In Harm's Way by Catharine A MacKinnon & Andrea Dworkin

Author:Catharine A MacKinnon & Andrea Dworkin
Language: eng
Format: epub

Minneapolis: Memo on Proposed Ordinance on Pornography, December 26, 1983

TO: Minneapolis City Council

FROM: Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin

RE: Proposed Ordinance on Pornography

DATE: 26 December 1983

Several of you have suggested to us that a short paper addressing some frequently asked questions would be helpful. Here we briefly discuss what this ordinance is trying to do, how it would work, why it is different from past approaches, and we assess supposed obstacles.

1. What this ordinance is trying to do

This ordinance defines pornography for what it is. Its central feature is that it subordinates women through sex. The influence of pornography on men who rule societies, and thus on the development of misogynist social institutions, can be traced back through feudalism, but it is only through relatively recent technology that the social environment has been glutted with pornography so that it hurts women openly, publicly, and with social legitimacy. This same pervasiveness and open availability have also made it possible to understand and document the effects of pornography, hence its place in the institutionalization of second class citizenship for women, for the first time in history.

The use of women in pornography and the impact of pornography on women’s status and treatment is the primary focus of this ordinance. Pornography promotes environmental terrorism and private abuse of women and girls and, to a lesser extent, men and boys and transsexuals. Society’s efforts toward the civil and sexual equality of women and men are severely hampered—frankly, nearly destroyed—by the success of pornography. Most frequently, the pornography promotes rape, pain, humiliation and inferiority as experiences that are sexually pleasing to all women because we are women. The studies show that it is not atypical for men to believe and act on the pornography. Each time men are sexually aroused by pornography—the sexually explicit subordination of women—they learn to connect women’s sexual pleasure to abuse and women’s sexual nature to inferiority. They learn this in their bodies, not just their minds, so that it becomes a physical, seemingly natural, response. When real women claim not to want inequality or force, they are not credible compared with the continually sexually available “real women” in pornography. These men are the same normal men who make decisions that control much of women’s lives and opportunities at every level of society. Until women achieve equal power with men, such men are in a position to control women’s employment, educational advancement, social status and credibility in the media, on paper, on the street, in meetings, in court, in their own homes, and in public office. The fact that some women have successfully fought some of this discrimination does not prove it does not exist; it proves that victories, like the victory this ordinance would be, can be won.

In the hearings, we learned that it takes coercion to make pornography—for instance, Deep Throat, the highest grossing film ever.* We learned that pornography is forced on women and children and that frequently the women and children are then raped or forced to do what is in the pornography.

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