Piecework

Once more, the Victorian sense of sexual horror permeates the discussion. If men are the source of all savagery to women, then sexual intercourse with men is itself a savage act. Women who claim to enjoy heterosexual lovemaking are, says Dworkin, “collaborators, more base in their collaboration than other collaborators have ever been, experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority, calling intercourse freedom.”

Forget whips, chains and handcuffs. All heterosexual intercourse is disgusting, an act of physical and psychic invasion. As Dworkin writes: “The woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally: occupied even if there has been no resistance, no force; even if the occupied person said yes please, yes hurry, yes more.”

Obviously, this is a total denial of any biologically driven sexual need. To follow the logic to its inevitable conclusion, the only pure feminists, the only noncollaborators with the enemy, would be celibates or lesbians. Alas, billions of human beings, male and female, from Tibet to Miami, don’t see the world — or the nature of sexuality — that way. They keep on doing what men and women have been doing since before history or the invention of religion. To the New Victorians this must be infuriating. And so they will attempt an act of hubris that even the old Victorians, in their imperial arrogance, did not try. They will correct human nature.

As Americans, MacKinnon, Dworkin and their allies have one major roadblock to their crusade: the Constitution. In their attack on “First Amendment absolutism,” the New Victorians want to discard a basic tenet of our lives: It doesn’t matter what we say, it is what we do that matters. That is a mere sentimentality, beloved of the hated liberals and the American Civil Liberties Union. Feminism first, says MacKinnon, the legal theorist, the law second. Or put another way: “The bottom line of the First Amendment is that porn stays. Our bottom line is that porn goes. We’re going to win in the long term.”

For the past few decades there has been a growth in the making and distribution of pornography. The reasons are complicated: the liberalizing of obscenity laws, the development of cheap offset printing and desktop publishing, the triumph of the VCR, the fear of women among some males that was caused by the ferocious oratory of the early days of the feminist movement itself and, lately, the fear of AIDS.

But there is no proof that pornography — even as defined by MacKinnon and Dworkin — causes all human beings to act upon the bodies of women. As MacKinnon herself points out, pornography is essentially an aid to masturbation. And as Gore Vidal once wrote, masturbation is “normal” sex, in the sense that it is surely the most frequent practice among all the world’s billions. Certainly the old Victorian belief that masturbation itself is a loathsome evil, a mortal sin, underlies much of the public rhetoric about pornography. But there is one effect that it may have that the New Victorians can’t admit. Rather than inspire men to loathsome acts, pornography may actually prevent them. For every rapist who is discovered to have pornography at home, there may be a thousand men who are content to look at the pictures, read the text, whack off and go to sleep. Nobody can prove this, but MacKinnon can’t prove that pornography creates monsters, either.

At the various public hearings she and Dworkin have staged, MacKinnon has brought fcfrth a number of women to relate tales of horror. Some were forced into the making of pornography, others were forced by lovers or husbands into imitating the sex acts described by pornography. Those stories were painful and heartbreaking, and their narrators were clearly damaged by their experiences. But it is unlikely that any future hearings will present balancing testimony from a man who says that he lives a perfectly respectable life, except when he gets off a few times a week in private with a copy of Water Sports Fetish. As far as I know, even Geraldo hasn’t done a show on the joys of masturbation and its amazing social values.

The Meese Commission on Pornography, called into existence by the antiporn forces of the Reagan administration, asserted in 1986 its belief that pornography causes sex crimes. But the fine print in its 1960-page report showed that it couldn’t prove it. Six of the 11 commissioners were committed to the antiporn position before studying the evidence and they still could not make a convincing case. They heard from many experts, including MacKinnon. But even an examination of those incidents where pornography was found in the homes of rapists couldn’t prove the longed-for assumption.