Women Against Sex

For the past two years, Playboy has observed and reported on the antics of a splinter group of the feminist movement called Women Against Pornography. The faction has staged highly visible demonstrations in major cities, including widely publicized "Take Back the Night" commando raids on sex stores. Its tactics vary, ranging from boycotts of magazines containing "sexist" images--Vogue is a frequent target--to the trashing of bookstores that sell Playboy and Oui. (The movement's apotheosis to date came when one of its leaders, Marcia Womongold, fired a rifle through the window of a Boston periodical store.)

These women believe that all erotic images are propaganda, part of a universal campaign against women. Demon Porn is the tool by which men are brainwashed into becoming sexist brutes, for whom the sight of a naked breast is cause for rape.

In an article called "Women at War" published last February, we dealt with the First Amendment question raised by the movement and argued that the call for censorship threatens our basic rights. The following article takes another view of the new enemies of eros. It was first published in Inquiry magazine--a journal of contemporary news and comment published in San Francisco. According to John Gordon, the Women Against Porn crusade suffers from confusion. It seems to be as much against sex as against sexist pornography. Gordon, who teaches English at Connecticut College, has captured that confusion and brought a much-needed sanity to the debate.

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When Women Against Pornography sent a pair of representatives to Hamilton College, they had an audience that would have applauded them if they had played tunes on spoons. Hamilton had recently gone coed and, as one of the many conciliatory gestures to its new female constituency, had instituted an annual binge of funded dumbness called "Women's Energy Weekend." This is an array of panels, consciousness raisings and outside speakers demanding to know why the English Department offers no courses on Margaret Fuller, why the History Department spends so much time on the history of men, and the by-now familiar blah-blah-blah. At last year's Women's Energy Weekend, for instance, my fellow professor of English John O'Neill was typed as a fascist by a prominent feminist writer and founding mother of Women Against Pornography for arguing that women are not necessarily more sensitive readers of literature than men.

I always try to lie low during Women's Energy Weekend, precisely because it is the sort of occasion on which one is liable to hear perfectly nice people called names by speakers who are not thereupon rebuked; who are, rather, applauded by large numbers; who are, in fact, paid for their slanders and fatuities with money indirectly filched from my pay check. Who needs more grief? But John O'Neill himself is tougher, and this year he wanted to go see the kickoff event of the weekend, a slide show and discussion presented by Women Against Pornography, "to hear what they had to say." And he convinced me, against my better judgment, to come along. Whence this report.

The two young women who give the show are altogether appealing, mainly because of the obvious depth of their sense of hurt and subdued outrage. They are convinced that they and their sisters are victims and that pornography is a way of legitimizing their victimization. Their presentation comprises slides of material purchased mainly in Times Square, alternating with pictures taken from billboards, album covers and popularly available magazines. The slides are arranged according to two principles. First, escalation: They keep getting worse, and the last one is just horrible. Second, juxtaposition: A hard-core picture is followed by a magazine ad that is in some way similar, the idea being to make us see that one is a carriage-trade version, or at best subtle evocation, of the other.

The hard-core pictures are almost all of the subgenre called "bondage and discipline." Tied-up women are shown being beaten or with clothespins attached to their nipples, or in tableaux of murder and mutilation. The final slide, introduced as from a "snuff" movie, shows a woman struggling to free herself while some instrument is applied to her breasts; there is blood everywhere, and the speaker assures us that it's not fake, that this woman is really being killed. A few of the slides feature children.

It is no fun, now, recalling these pictures, and the original experience is worse. The audience is outraged. At least one woman cries throughout. As the speakers work up to the climax by showing slides from a magazine devoted to the sexual humiliation of Oriental females while reading an account of a Vietnamese girl being raped with a rifle barrel and then murdered, a sound that I can describe only as a wail grows, to culminate in one collective gasp at the final shocker.

You cannot possibly see these images without wishing them out of existence and the people responsible along with them; without, in fact, feeling for a spell like the New York taxi driver in Martin Scorsese's film who drives through Times Square dreaming of blowing the place up. If the import of these pictures when shown in a movie theater is violence to women, their import when shown in a lecture hall is violence to pornographers: Jail is too good for them.

But nothing close to that is actually said during the presentation. The speakers, like some though not all of the other members of Women Against Pornography, favor boycotts instead of censorship, and in general a heightened awareness of what the presence of pornography shows about the culture that produces it. All very reasonable, except that what the pictures are saying is, Lock them up or string them up. The emotions the slides generate are not likely to be appeased by refusing to buy magazines that one would never have bought in the first place. Accompanied as they are with accounts of actual rapes and mutilations of women in this country and around the world, intercut with provocative pictures from Vogue, The New York Times, and so forth, the pictures are saying that pornography is the propaganda of a universal campaign against women analogous to that of the Nazis against the Jews, carried on by men whose fellow travelers and dupes are all around us.

I am not making this up: We are shown some rather nice pictures of naked bodies in Playboy followed by some stomach-twisting pictures from Hustler and reminded that Auschwitz was full of naked bodies. We are shown, in between hard-core images of mutilation, an ad for Gloria Vanderbilt designer jeans where the model's body is "cut off" at the knees by the photograph's frame and "cut in half" by the seam down the backside, thus reducing her to a piece of meat. The equation is that lust equals dehumanization equals brutalization equals Nazis. There is no talk, even, of gradations: One is the other, in more or less obvious form. For these angry women it is the familiar story of the fatal glass of beer: naughty postcards one minute, Texas chainsaw Massacre the next. It was one of J. Edgar Hoover's favorite parables--the young innocent inflamed by smut to do something dastardly. Now the late director's ghost rises: The recent FBI raid on Times Square pornographers was reportedly attributable in part to the influence of Women Against Pornography and similar groups. The old outfit has had its feminist consciousness raised, right up to the level of about 30 years ago.

Any argument designed to show that everything you see is a version of everything else obviously has no patience with distinctions. An offensive picture from a leading fashion magazine is accounted for by the fact that the editor in chief is a man: No matter that the readership is overwhelmingly female. When someone objects that ritual mutilation of females has long existed in cultures where pornography is virtually nonexistent, the answer is that the connection between the two is broader than cause and effect--they "go together."

When it comes to logic, finding holes in the case would be like shooting fish in a barrel, were it not that logic is of course overwhelmed by the pictures' call of blood for blood: Logic is, in truth, the enemy. When much-tried John O'Neill points out a flagrant contradiction, the answer is, "We respect your opinion," and the audience bursts into applause, as if they'd witnessed Disraeli adding the finishing flourish to some masterly parliamentary riposte. Afterward, John O'Neill concludes that he was wasting his time by reasoning: "It was stupid trying to make sense out of it. What I wish I had said is, 'When you compared the torture and murder of that Vietnamese girl to some model posing for money, you were trivializing her death, and that is as disgusting as anything you've shown us.' " I, too, wish he had said that, except that in doing so, he would just have made himself one more instance of brutal macho male blah-blah-blah. I wish also that he or somebody had been able to take five minutes to make distinctions.

He could have begun by pointing out that the acts of child abuse, torture and murder are already against the law; also, so far, no genuine snuff film has ever been discovered, and if the speaker knows of one, she has a legal obligation to report it. He would go on to say that the slides that make up virtually all of this hard-core sample are directed to a small special-interest group among pornography consumers, that most pornography consists of repetitive shots of manifestly bored copulators and is intended to gratify an audience not of knife-wielding savages but of poor horny sods. These men have been cut off from a vital part of human life because, for reasons of self-interest, women long ago schooled themselves to punish with sexual rejection the poor, the powerless and the unchic. He would point out that it is a very selective charity which calls the women caught up in this system victims but the men creeps, slime and scum.

He would add that sadistic pornography is just one branch of media violence, that the victims of this violence are usually male, that both today and in the public executions and dismemberments of the past their agony has been displayed for the delectation of both men and women. To the speaker's assertion that one never sees pictures of brutalized men, he would answer, Oh, balderdash--read the news, turn on a television set, go into a church and look at the image above the altar. He would suggest that the people who enjoy these pictures have probably been damaged at some fundamental level, and that trying to deal with them by confiscating magazines is like trying to cure cancer with zoning laws. He might add that these people may well be attracted to representations of violence as children are attracted to horror movies, not as a vision of what they desire but as an exorcism of what they fear; that they may have deeper causes for such fears because as men they have been more brutalized by grossly sexist institutions, such as the all-male draft, which most women have until recently supported.

He would ask why the slide show juxtaposes women in chains with shots from Playboy instead of, for instance, a marriage service, in which people "tie the knot" by entering into "wedlock" with the exchange of "bands." He would then sarcastically inquire whether the speaker knew the meaning of the word metaphor. He would inform the audience that given time and a few slides, he would demonstrate to their entire satisfaction that religion goes with mass murder and suicide (slide of Communion chalice; cut to slide of Jonestown tub of cyanide, bodies in background), that either abortionists (slide of mangled fetus) or anti-abortionists (slide of woman bleeding on back-room kitchen table) are butchers. He would add that almost all of this century's 100,000,000 or so atrocities have been performed not by free-lancers but by people in uniform fired with the kind of righteous zeal that Women Against Pornography is seeking to kindle.

He would wonder aloud why people concerned about the possible confusion in some minds between fantasy and life should particularly protest the most abstracted and ritualized forms of fantasy, forms about as far removed from reality as the no drama. He would point out that their attack is wildly discriminatory, since it condemns any image of the female body suspected of arousing men to anything other than admiration but gives free play to homosexual and women-directed material.

As I said, shooting fish in a barrel. All these distinctions need to be made because of one fundamental confusion that threatens to turn what should be the major liberating movement of our age into a gaggle of prigs. It is that sex is sexism. These women evidently actually believe that for men, anyway, the desire to possess is the desire to oppress or worse, that a man who wants to see a woman naked in reality wants to see her as "meat," trussed and packaged. No wonder they can make no distinction between the Disneylandish Playboy and the reptilian Hustler.

Now, this is the way it is, and remember you read it here first. Men who want to see naked women, as a rule, want to see naked women. They are motivated not by blood lust but just by plain old lust. And lust is great, absolutely top-notch. With love or without it, with friends or with strangers, there are few things in life so nice as a couple of people getting together and making sex objects of each other. Despite all of W.A.P.'s formidable anaphrodisia conditioning, I, for instance, will continue to like seeing attractive women, not because of some vast international macho conspiracy that years ago brainwashed me into a morbid fascination with the sexually distinguishing features of the female body but because I just like looking at said attractive women and perchance contemplating said distinguishing features. Any woman who considers this some sort of symbolic exploitation is invited to sort of symbolically exploit me right back.

Well, there it is. But what sort of intellectual climate is it where these things need saying? A climate created by people whose standard of scholarly achievement is represented by Sexual Politics and Against Our Will, whose latest manifesto is a best-selling novel the thesis of which, and I am not exaggerating, is that all men deep down are Nazi rapists. In the case of W.A.P., it is primarily the innocent outrage of people realizing for the first time that any human passion can become monstrous--discovering man and woman's inhumanity to man and woman, in short, and breathlessly sharing the news. The result has been a campaign that would be merely silly were it not able to draw strength from the traditional, ingrained female attitudes personified in Mrs. Grundy and Carry Nation, which feminists have supposedly shed. And it's getting worse, as the emergence of W.A.P. shows: The prospect for the future seems to be for a generation of savants trying, with panel discussions and government grants, to reason the libido into something more decorous. Swift! Thou shouldst be living at this hour!

To anyone who likes to hope, with the feminists, that people are free to escape their societally imposed roles, it is terribly depressing to see women protesting female stereotyping and in the process revealing themselves as hysterical, nagging, scatterbrained old shrews. It is as if Martin Luther King, Jr., on that day at the reflecting pool in Washington had intoned. "Ah has a dream"; all the wrong people are poised to say they told you so. But depressing or not, men cannot long be expected to participate in a dialog on the question of whether they are unredeemable degenerates or just redeemable degenerates. If the W.A.P. strain of feminism prevails and establishes that the big enemy is not discrimination or oppression so much as lust, then feminists are going to lose their struggle to make us all more free, sure as anything. That would be a pity.