Porn as a violation of civil rights.

[Senior citizen]

Just for the sake of discussion, let's imagine that some schoolboys watch a porn video and, needing money, decide that they can make one and sell it. So they find a girl in school they think is weak and vulnerable, perhaps somewhat retarded, force her to act out what they saw in the video, and they film it with the intention of selling the film for profit. But they get caught. They are subject to criminal charges for assault, but as minors probably won't be too severely punished. Their defense is that it was consensual and the girl is too deeply traumatized to testify, so after viewing the video, the judge/jury isn't certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that the girl didn't consent, and are lenient with the boys. If it happened in school, the girl might also have a civil cause of action against the school and its officials. BUT, just suppose that a copy of the video the boys made somehow gets out, and becomes a top seller, making lots of money for whoever distributes it. Is the girl harmed by the distribution of the film? Does she have a cause of action against the distributor?

[Ian David]

1. Leave Paris Hilton alone already. Hasn't she suffered enough?

[Warpy]

2. HAHA!!

However, the ability of the girl in question to consent to this thing is the real crux of the problem. A mentally handicapped and/or underage girl is not deemed capable of consent.

Anyone who makes money off the tape would be liable for civil damages.

[FreedomAngel82]

8. I remember

there was a "Lifetime" movie like this. A mentally challenged girl got raped and they video taped it and made her think they really liked her and everything. She didn't know to say "no" and she didn't want to report it because she thought the boys wouldn't like her again. It was pretty good. In the end the boys ended up being punished but I can't remember what. :shrug: Has anybody seen this? I don't know the name of the movie, sorry.

[Mojambo]

3. Good one.

You know, back in the day they did a Law and Order episode with a very similar premise. There was no video tape though.

[name not needed]

13. Cabin Boy!

hahahahaha!

[Warren DeMontague]

14. You mean the movie with Chris Elliot?

It had it's moments, I guess.

[Deja Q]

45. ROFL!

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[Jack Rabbit]

4. Since we're talking about minors, that the sex is consenual is irrelevant

You did say "schoolboys", right?

They're busted. Depending on what other mischief they get into, they probably won't do any time in a juvenile lock up.

If the film were distributed, the distributor is in serious trouble for dealing kiddie porn.

I don't see a civil rights issue here. Gee, I'm disappointed about that. I thought in the light of Andrea Dworkin's passing last week we might have a discussion about it. I have some problems with seeing pornography as a civil rights violation, although I don't necessarily approve of it.

[alcibiades_mystery]

5. A very convoluted example for such a general subject line

Is the distributor of child pornography in trouble? Yes. End of story.

Try again next time with a better story.

[nonconformist]

6. If someone distributed child pornography

Which is what it is in your analogy, a civil case would be the least of their concerns.

[pop goes the weasel]

7. what you are describing involves minors

Trafficking in porn that involves minors is a criminal act, so the girl would not need to act against the distributor. Any law enforcement agency would have the discretion to do that itself.

[Warren DeMontague]

9. Wait a minute. You mean someone is using an argument involving

people underage or unable to consent as an excuse to rail against erotic material produced by, with, and for CONSENTING ADULTS?

Say it isn't so.

Next, they'll probably be using arguments about "protecting the children" as excuses to lock up non-violent, adult drug users for ridiculous mandatory minimum sentences...


ooops, too late.

Porn involving minors is very illegal.. and a high law enforcement priority. A tape such as you describe, unless you are grossly misrepresenting it, would be subject to severe criminal sanctions for possesion, not to mention production.

[Jack Rabbit]

10. Let's start over: Excerpt from Andrea Dworkin's book on Pornography

From the website of the late Andrea Dworkin

Pornography: Men Possessing Women
Introduction to the Second Edition
By Andrea Dwokin (1989)

Now imagine Cherry Tart or Bunny or Pet or Beaver saying, and meaning, that a man who expected to succeed in whipping must also succeed in killing her. She says it; she means it. It is not a pornographic scenario in which she is the dummy forced by the pimp-ventriloquist to say the ubiquitous No-That-Means-Yes. It is not the usual sexual provocation created by pornographers using a woman's body, the subtext of which is: I refuse to be whipped so whip me harder, whip me more; I refuse to be whipped, what I really want is for you to kill me; whip me, then kill me; kill me, then whip me; whatever you want, however you want it--was it good for you? Instead, the piece on the page or in the film steps down and steps out: I'm real, she says. Like Frederick Douglass, she will be hesitant and embarrassed. She will feel ignorant. She will tell a first-person story about her own experience in prostitution, in pornography, as a victim of incest, as a victim of rape, as someone who has been beaten or tortured, as someone who has been bought and sold. She may not remind her audience that sexual servitude is a poor school for the human intellect and heart--sexually violated, often since childhood, she may not know the value of her human intellect or her human heart--and the audience cannot be counted on to know that she deserved better than she got. Will there be someone there to implore the audience to help her escape the pornography--law or no law, constitution or no constitution; will the audience understand that as long as the pornography of her exists she is a captive of it, a fugitive from it? Will the audience be willing to fight for her freedom by fighting against the pornography of her, because, as Linda Marchiano said of Deep Throat, "every time someone watches that film, they are watching me being raped"? Will the audience understand that she is standing in for those who didn't get away; will the audience understand that those who didn't get away were someone--each one was someone? Will the audience understand what stepping down from the page or out of the film cost her--what it took for her to survive, for her to escape, for her to dare to speak now about what happened to her then?

"I'm an incest survivor, ex-pornography model, and ex-prostitute," the woman says. "My incest story begins before preschool and ends many years later--this was with my father. I was also molested by an uncle and a minister . . . my father forced me to perform sexual acts with men at a stag party when I was a teenager. . . . My father was my pimp in pornography. There were three occasions from ages nine to sixteen when he forced me to be a pornography model . . . in Nebraska, so, yes, it does happen here" . . . .

Most of what we know about the experience of punishment, the experience of torture, the experience of socially sanctioned sadism, comes from the first- person testimony of individuals--"anecdotal" material. We have the first- person stories of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, of Primo Levy and Elie Wiesel, of Nadezhda Mandelstam and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Others in the same or different circumstances of torture and terror have spoken out to bear witness. Often, they were not believed. They were shamed, not honored. We smelled the humiliation, the degradation, on them; we turned away. At the same time, their stories were too horrible, too impossible, too unpleasant; their stories indicted those who stood by and did nothing--most of us, most of the time. Respectfully, I suggest that the women who have experienced the sadism of pornography on their bodies --- the women in the pornography and the women on whom the pornography is used--are also survivors; they bear witness, now, for themselves, on behalf of others. "Survivors," wrote Terrence Des Pres, "are not individuals in the bourgeois sense. They are living remnants of the general struggle, and certainly they know it." 13 Of these women hurt by pornography, we must say that they know it now. Before, each was alone, unspeakably alone, isolated in terror and humiliated even by the will to live -- it was the will to live, after all, that carried each woman from rape to rape, from beating to beating. Each had never heard another's voice saying the words of what had happened, telling the same story; because it is the same story, over and over--and none of those who escaped, survived, endured are individuals in the bourgeois sense. These women will not abandon the meaning of their own experience. That meaning is: pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women's bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity--the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he's got her . . . .

In the fall of 1983, something changed. The speech of women hurt by pornography became public and real. It, they, began to exist in the sphere of public reality. Constitutional lawyer Catharine A. MacKinnon and I were hired by the City of Minneapolis to draft an amendment to the city's civil rights law: an amendment that would recognize pornography as a violation of the civil rights of women, as a form of sex discrimination, an abuse of human rights. We were also asked to organize hearings that would provide a legislative record showing the need for such a law. Essentially, the legislators needed to know that these violations were systematic and pervasive in the population they represented, not rare, peculiar anomalies.

The law itself is civil, not criminal. It allows people who have been hurt by pornography to sue for sex discrimination. Under this law, it is sex discrimination to coerce, intimidate, or fraudulently induce anyone into pornography; it is sex discrimination to force pornography on a person in any place of employment, education, home, or any public place; it is sex discrimination to assault, physically attack, or injure any person in a way that is directly caused by a specific piece of pornography--the pornographers share responsibility for the assault; in the Bellingham version, it is also sex discrimination to defame any person through the unauthorized use in pornography of their name, image, and/or recognizable personal likeness; and it is sex discrimination to produce, sell, exhibit, or distribute pornography--to traffic in the exploitation of women, to traffic in material that provably causes aggression against and lower civil status for women in society . . . .

The law's definition of pornography is concrete, not abstract. Pornography is defined as the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women in pictures and/or words that also includes women presented dehumanized as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or women presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or women presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or women presented as whores by nature; or women presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or women presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual. If men, children, or transsexuals are used in any of the same ways, the material also meets the definition of pornography.

For women hurt by pornography, this law simply describes reality; it is a map of a real world. Because the law allows them to sue those who have imposed this reality on them--especially the makers, sellers, exhibitors, and distributors of pornography--they have a way of redrawing the map. The courts now protect the pornography; they recognize the harm to women in judicial decisions--or they use words that say they recognize the harm--and then tell women that the Constitution protects the harm; profit is real to them and they make sure the pimps stay rich, even as women and their children are this country's poor. The civil rights law is designed to confront both the courts and the pornographers with a demand for substantive, not theoretical, equality. This law says: we have the right to stop them from doing this to us because we are human beings. "If my existence is proved real, I am coming to take what is mine," Therese Stanton wrote for every woman who wants to use this law. How terrifying that thought must be to those who have been using women with impunity.

Read more. It's several pages long.

Again, I have some trouble with Ms. Dworkin's argument. Perhaps someone would like to take this up.

[Warren DeMontague]

12. A lot of words which come down to, essentially, one- censorship.

And let's not conflate minors on non-consent with consenting adults, when clearly they are not the same situation, legally or otherwise.

If consenting adults want to take their clothes off or fuck in front of a camera, and other consenting adults want to watch it, I don't see why the Dworkin crowd has any more right to make that call for other people than the Texas legislature has the right to tell gays they can't have sex with each other, or big hair fundamentalists have the right to tell women what kinds of birth control they can or cannot use.

Of course, the gang you've quoted above are the same people who brought us time-tested gems like, "all heterosexual sex is rape", so of course, all porn is violent oppression of women. (Except maybe gay male porn, which is.. what..)

[Jack Rabbit]

16. That's only part of my problem with it

In many ways, I am quite sympathetic to Ms. Dworkin's points. If any woman is forced to pose for pornographic photos, she ought to able to sue and perhaps the pornographer should be liable for criminal charges under rape statutes. Nevertheless, I find some of her ideas dangerous. Not all women seen in pornography are forced to participate; also, there is a little problem with just when a woman is depicted as a "dehumanized sexual object." There has got to be a clear standard so that an artist using a nude model will know when he is breaking the law.

That is not the only problem I have with Ms. Dworkin's thesis. I define democracy as a state where:

• Citizenship is universal. Each person born within the boundaries of the state is a citizen, as is one born abroad to at least one citizen parent or who swears allegiance to the state in a rite of naturalization.
• Citizenship is equal. Each citizen has an equal opportunity to participate in and influence public affairs. Every adult citizen shall be enfranchised with the right to vote. Decisions are made by a majority voted based on the principle of one man/one vote.
• Citizenship is inalienable. A guaranteed set of civil liberties is in place to assure full and open public discourse of civic affairs. No citizen may be stripped of his citizenship or otherwise punished by the state for expressing any point of view, no matter how unpopular or even absurd.

It is that last point that becomes important here.

In a public forum, one should at least in theory be able say the rape laws should be changed, even abolished; that any woman who says "no" should be shown what she is missing and she will appreciate it.

That's a pretty absurd argument and my reaction to it would be: Buddy, why are you wasting our time with his nonsense?

Nevertheless, the third point of this definition of democracy presented protects pornography and hate speech. In a sense, we are saying that democracy is not democracy unless it has the ability to subvert itself in that way. The attack on democratic principles made by pornography and hate speech should be met with censure, not censor.

I would hope that somebody would come to the defense of Ms. Dworkin's thesis and try to convince me that I'm wrong and that seeing things her way is more beneficial.

[mopinko]

18. the point is to take the profit out of crime

i do not see how this law could possibly be used to prosecute truly willing participants. annie sprinkle is in no danger.
i think that it is a perfect solution to a difficult problem.
it does not censor. it does not provide for jail, injunction against publication, etc. it provides for economic remedy for an economically motivated crime. the remedy is available only after proof of force or coercion. how can you defend profit from rape under the banner of free speech?
people here advocate for the production of eggs without cruelty. can't we apply a similar standard to pornography?

[Jack Rabbit]

19. What you are describing is something I could support

And thank you for your input.

While I could support what you describe, what Ms. Dworkin describes is something about which I have some reservations.

In the next-to-last paragraph I pasted in post 10 and the one before it, I don't see a provision that the woman needs to be forced into participating in the project. Again, one would think that if she was forced than rape laws would cover this.

I take note that the instances of pornography described by Ms. Dworkin here all involve coercion. Any woman who participates in a pornographic project under those conditions ought to be able to recover damages; whatever the court awards her would hardly seem sufficient.

However, if a woman consents to appear in a pornographic film as an actress in which her character is raped in an explicit scene and that she enjoys being raped and that she is be nature a whore and some of the offenses Ms. Dworkin lists, then would she have the right to sue the filmmaker or the distributor? I read nothing in Ms. Dworkin's remarks that would indicate should have no such right, although she consented beforehand and presumably read the script and knew what this was all about.

I am not not saying that I approve of the message in this hypothetical film; I doubt that I would want to see it. However, is it free speech or is it something that falls afoul of this ordinance that Ms. Dworkin and Ms. MacKinnon devised?

I will confess to only having read the introduction to the book that is posted on Ms. Dworkin's website, so perhaps there is something elsewhere that clarifies these concerns.

[mopinko]

23. what is consent?

this is a long running discussion in feminist circles. one of those- where to you draw the line situations.
is a woman who was raped by her father, molested by her preacher, subsequently emotionally crippled, unable to cope and succeed in life, reduced to a choice between starvation and prostitution, really capable of consent? is it not wrong in every sense of the word for someone to make money on this woman's humiliation?
honestly, i struggle with all this myself. i have been married for a long time to a typical guy. i have really tried to figure out how i feel and what i think about all this. i am really not a prude. but i see the pictures of the "hot asian teens" which everyone around here likes to deny are really children, and i just want to puke. i look at them, and i think- i bet she is dead now. committed suicide, died of aids, murdered by her pimp. like rape, this is not about sex, but about domination.

but by the same token, i honestly believe that if you can't sell your body, you don't really own it. maybe this is a good route to making this all fair, like sex worker's unions. it's about finding a different way than prohibition, which, of course never works. it's about making sure consent is really consent, and there is recourse when consent is absent.

[Jack Rabbit]

29. An abstract scenario assumes the lady is capable of consent

That one did.

I'm not going into to details for obvious reasons, but I know a lady who was badly abused as a child. She was not reduced to a choice between starvation and prostitution and has led a productive adult life. Nevertheless, she has serious problems and needs a lot of help.

Something we need to do as a society is realize that the demons people like her face do not go away after they grow up. Long term care for the psychologically traumatized, whether survivors of child abuse or veterans with PTSD, is not something at which Americans are very good.

[Warren DeMontague]

41. Reasonable questions, all.

We need protections for all workers- including sex workers. And I know that the feds are extremely hard on anyone caught even
"unknowingly" distributing material involving people who turn out to be minors-- witness the harsh penalties dealt out to a few video store owners that continued to stock Traci Lords movies after it became apparent she was working underage.

I certainly agree that there should be recourse, civil AND criminal, when people are forced to do things that they don't consent to. And I don't care if we're dealing with Asia or the US; underage is underage is underage... is illegal.

But if you draw the boundaries of "consent" so narrowly (like saying, "Any porn star couldn't know what she was doing -or 'consent' to it- because porn stars are obviously emotionally messed up") then you end up adopting a patronizing attitude towards women controlling their own bodies, telling them you know better than they do what is good for them-- As you alluded to.

[jdj]

24. I think you are missing the point.

I almost think that Dworkin did as well, because we are so enmeshed in a culture that is anti-feminine. I don't think she erred in the least in describing what heterosexual sex is, I just think that she didn't portray well enough a vision of a culture where being that thing, that "dehumanized sexual object", that cunt, is allowed and even celebrated.

Because that is what sex is in some ways.

If you've ever seen the old carvings of Sheila Na Gig that were used as ornmamentation in pre-christian churches in Ireland, then you know our culture is far removed from having any concept of what a culture with such a paradigm or mindset could have been or felt like. Everything in our entire culture now is about the macho posing, about dominance, and invasion, and there is very little point of view of the object expressed, very little praise of openness and opening of self and allowing entry, etc. This is essentially what liberals do...we are "open-minded" and that apparently is why we are 'candy-asses' or whatever. That is the stink of this whole culture; masculine-good, feminine-bad. And I think Andrea Dworkin was ballsy as hell to put forth a real monolog on what she felt the experience of female sexuality to be (she WAS heterosexual and married, after all); I have read that passage from her work and I think it is brilliant and brave. But I don't think she worked far enough into the future with her perspective, I don't think she foresaw the sexual cultural shift that minority women have brought to mainstream american culture...it feels like a whole new ballgame to me, and for her generation of women, that kind of sexual expression was always coupled with shame. This generation of young women that is now graduating high school and college don't seem to have it, and it is directly because of her bravery. I love the hell out of her, and Kate Millet, and all the prolific writers of that time. These women were crucial in helping women find our way to real feminine sexuality by first defining what it is not, by giving voice to the women in the sex industry who up until this very era were considered non-persons. I remember a show about the death of a prostitute, it said they labeled the file "NHI" for 'no humans involved'. Trust me, without these women writing there would be no Coyote, there would be no Traci Lords albums, no Jenna Jameson websites, no Pam Anderson franchise.

Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon were some of the first people in our culture to give sex workers a legitimate public voice, and once that was done, there was no turning back. Their work did not have the effect that they intended it to, but it in effect HUMANIZED sex workers. I don't know where we are going from here, but I know we as a culture will be healthier and we have Dworkin and Mackinnon among others to thank for that.

[readmoreoften]

26. I don't think Dworkin gave voice to sex workers in any way.

She tried to speak FOR us. She put her words in our mouths. And as far as cops go, some still joke about dead sex workers as NHI. A murdered associate of mine was considered to be such. The idea that MacKinnon and Dworkin have humanized us is an argument I've never heard. As far as I've read and seen, they fight us and consider us pathetic quislings.

The reason why so many young girls are sex positive is because of sex positive feminism, not Dworkin. Annie Sprinkle, Nina Hartley, Susie Bright, Joan Nestle... much more liberating.

[jdj]

30. Well, I know how I found out about these women you mentioned.

Through Dworkin and Mackinnon. Through Kate Millet. They were the entry authors.

I remember being so ANGRY after reading Dworkin for the first time, the way she described porn, (posed pics, nothing explicit). She showed me how so many things had been eroticized, how practically every object in the picture had an erotic subtext to it the way she described it, and it made me furious to realize that the whole world was just chock full of sex. It was everywhere, imbued in everything. Only who didn't get it? Me. I didn't get the sex because I was female and religious. I just thought everyone else was similarly deprived. Sonia Johnson is the best read on how those of us growing up in fundie religions are taught to (not) experience sexuality. I realized through her that I had been gypped and lied to and stolen from, and I was FURIOUS. That is how sheltered I was. I stand by my argument, with one diclaimer that I used "humanize" in the past tense for the time it was done in, not in reference to sex workers today.

I truly believe that the passage and repeal of and all the arguments surrounding the Dworkin/ Mackinnon civil rights law broke open that whole damn of silence around female sexuality. It may have been a backlash of sexworkers in anger of being "spoken for", but that was the spark that ignited things. If it's what we had to go through to get where we are then I say great. I still don't think we are there yet. Dworkin's major flaw was not being able to imagine past her own culture, but that is no crime and certainly not a reason for her to be as hated as she is, she's like Eve's first daughter, which is ridiculous.

I don't know how I feel about porn, because it doesn't turn me on. I watch Howard Stern and I am too busy watching him to concentrate on the naked girls tongue kissing, he's hotter to me clothed than they are naked. I can't get enough of women like Jenna Jameson doing interviews and shows, etc, but I have never seen any of her work, and don't want to, but on tv I am absolutely transfixed by her. The saddest thing of all to me about it is that women are debating against each other. That Jenna has to go to Harvard and debate against other women about what she does for a living. When does it come to the point where a woman speaks and says "this is what I do and I enjoy it" and other women simply say "okay, that's cool", and respect it. It's just sad to me, that we should be able to find a way to unite around this and we haven't, we shouldn't be portrayed as opposing sides.
(btw Dworkin died last week)

[readmoreoften]

36. It's an interesting take on Dworkin.

I can see how she may have been the first person to mention sex workers, albeit it in an extremely narrow way, and how the 'looking' at the issue may have helped future sex positive activists, but I'm not sure. MacKinnon and Dworkwin are/were in an battle against porn and always seemed to be fighting the women who make it above all. The only policies they ever swayed were Canadian and the only porn store they ever shut down was a lesbian book store. She seems like an interesting person, though. Her testimony before Canadian officials that looking at Playboy was like looking at the atrocities at Auschwitz really made me feel bad for her.

Funny, when I think of porn, I don't think of 'straight porn stars' like Jenna Jameson. I really think about all the gay porn stars and lesbians trying to figure out how to represent our sexualities on the screen.

I agree, though. Porn does NOTHING for me. I thought it was hot when I was a kid, though because it was so taboo. I haven't gotten turned on by a porn in decades and I'm only 34.

[Merope215]

35. "This generation of young women that is now graduating high school..."

All right, I have a confession to make. I am a straight woman in college, I've read what I thought was a fair amount of feminist and gender criticism (only dabbling, but a few second-wave authors and some fiction), and I had never heard of Andrea Dworkin until she died. I found out about her on DU. I'm kind of ashamed to admit it.

So I still haven't read her, but I've looked at a few articles that people have posted about her and her writings, and the ideas I've come across, while admirable in some aspects of her theory, seem totally, completely, utterly off the wall to me. I'm not saying this to bash her. Actually, I think it's a testament to some kind of pervasive power of feminism, and I don't know whether it's in part attributable to her or not, though I think it is, because whatever else she may have been, she was necessarily very brave. I don't think of sex as a violation, and neither does anyone else I know, and we enjoy it and we're comfortable with it; it's simply a part of life. It should be treated, in my opinion, with great respect, precisely because it's so intimate, but I and the other women of my generation you mention don't really have those kinds of awful psychological issues with it; when it's treated with the respect and care it demands, sex is just a part of a healthy person. Dworkin's writing doesn't make me angry at men. It makes me feel bad for the very, very many women who were angered when they discovered what she writes about, women who discovered that they did feel violated and did feel demeaned and did feel broken by sex. (I mean consensual sex here, obviously.)

It must be terrible. But the fact that I don't know what that's like, and don't know anyone else who does, is, it seems to me, a real monument to the kind of world she might have wanted to see.

[Warren DeMontague]

44. I can get behind all of that. And I certainly believe in respecting

female and male sexuality; and that also includes people who are sex workers.

And you will get no argument about the testosterone-heavy jarheadness of modern American culture. Fucking tell me about it. If I had time I would tell you about my joyous experience this past weekend with the idiot redneck twentysomething next door, but theis isn't the thread.. Suffice it to say, I DO know what you mean.

It's just censorship that I have a problem with, plain and simple.

[readmoreoften]

20. Actually, Dworkin states that gay male porn isn't okay either

because the penetrated man is only a stand in for a woman. (paraphrase)

As a former sex worker, let me tell you that I don't care for Dworkin one iota. And I'm not a blanket apologist for the industry. But not all porn is bad and not all sex workers are brain-washed victims. Dworkin takes away my agency and makes me a victim. I don't appreciate that and neither do many of the girls I've known in the industry.

Femme lesbians have a long history in the sex industry. As sexually marked women with no interest in men, it was often the way many lesbians could have autonomy and support their partners during the hostile middle 20th century. Myself and many of my friends in the sex industry were lesbians with a different perspective on things.

My problem with Dworkin is that she dehumanizes the woman into an image. If a woman is being fucked, well that looks like a metaphor for violence because the act is repetitive and penetrating. But what about the REAL PERSON behind that image. Is she happy? Is she being paid well? After work do she and the photographer laugh and have a drink or is she beaten and shamed? That is all that really matters as far as I'm concerned: what are the working conditions of real sex workers?

If you're not concerned with real women, then I don't have much interest in your feminist point of view.

[jdj]

21. you're having trouble with copyright law as well.

What is interesting about the fight over this law in my opinion, is the utter callousness with which the other side handled the arguments over this law. It was revealing in a way that they probably didn't intend.

I think we are on a new threshold. Women have been suffocated and repressed under the sex-hating shroud of Christianity, Judaism and Islam for so many thousands of years that we literally have no idea what public expression of female sexuality can or should or would look like...we dont' know if we are in the center or beyond the pale. The fundie fathers of these cults murdered the goddess-centered cultures and destroyed all evidence of their existence, so we don't know what they women that preceded these cultures wore or didn't wear (except for in remnants) what sex they did or didn't particpate in, what their societies thought or didn't think about them. We have no idea what life as a sexual female was like on this planet before the scourge of the self- and woman-hating paternalistic religions spread over the earth like a plague, and this was especially the case in the seventies and eighties. We were in the midst of a feminism that was white and middle class, and no one in our American culture is more sexually repressed than the white middle class. People forget that while these women may have erred against the first amendment, they erred on the side of ACTUAL, REAL women. Boy men get all bitchy when you try to take their nudie pics away, that's way more important than any raped or brutalized living woman, with the occasional exception of when that woman happens to be your sister/ daughter/ mother.

I'm thinking about writing a little article about what Andrea Dworkin taught me, because it was because of her writings that I got the scales ripped from my eyes and learned to see the trading on sex that was all around me, especially where you least expect to find it and where it is never admitted to be, especially with regards to powerful men and their flirting/affection for/ sexual attraction to each other. I wish people could get over their fear of her and losing their wank-off rags to really just read her prolific body of work without judgement. No one's ever done a better job of explaining the motives and mindset of conservative women than she did in her book "Right-Wing Women".

It's kind of like riding a roller coaster for the first time... it's scary, but just riding it isn't gonna hurt you.

[Jack Rabbit]

27. OK

I recall there used to be in the board rules a remark that said that for longer articles, more than the usual four paragraphs was permitted. I felt justified in that here.

We wouldn't know what a goddess-center culture would look like, as you say. It was either destroyed or didn't exist in the first place. The Chinese civilization that bound little girl's feet so they wouldn't grow (they found this attractive) was neither Judeo-Christian nor Islamic. Monotheism isn't responsible for everything. I'm more inclined to believe oppression of women is more universal than such sentiment presumes.

We can accommodate both the First Amendment and real brutalized women. For women, better law enforcement for crimes against women is a start; taking a woman's valid fears of a man who puts her at risk is another; more money for women's shelters could also be made available. However, free speech means we put up with things we don't like to hear or see, including that from people who say the stupidest things about minority groups and women. Start banning that as hate speech and the next thing you know Bush's rich friends will be out there saying that any suggestion that their taxes be raised is hate speech.

Are we on a new threshold? I hope so, but getting there won't be pretty. The gods usually fall with a great crash; innocent people below the heavens may get hurt.

[jdj]

31. Honey all you have to do is read the old testament to know about Goddess

culture. Who do you think the 'whore of bablyon' was? who do you think Asherah was? The goddess culture that the hebiru destroyed is all over the old testament if you read in between the lines. It still exists in remnants today, around my appalachian town of origin there are still folks who handle snakes (think Eve) and speak in tongues. They have no idea why they do it, but it's amazing to me that try as they might the patriarchs did not kill it completely. (It's been shown the bites of certain venomous snakes if not fatal cause hallucinations). The apple tree that eve ate from in the bible is said to have originally been a fig tree, which would make sense considering the original garden of eden was said to be in Iraq. Figs were the symbol of the pre-patriarchal goddess Asherah (otherwise known as the whore of Babylon)known elsewhere as Inanna, Ishtar, Isis,Au Set, etc etc. You don't have to dig very far into to find the suppressed evidence of these ancient religions. Google
Cretan Snake Goddess and see what comes up. Incidentally, many terms orignally associated with female positive religion are now negative. Crete being an island kept their woman centered religion longer than other cultures near them, hence a stupid person nowadays is called a "Cretan". Three was a holy number in many Goddess religions, and a meeting of three roads was considered lucky or enchanted, now it is considered "trivia". I could go on all night, this is more than just speculation.

It's a cultural human pattern, I think it happened in most cultures because initially childbirth was so dangerous and infant mortality so high that women and all things feminine were revered, especially if you believe as some do that early humans didn't know about the role of the male in procreation (I'm not sure about this one). But as women became more and more skilled at gathering and practicing herbal medicine childbirth probably became much more successful, and so less mysterious and revered, and as the population of males grew, and competition among men to breed grew, society devolved and we got into the warrior/ technology fetish rut that we are presently stuck in.

The Chinese foot binding thing spread the same way that hijab did, rich women started it and over centuries it passed down through the lower classes amoung women trying to appear wealthier than they are. But antoropologists have found the same pattern in Asian cultures of initially very important and revered female goddesses becoming less important and being replaced by more male gods and time went on.

edit: sorry for all the misspellings. I'm too tired to fix it.

[Jack Rabbit]

32. And please don't forget Demeter and Kore

They were the goddesses at the center of the Eleusinian mysteries. The Eleusinian rites were the most important of the mysteries of the ancient Mediterranean world. The mysteries remained important up to the sixth century AD.

Ancient Greece, the center of the Eleusinian cult, has long been considered one of the most hostile civilizations toward women.

[mopinko]

34. not to trash your whole argument

not to go too far off on a tangent. but, well, it's your tangent, i'm just joining in.
i'm not a believer in that old golden matriarchy stuff. we descended from chimps. war and violence were essential elements in our evolution, imho. and apropos of this discussion, so was rape. there have been cultures that were more peaceful than others, but there was never great age of peace and matriarchy.
but what i really want to take issue with is your assertion that birth was dangerous and frequently unsuccessful. i do not have an stats, or scholarly research to back me up. but, such an animal would be quickly extinguished by mr darwin's laws.

[readmoreoften]

37. well, without scholarly research that's just your imagination

Gender and sexuality was and has been complicated since always and anthropological records show that rape was an extraordinarily rare occurence among almost all Native American tribes even after contact (and they were not matriarchies). (Try reading an anthropological book--written by a man, if that makes you feel better-- called "The Spirit and the Flesh")

Social Darwinism is silly and evolutionary psychology is largely a pseudoscientific fad.

Of course there was no 'great age of matriarchy' where all cultures were matriarchial but there was far more diversity of gender norms form place to place before evangelism.

For you to just state that IMHO 'rape' was essential in our evolution is an absurd fantasy on your part and hell if I know where you got it.

and just so you don't say I'm putting words in your mouth, your quote: >>>war and violence were essential elements in our evolution, imho. and apropos of this discussion, so was rape.<<<

[mopinko]

38. it was your story about childbirth

that i was really objecting to. it's just preposterous. no animal exists that cannot reliably reproduce. can't happen.
and i'll recommend a book for you- the moral animal, robert wright. if you have never really read about evolutionary psychology, you probably have a skewed view of what it is and says. which is not to say that you don't know what you are talking about, just that there is a lot of misrepresentation out there. like thinking it has anything to do with social darwinism. i think it is a fascinating field, and gives great insight into the human condition.
but i also doubt that there is any hard data about the sexual habits of native americans. they certainly were not uniformly peaceful and good. any book that would make such a sweeping assertion must also use a lot of "imagination"

[readmoreoften]

28. I don't like Dworkin, but I totally agree with your 2nd paragraph.

Western women have been sexually repressed for so long that we have no idea of what free women look like. All the more reason to eschew obscenity laws and embrace women who explore their sexuality through media representation.

[Jack Rabbit]

46. Katha Pollitt (The Nation, April 14): Andrea Dworkin, 1946-2005

From The Nation
Issue of May 2, 2005
Posted Thursday April 14

Andrea Dworkin, 1946-2005
By Katha Pollitt

I first heard of Andrea Dworkin in 1968. She had been arrested in an antiwar demonstration and jailed at the old Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village, where male doctors subjected her to brutal internal exams. Her name was in the news because she had gone public with her story. My good, kind, radical, civil libertarian parents thought this was ridiculous. What did she expect, this privileged white woman, this "Bennington girl"? It wasn't that they didn't believe her, exactly. It was that they didn't see why she was making such a big, princessy fuss. It was like getting arrested and complaining about the food.

Andrea Dworkin died on April 9 at 58--she of the denim overalls and the wild hair and wilder pronouncements. Although she denied ever uttering the most famous soundbite attributed to her, that all intercourse is rape, she came pretty close: "Fucking is the means by which the male colonizes the female"; "in seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine." She argued that pornography was an instruction manual for rape, that women had the right to "execute" rapists and pedophiles; toward the end of her life she declared that maybe women, like the Jews, should have their own country. The counsel of despair, and crazy, too--but by then Dworkin was ill, not much in demand as a speaker and several of her major books were out of print. The 1980s were long over: On campus, the militant anti-rape marches and speakouts of Take Back the Night had morphed into cheery V-Day, which marries antiviolence activism to a celebration of women's sexuality.

The antipornography feminism Dworkin did so much to promote seems impossibly quaint today, when Paris Hilton can parlay an embarrassing sex video into mainstream celebrity and the porn star Jenna Jameson rides the New York Times bestseller list. But even in its heyday it was a blind alley. Not just because porn, like pot, is here to stay, not just because the Bible and the Koran--to say nothing of fashion, advertising and Britney Spears--do far more harm to women, not even because of the difficulty of defining such slippery terms as "degrading to women," a phrase that surely did not mean the same thing to Dworkin as it did to the Christian conservatives who helped make the antiporn ordinance she wrote with Catharine MacKinnon briefly law in Indianapolis. Like the temperance movement, antiporn activism mistook a symptom of male dominance for the cause. Nor did it have much to do with actually existing raped and abused women. "For God's sake, take away his Nina Hartley videos" is not a cry often heard in shelters or emergency rooms. If by magic pornography vanished from the land, women would still be the second sex--underpaid, disrespected, lacking in power over their own bodies. Rape, battery, torture, even murder would still be hugely titillating to both sexes, just as in Shakespeare's day, and women would still be blamed, by both sexes, for the violence men inflict on them. What made Dworkin's obsession with pornography so bizarre is that she herself should have known it for a diversion.

Read more.

[leftofthedial]

11. you describe several crimes above,

but porn isn't one of them

[Bridget Burke]

15. You're describing a crime.

Report the little bastards to the police. And the distributor may also be guilty of a crime, as well as any money the victim may get.

[NashVegas]

17. She Has a Suit, The Distributors Are Arrested

Assuming the girl was under 18 years of age, that's illegal porn.

She also has a suit if the film is being commercially exploited and she never signed a release for her performance, regardless of age.

[Senior citizen]

22. Is there a statute of limitations?

While I like the fact that an underage girl cannot have been deemed to have consented, even if forced to sign a consent form, it seems to me a a young girl might not be aware that something was filmed, might not be aware that it is being distributed, and might only find out many, many years later.

[readmoreoften]

25. It's still child pornography and the distributors

are still liable. Obviously they are still distributing or she wouldn't've been exposed to it.

[Terran]

33. A "schoolgirl" probably

isn't of an age to engage in any consensual sex, legally. So the boys would have no defense there. Case closed.

[mitchum]

39. Couldn't you have sent Andrea some flowers instead of presenting us...

with this convoluted flamebait?

How dare you exploit a strawMan. Sexist.

[mongo]

40. If the girl is under 18

then the boys are guilty of pandering obscenity involving a minor (child porn) and would go to prison.

If the girl is over 18, then they have filmed her without consent, and also are profiting from the commision of a crime. The girl could sue for any and all profits from the video, and they may also face additional criminal penalties.

Also, without model releases/proof of age (USC 2257), no producer would copy the film, and no distributor would take it. There would be NO distribution channel available to the boys for this film.

[mondo joe]

42. What if someone opens a fast food joint and gets a somewhat retarded minor

to schlep burgers for minimum wage?

Is that a civil rights issue?

[MazeRat7]

43. You kidding right ?

Was it the weed or did you stay up late to dream this useless question up for us to ponder ?

MZr7