage-manage the final vote. At the public hearing, MacKinnon explained the legal theory of the bill for more than an hour, in academic terms that seemed to pass right by the council members. The remaining proponents did not speak about the law at all, but about the pain of rape and abuse, or about the terrors of “unnatural acts” and “sodomy.” A woman from the prosecutor’s office introduced the psychological studies that antipornography activists claim prove that porn causes sexual violence. Social psychologist Edward Donnerstein, one of the experts cited, appeared before the full council two weeks later to stress that his studies showed the effects of violent images on attitudes, not the effects of sexually explicit materials on behavior. Donnerstein has since complained that his studies are being misused in antipornography campaigns.
Opposition to the law was organized by Michael Gradison in the Indiana Civil Liberties Union office. Predictably, civil liberties attorneys were appalled by the bill’s breadth and vagueness. In addition, many members of the city’s black community were upset that complaints about porn, under the law’s provision, would be screened by the city’s Equal Opportunity Board, a body already overloaded with complaints about racial and sex discrimination. A representative of the Urban League asked that council members consider what would happen to antidiscrimination efforts in the city once the Office of Equal Opportunity was swamped with examples of pornography to rule upon. Two members of the gay community suggested to the council that it consider strengthening antiviolence, antiabuse laws or provide additional services for victims, rather than support censorship. Oddly, there were no right-wing fundamentalists present at the public hearing. This, no doubt, contributed to MacKinnon’s belief that they were not directly involved. It was only after the hearing that Coughenour called Reverend Dixon and asked for his help. The law was in trouble. Although it had been passed out of committee, many council members had serious doubts about its constitutionality, its practicality, the cost of litigating it in federal court. Dixon called a meeting of the Coalition for a Clean Community and got to work, phoning council members to assure them that this law was not a “backdoor” attempt to legitimate feminism: a vote for this law would be a vote against smut. Dixon turned out nearly three hundred of his supporters for the final vote on the measure—a vote at which MacKinnon was not present. Dixon was not fully informed by Coughenour. When asked why he did not appear at the public hearing, he replied, “Public hearing? What public hearing?” When supplied with the date, he looked at his calendar. After a long silence he said, “I was in town on that day.” Then the light went on in his eyes, and he explained that his absence was probably a tactical maneuver on Coughenour’s part. “Mrs. Coughenour,” he said, “was probably engineering that.…” Dixon spoke to me from behind his large desk in a comfortable office at his Baptist Temple complex—which includes the church, day care facilities, schools and offices. A smooth, articulate speaker, he revealed the depths of his paranoia only when we were well into our conversation. He believes abortion is murder, ERA would destroy the family and the free enterprise system, homosexuality ought to be a felony. But his fears go deeper. He is convinced that there is a conspiracy of “elitists” to control the world’s population through advocacy of a “six-pronged program” of contraception, abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, suicide, and even war and terrorism. This program, called “globalism,” is, in Reverend Dixon’s view, the agenda of public schools. Political activism, in his mind, is a sacred duty, necessary to avert physical as well as moral destruction.
Reverend Dixon’s political activism played a decisive role in passing the antiporn law in Indianapolis. During the final discussion before the vote, many council members were equivocating. But every time a doubt was voiced, Dixon’s supporters, crowded into council chambers, grumbled; every time praise was uttered, they broke out in applause. In the end, it was the most conservative councillors who felt the pressure and passed the law—overwhelmingly. All the Republicans on the council voted yes. All the Democrats, including those black councillors concerned with strengthening civil rights enforcement in the city, voted no. The total was twenty-four to five.
Now that the passage of the law is a fait accompli and cities around the country await Judge Barker’s decision on its constitutionality, it is worth asking the obvious question: what the hell happened in Indianapolis? Radical feminists allied with the Moral Majority? A censorship law as a means to gain equality between the sexes? It is confusing, and of course the principals involved have different interpretations of what occurred. Reverend Dixon believes that he helped galvanize the war on smut by supporting a new weapon in the public arsenal. Ron Hackler of the Citizens for Decency has more modest hopes. He has tried to raise public awareness of the problem posed by pornography, so that obscenity laws (which he actually prefers to antiporn legislation) can be more vigorously enforced. Obscenity laws, he thinks, could eliminate a wide variety of sexual materials, including: “The explicit depiction of sexual acts … fellatio and cunnilingus close up in living color, the erect penis in sex acts, and things that are of no particular value. They’re offensive to most people, they lead to an unrealistic expectation of people as they view sex. …” He also added, “We saw movies of men taking artificial penises and shoving them up the rear end of other men, tying up a man and one man banging his penis against another man’s penis. Maybe that’s not obscene, I don’t know—it’s kind of stupid.” MacKinnon sees events in Indianapolis quite differently from Dixon and Hackler. She told me the coalition that supported and passed the law represented: Women who understand what pornography does and means for women in this culture, and therefore think that we should be able to do something about it, and men who do not want to live in a society in which the subordination of women is enjoyed, profited from, and is a standard for masculinity. This is undoubtedly the coalition MacKinnon would like to have seen, but as a description of events in Indianapolis, her statement is profoundly out of touch with political reality. She acknowledges that supporters came from “diverse points on the political spectrum,” but she believes that the Indianapolis coalition reconstituted alignment “on a feminist basis”—an assessment that ignores the explicitly antifeminist politics of the law’s right-wing supporters. MacKinnon is also convinced that, if some supporters of the law are really after “obscene” materials rather than “subordinating” ones, they’re “doing something stupid.” The civil rights approach, she says, will not meet their demands. But supporters of the law such as Reverend Dixon and Ron Hackler understand the limitations of the civil rights ordinance. Dixon, in fact, hopes that the law will be combined with obscenity and prostitution busts and the recriminalization of homosexuality. MacKinnon to the contrary, these antipornography campaigners are not doing something stupid. They are working to organize a public morality crusade, and they believe that the attention focused on this law has helped them. Still the question persists—how have feminists managed to ally themselves with right-wing moralists on this issue?
What is it about pornography that attracts such energy from such disparate places? If one looks closely at the Indianapolis “coalition,” one sees first the great advantage to the politicians who managed to hold it together. The names of Mayor William Hudnut and Beulah Coughenour have appeared in the national press for the first time in their political careers. There is nothing like the combination of sex and violence to generate public interest and media attention. But another look reveals the outlines of a symbolic campaign on the part of various antipornography “true believers.” Right-wing moralists see pornography as representative of social disorder. Its depictions of nonmarital, nonreproductive sex invoke the threatening social changes associated, for them, with divorce, birth control, abortion, miscegenation, and homosexuality. Pornography is understood as a threat to the sanctity and authority of the patriarchal family, and it is made to stand for gender confusion and sexual chaos. In this context, right-wing moralists can agree with feminists that “pornography degrades women,” because women’s sexuality outside the family is itself seen as cheapened and degraded. Reverend Dixon and Phyllis Schlafly agree that it is women, as upholders of morality and the home, who should lead the fight against pornography. Neighborhood groups do not necessarily share the cosmology of right wingers when they set out to fight pornography. In part they are responding to the real-world association of porn shops with organized crime in cities throughout America. But neighborhood groups in Indianapolis also see porn shops and pornography as symbolic substitutes for social change in the community. Economic decline and increased crime are blamed on the porn shop—as are the fears of some white residents about racial integration. It is imagined that if the porn shop were closed, all would be well again; the happy secure neighborhoods of the nostalgia-laden past could be restored. The radical feminist antipornography campaign, represented in Indianapolis by MacKinnon (and only MacKinnon), is also engaged in symbolic politics. Pornography is made to stand in for all misogyny, all discrimination, all exploitation of women—in their view, it not only causes but constitutes the subordination of women. The commodification and objectification of women’s bodies is believed to reside more centrally in pornography than in mainstream media; this society’s culture of violence against women is said to radiate from, rather than be reflected in, pornography. The campaign against porn is thus a symbolic substitute for a more diffuse, but more necessary, campaign against the myriad forms of male domination in economic life, in political life, in sexual life. Pornography serves as a condensed metaphor for female degradation. It is also far easier to fight, politically, in the conservative climate of the Reagan years—far easier now to gain support for an antiporn campaign than for affirmative action, abortion, lesbian rights.
What all these antiporn zealots have in common is a conviction of the special power of sexual representation to endanger. For some it endangers the family, for some community, for others the well-being of women. All are agreed that sexually explicit images must be controlled—though each group would differ as to which images are most in need of control—in order to control the perceived social danger, in order to prevent ruin, decay, obliteration. The groups allied against porn in Indianapolis also share a vision of sexuality as a terrain of female victimization and degradation; none of them offers a vision of female sexual subjectivity, of female power and joy in the sexual arena.
Feminists have engaged in such symbolic campaigns before. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, some British and American feminists waged campaigns against prostitution and for “social purity,” and they achieved legislative success with the help of conservative allies. However, the strengthening of laws against prostitution had the effect of worsening the condition of prostitutes, making them yet more vulnerable to victimization at the hands of law enforcement officials, as well as pimps and johns. The raising of the age of consent in the early twentieth century, also accomplished with feminist support in the United States, had the result of empowering institutions of juvenile justice to persecute and incarcerate adolescent girls for the “offense” of sexual activity. In all these cases, conservatives ultimately exercised more power in determining how laws, once enacted, would finally affect women’s lives—more power than feminists then imagined. One of the insights gained by feminist historians, who have examined such social legislation, is that a “feminist issue” or “feminist law” does not exist in the abstract: it is the alignment of political and cultural forces that gives meaning to issues and laws. In Indianapolis, local feminists were invisible except for the handful who opposed the antiporn law. No effort was made to distinguish clearly the feminist from the conservative position. As a result the visibility of reactionary, antifeminist forces was enhanced—exactly the opposite of what MacKinnon intended.
And it is not only in Indianapolis that the reactionary, antifeminist position has been enhanced. The MacKinnon/Dworkin bill has contributed to a moral crusade that is threatening to expand to other places on a wider scale. In Suffolk County, Republican legislator Michael D’Andre has recently introduced a version of the antiporn law that emphasizes the repressive potential of the MacKinnon/Dworkin approach by asserting that pornography causes “sodomy and “destruction of the family unit,” as well as crimes and immorality “inimical to the public good.” In Washington, Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter is broadening his congressional hearings on child pornography to investigate the effects of adult porn on women. President Reagan has also announced his intention to establish a federal commission to study pornography and offer legislative action. Imagine the administration that brought you the Family Protection Act introducing measures to control pornography. Imagine antipornography feminists helping to legitimate such a nightmare. In Canada, the conservative Fraser Committee on Pornography and Prostitution has been holding hearings across the country, while some city governments have already been prosecuting prostitutes, rounding up gay men in bathhouses, and bringing charges against gay publications for obscenity. Canadian antiporn feminists, joined by some American sympathizers, have testified in favor of more restrictions on sexual representation. If the discussion of sexuality surrounding the antiporn law in Indianapolis had resulted in increased awareness of feminist issues, in the increased visibility and social/political power of feminists, in the enhanced ability of feminists on both sides of the issue to define and control the terms of debate, perhaps it could have been useful. But it did not. Instead, Catharine MacKinnon joined with the right wing in invoking the power of the state against sexual representation. In so doing she and her supporters have helped spur a moral crusade that is already beyond the control of feminists—antiporn or otherwise. And that moral crusade can only be dangerous to the interests of feminists everywhere, and to the future of women’s rights to free expression.