The Saturday Essay: Against Pornography

The following is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.

The #MeToo movement exposed a number of liberal Hollywood executives and actors as sex criminals. This should come as no surprise. The obscene and degrading media that is pornography—the stuff of “empowerment,” according to many leftists—is partly to blame for the #MeToo problem. 

If you are against the Harvey Weinsteins of the world, you should be against the content that enables them. I’m talking about pornography, 88% of which contains violence against women, according to a recent study.

Porn sexualizes the assault of women and threatens women’s free speech. All of us — from the left to the right, from pro-sex feminists to the most ardent defenders of free speech — should be united in the fight to regulate this type of media.

Pornography is bad for us. Exposure to pornography is linked to greater callousness towards women, lesser compassion towards rape victims, and the belief that rape is a trivial offense. Watching pornography has also been linked to marital unhappiness, extramarital affairs, and divorce.

Someone who gets off to “spanking, gagging, and slapping” women is a Harvey Weinstein in-the-making. There is wide range of violence in pornography, some acts worse than others. But none of this conduct is tolerated outside of a sexual context. When a man spanks, gags, and slaps a woman in the streets, we are rightfully outraged. But when it happens in the sheets, we turn a blind eye — or worse: we say it’s “hot.” 

I have a different word for works that depict acts of physical aggression towards women: misogynistic.

If you care about the women in your life, the one in five women who is the victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime, join me in calling to ban the content that sexualizes gender-based violence towards women. 

Recently, four Republican congressmen penned a letter to Attorney General William Barr, urging him to “declare the prosecution of obscene pornography a criminal justice priority” and enforce existing obscenity laws.

Enforcing the laws on the books is a start. But I have a few reservations.

First, the current legal standard, articulated in the 1973 Supreme Court case Miller v. California, is relativistic. It defines obscene by asking “whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest.” But what passes as morally permissible according to “contemporary community standards” is often ridiculous—and sometimes patently immoral.

Second, the law as it pertains to obscenity is overbroad. The current standard targets works that 1) appeal to the prurient interest of the average person, 2) depict sexual conduct in a “patently offensive way,” and 3) lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

A better standard is to adopt what radical feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon proposed in their Anti-Pornography Ordinance in 1983. They defined pornography more objectively and narrowly: as the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women, which must contain one of a number of elements, including: women presented as enjoying rape, as whores by nature, or “in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.”

The Ordinance, which received strong support from conservatives, defines pornography in a way that makes explicit exactly what is objectionable: sexualized violence towards women. It does not rely on hand-wavy terms like “prurient interest” or precarious standards set by the “contemporary community.” As MacKinnon writes, “obscenity is abstract; pornography is concrete.”

Third, obscenity laws make speech a criminal offense. This should give pause to any conservative worried about the government interfering with speech.

The Ordinance avoids the problems with obscenity laws in two ways. First, it is a civil, not criminal law. No one will be going to prison for making pornography. Second, pornography itself is not enough to mount a legal claim. The Ordinance requires a concrete injury resulting from the pornography be proven. The causes of action include: coercing someone into making pornography, forcing pornography on a person, and human trafficking. Because it requires proof of an injury, the Ordinance is not an attack on speech per se.

Free speech absolutists may still feel uncomfortable passing such a law. They are right that pornography is a free speech issue—but not in the way they might think.

The existence of pornography is an assault on women’s free speech. Philosopher Rae Langton argues that pornography can silence women. Here’s how: suppose Joe watches a lot of pornography in which a woman says “no” but really means “yes.” He’s seen hundreds of these videos. One day, he is in bed with a potential sexual partner. He tries to initiate sex. She says “no.” She is trying to refuse sex. But Joe has seen this scenario a hundred times before. As far as he knows, she means “yes.” 

“Sometimes “no,” spoken by a woman, does not count as an act of refusal,” Langton explains, “something about her, something about the role she occupies, prevents her from voicing refusal. Refusal—in that context—has become unspeakable for her.”

How often does this happen? One study estimates that ten percent of women have been upset by someone attempting to get them “to do what they’d seen in pornographic pictures, movies, or books.” And the majority of rape victims who stay silent—they’ve been silenced by a society that sexualizes rape.

Calls to “Believe Women” cannot be said with a straight face by anyone who watches pornography that depicts women saying “no” but meaning “yes.” If her refusal doesn’t count in porn, why should we think it counts in a court of law? Porn hurts the credibility of all women.

The most ardent defender of free speech should join conservatives and radical feminists in the fight to regulate pornography. 

Defenders of pornography often remind us that the conduct is consensual, for example, that the woman agreed to being whipped by her lesbian lover. To the porn apologists, I ask: how do you know the actors were not coerced into performing? How do you know they were not being trafficked? How do you know they weren’t 15? In the absence of that knowledge, how can you defend the work in good conscience?

Many pro-sex feminists defend the production and consumption of a more humane type of sexual media, sometimes called “erotica.” Erotica — sexually stimulating content that is not pornographic — comprises queer sexual media, sexual media that emphasizes mutuality and reciprocity, and sexual media made by women, for women.

Defenders of erotica argue that it can break stereotypes, serve as “a source of solitary enlightenment,” and be “good therapy” because it “provides a sexual outlet for those who — for whatever reason — have no sexual partner.” They warn us about letting concerns about pornography morph into a “moral witch hunt” that attacks the sexually marginalized. Erotica can be a tool of sexual expression for the sexually repressed or oppressed. 

We should take these concerns seriously. 98% of men and 73% of women have watched online sexual media in the past six months—some of which might have been this more “egalitarian” porn. 

But we shouldn’t let the egalitarian become the enemy of the good. The fact that there is equitable sexual media out there shouldn’t stop us from preventing the harms done by violent pornography. 

To the extent that erotica doesn’t depict the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women that the Anti-Porn Ordinance defines as pornography, it would not be regulated by the Ordinance.

Pro-sex feminists who defend erotica should join the rest of us who stand against pornography. You can be pro-sex and anti-porn in the same way you can be pro-sex and anti-rape. The positions are not only compatible: they are complementary. 

As First Things senior editor Matthew Schmitz wrote in a recent opinion piece, “pornography’s enjoyments may be private, but its harms are inescapably public.”

If you were horrified by the abuses of power brought to light by the #MeToo reporting, it’s time to rethink how we, too, could be contributing to this problem.

If you care about speech, it’s time to think about how pornography can silence others.

 If you are scared of becoming the 1 out of 5 women who is the victim of sexual assault, it’s time to stand up to the so-called feminists who defend pornography as an empowering freedom of expression and sexuality.

The freedom to be whipped, beaten, and raped is no freedom at all: it’s misogyny.

Sarah Hirschfield’s piece is part of the Tory’s Saturday Essay series, selected for the spotlight by Editor-in-Chief Akhil Rajasekar. Follow the Tory on Facebook and Twitter to start your weekend with the best of our content.

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