The antipornography advocates are quick to exploit the equivocation of their opponents, defining porn in the broadest possible terms. Going beyond the extreme rhetoric of the early antipornography movement--"Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice"--Andrea Dworkin and MacKinnon have declared that pornography is itself rape. This is the central assertion (I hesitate to say argument) of Only Words. "Protecting pornography means protecting sexual abuse as speech," MacKinnon writes, "at the same time that both pornography and its expression have deprived women of speech, especially speech against sexual abuse."
She simply ignores the question of consent, implying that all pornographic sex (and perhaps most heterosexual intercourse) is somehow forced upon always unwilling, always female victims for the benefit of sadistic, always male victimizers. There are, of course, a few empirical problems with this dramatic assertion: a great deal of porn is designed for gay men and involves no women at all, women (straight and lesbian) consume plenty of porn, and some porn is explicitly egalitarian, produced by and for women. But there's a philosophical problem as well: MacKinnon looks upon female sexual desire with uncomprehending condescension, claiming that all expressions of consent in sex are so defiled by sexual inequality that they don't count as consent.
The assumptions underlying such a view--partially obscured by MacKinnon's deft, sweeping rhetoric--are startling. She rails, for example, at any depiction of "a penis ramming into a vagina." Unless one equates all heterosexual intercourse with rape, it's hard to imagine what's inherently awful about that. Her distrust of any expression of sexuality is almost palpable: "Once you are used for sex, you are sexualized," she writes. "You lose your human status." At least the Meese Commission on pornography was more open (and perhaps more honest) about its assumptions and its censorious ideology. According to the commission, any and all explicit depictions of sex are beyond the pale, even representations of sex that is "intervaginal and between two married adults who find mutual pleasure in it and for the sole purpose of procreation."
MacKinnon also obscures free-speech arguments by avoiding the difficult question of definition that has always been at the heart of the legal wrangles over pornography and censorship. She never clearly sets the boundaries between what is and what isn't porn, and she refers to everything as almost equally degrading, though she focuses mainly on the most graphic and most violent subsets of the genre. The legal definition of pornography she has promoted--"graphically sexually explicit materials that subordinate women through pictures or words"--is designed to run the gamut of the industry, "from Playboy, in which women are objectified and presented dehumanized as sexual objects or things for use; through the torture of women and the sexualization of racism and the fetishization of women's body parts; to snuff films, in which actual murder is the ultimate sexual act, the reduction to the thing form of a human being and the silence of women literal and complete." But what about, say, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition? (It objectifies women.) What about the fashion photos in Vogue? (They objectify as well.) What about the lingerie section of the Sears catalog? One suspects that for MacKinnon everything is as nasty as she wants it to be.
But if she won't quite say what pornography is, she is willing to say what it is not: speech. She argues that while porn may contain ideas (the idea, for example, that women are designed to serve men sexually), it doesn't serve as a vehicle for the expression of ideas in any conventional sense. She then explains away this contradiction in a curiously circular fashion: she simply restates her premise in different words, arguing that porn "works . . . not as a thought or through its ideas as such, at least not in the ways thoughts and ideas are recognized as speech."
In short, porn is merely a stimulant for male erections, and erections are little more than stimulants for the abuse of women. It's not that men think with their dicks; it's that the possession of an erect penis makes thought irrelevant. MacKinnon quotes with obvious satisfaction an old Yiddish saying: "A stiff prick turns the mind to shit." The penis, she explains, "is not an organ of thought. . . . Having sex is antithetical to thinking." And since porn is nothing more than a primitive stimulus for primitive, vicious behavior, the First Amendment is irrelevant and the question of censorship merely a distraction. "An erection is neither a thought nor a feeling, but a behavior," she states, though she doesn't bother to elucidate the distinction she's drawing. "Pornography consumers are not consuming an idea any more than eating a loaf of bread is consuming the ideas on its wrapper or the ideas in its recipe."
In this view, the effect of pornography is easy enough to predict. Since all pornographic images--even soft-core Playboy centerfolds--not only reflect but are a kind of two-dimensional rape, the images of porn inevitably and inexorably lead men to commit rape in the real world. "Sooner or later, in one way or another, the consumers want to live out the fantasy in three dimensions," MacKinnon writes. "Sooner or later, in one way or another, they do." It's a remarkable display of rhetorical bravura--the phrases "sooner or later" and "in one way or another" qualify her statement to such a degree that it's nearly impossible to disprove. Yet the effect of the passage is to imply that all consumers of porn are compelled to rape--and that all who oppose her view are in a sense accessories to the crime.
MacKinnon is as sloppy with her evidence as she is with her assumptions. She claims a small stack of "scientific" surveys backs up her startling conclusions, but doesn't discuss the evidence she says is embedded in these reports or the methodologies of the research. We must take her word for it that science has concluded decisively that pornography "change[s] attitudes and impel[s] behavior in ways that are unique in their extent and devastating in their consequences." Curiously, she then goes on to argue that "there is no evidence that pornography does no harm; not even courts equivocate over its carnage anymore."
The courts may not "equivocate," but researchers certainly do: studies of the effects of pornography are far less decisive than MacKinnon claims. At worst the studies simply "prove" what the researchers thought all along; at best they're inconclusive. MacKinnon and her supporters can cite studies "proving" that porn inspires rape and abuse; their opponents can find studies that "prove" the opposite.
Arcand cites some studies that show that, far from being slaves to porn-induced madness, "violent rapists and pedophiles are not very fond of pornography" and find it embarrassing or upsetting rather than arousing. According to Leonore Tiefer, a psychologist who works with the National Coalition Against Censorship, women face more dangers from censorship than they do from pornography. "Pornography is about fantasy," she argued at a recent anticensorship conference. "Suppressing pornography will harm women struggling to develop their own sexualities, because history teaches us that any crackdown on sexuality always falls the hardest on the experimental and on women." However, this assertion is as unprovable as MacKinnon's.
As Gore Vidal has suggested, the only thing pornography is known to cause directly is "the solitary act of masturbation." And even this, he suggests, is not guaranteed: since people have different tastes, the same images may excite one person and bore another. To Vidal, this is all that can reasonably be said about the subject. "The worst that can be said of pornography is that it leads not to 'antisocial' sexual acts but to the reading of more pornography," he writes. "As for corruption, the only immediate victim is English prose."
