By Sex Possessed

For its January 1981 issue, Inquiry, a San Francisco--based journal of contemporary news and comment, asked Christie Hefner to review "Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography," a collection of feminist essays edited by Laura Lederer. Christie's review turned out to be a thoughtful analysis of the emotionalism and dogma that permeate the antiporn movement, which itself has led to a curious alliance between some women's groups and their own worst enemy, the new moral right. We've published articles, interviews and commentary on these subjects in the past (February, October and November, 1980), but Christie's observations go beyond previously stated arguments. She perceptively examines the tendency to equate pornography with pornographic violence and to confuse the two, simplistically relating both of them to rape. With thanks to Inquiry for permission, we reprint the review here.

In September 1977, I received a letter from a woman named Laura Lederer, a founding member of a year-old organization called Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media. She was requesting a grant from the Playboy Foundation, of which I am a director, to support her organization's efforts toward "decreasing the number of violent crimes against women ... by removing violent images of women in the media." She explained that she was asking the Playboy Foundation for help because "Playboy magazine has always been in the front lines of the battle against this country's social problems.... Playboy has always been interested in healthy, happy relations between the sexes." The five-person foundation board voted against funding W.A.V.P.M. because of our concern that the stated goals of the organization implied a reliance less on voluntarism and persuasion than on state censorship.

Now Laura Lederer has edited a book entitled Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography. It is a collection of essays (including some by well-known feminists like Gloria Steinem, Susan Brownmiller, Robin Morgan and Andrea Dworkin) that reflect a variety of concerns in the area of pornography. These include "Child Pornography," "Racism in Pornography and the Women's Movement," "Lesbianism and Erotica in Pornographic America" and "Why So-Called Radical Men Love and Need Pornography."

The book as a whole, however, reflects a strong and singular feeling about pornography. It is dedicated "to the thousands of women in this country and abroad who recognize the hatefulness and harmfulness of pornography and who are organizing to stop it now."

Somehow, during the past three years, "women against violence" has become "women against pornography." Some feminists have been so shocked, frightened and disgusted by the violence in some pornography that they have concluded that pornography itself is the enemy. Although a few contributors to the volume try to justify this transformation by arguing that violence is one of the defining characteristics of a pornographic work, most of the authors here are just as likely to condemn nonviolent pornography. In 1977, Laura Lederer credited Playboy with being "interested in healthy, happy relations between the sexes." Now she has edited a book in which "the Playboy ethic" is called "a threat to our very lives as human and humane beings."

Condemning violence against women is easy. The number of reported rapes is increasing alarmingly. Whether this is because the feminist movement has encouraged women to step forward and press charges, or because these crimes actually are on the rise, the new awareness of violence toward women has created an atmosphere of fear. The title Take Back the Night indicates the emotionalism surrounding the issue: Women feel more and more frightened of being alone in the streets, especially after dark. "Take back the night" has become the slogan of women seeking to reclaim territory for themselves and dispel those fears.

Condemning violent images has become almost as popular as condemning violence. Commenting on the media's obsession with violence has turned into a set piece for pop critics. But the essays in T.B.T.N. are not aimed primarily at violence or sadism. Rather, their target is pornography--which may or may not be violent, may or may not be sadistic, and which above all means very different things to different people.

The inability to define pornography is the fundamental problem that remains unresolved in the essays in T.B.T.N. One contributor, Robin Yeamans, writes that "pornography is any use of the media which equates sex and violence." That's a clear enough definition, but most of the other contributors don't accept it. In the opening chapter, Lederer states that "not all pornography is violent, but even the most banal pornography objectifies women's bodies." This criterion of "objectification," however, is so broad that it seems to encompass, for example, virtually all fashion photography.

Dr. Diana Russell's definition of pornography would probably be accepted by most of the other authors: "Pornography is explicit representations of sexual behavior, verbal or pictorial, that have as a distinguishing characteristic the degrading or demeaning portrayal of human beings, especially women." Although this definition presumably allows for sexually explicit representations that are not degrading or demeaning (images which most contributors to this volume would call "erotica"), the basic problem of who decides what is degrading and demeaning persists. As feminist Deirdre English pointed out in an article in Mother Jones not reprinted in T.B.T.N.: "Degradation, after all, is highly subjective. As for the line between pornography and erotica, it is hopelessly blurred.... For example, what would feminists have thought about The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago if it had been created by a man--honoring 39 great women in history by making dinner plates of their vaginas?"

The failure to be honest about the fact that differences of opinion exist--among feminists as in the general population--as to what is pornographic and what is merely erotic gives T.B.T.N. a heavily dogmatic tone. A dictum by feminist activist Charlotte Bunch points up the intellectual evasiveness that permeates the book: "We don't all like or respond to the same things sexually, but we do all know the distinction between eroticism, which celebrates our sexuality, and pornography, which degrades us."

In reading these essays, you get the strong message that if you don't agree with what some of the authors condemn as pornography, then you've obviously been co-opted by the enemy and therefore your views are at least suspect. Dr. Judith Bat-Ada states unequivocally that "healthy, self-respecting females do not want to see Playboy, Penthouse or any other pornographic magazines in drugstores, grocery stores and markets." What does that make the nearly 5,000,000 women who actually read Playboy?

Not surprisingly, much of the outside support for the feminist campaign against pornography comes from bitter antifeminists. Despite efforts to distinguish the feminist antipornography perspective from the conservative antipornography perspective, the newly powerful new right is all too happy to join forces in this crusade. The conservatives never marched against violence, but they're certainly ready to march against "immorality," especially sex without benefit of clergy--which in their view constitutes pornography. And feminists who've stopped focusing on the violence in pornography and elsewhere are fighting against the same sexual images as the conservatives.

Some feminists seem actually eager to make use of the political, and even intellectual, support of conservatives. In a section of the book entitled "Pornography and the First Amendment," Susan Brownmiller cites Chief Justice Warren Burger's view on obscenity to justify her contention that not all images and ideas are worthy of constitutional protection. Putting aside the point that Brownmiller would scarcely want to live by the Chief Justice's views on other subjects (such as abortion), this drawing on conservatives for support is a highly dangerous game. As Gloria Steinem points out in her T.B.T.N. essay, "Erotica and Pornography: A Clear and Present Difference," "Right-wing groups are not only denouncing prochoice abortion literature as pornographic, but are trying to stop the sending of all contraceptive information through the mails by invoking the obscenity laws. In fact, Phyllis Schlafly recently denounced the entire women's movement as 'obscene.' "

Pornography, like all forms of expression, reflects the values of the society in which it is created. Consequently, a lot of pornography reflects the power inequities that are a real part of the lives of women and men. Some pornography is also violent, although as against the claims in T.B.T.N., Dr. Joseph Slade, who monitors pornographic films for the Kinsey Institute, estimates that only eight to 12 percent of the films produced during the past decade are violent in content.

Then what of the connection between pornography and violent crime? The contributors to T.B.T.N. generally ignore or dismiss the research that has been done in the United States, the United Kingdom and Denmark, which overwhelmingly concludes that no statistical, let alone causal, relationship exists between pornography and criminal acts. On those occasions when they do deal with the evidence, the treatment borders on the cavalier. Dr. Michael Goldstein, for instance, has studied convicted rapists and heavy pornography users and concluded that "rapists had no greater likelihood of encountering material combining sexuality and aggression than the controls, so the idea for the aggressive sexual act does not appear to derive from pornography." Dr. Pauline Bart and Margaret Jozsa reject his conclusions, in an essay entitled "Dirty Books, Dirty Films and Dirty Data," on the basis that "the assumption that the control group does not contain rapists is untenable."

I agree with the contributors to this book that the presentation of violence meant to be sexually stimulating is offensive and deplorable. In fact, I refused to see Dressed to Kill because the idea of a woman being sliced up was so disturbing and offensive to me. But it never occurred to me that Brian De Palma didn't have the right to make that film, so I believe that pornographers who make use of violence in their business should be condemned, but not outlawed. It is simply not true that, as Florence Rush says in commenting on the cases where pornography has been discovered in the possession of a rapist or murderer, "the step from pornographic fantasy to acting out the fantasy as real-life experience is negligible."

Were that so, we might be forced to conclude that women who fantasize about being raped (and research by Masters and Johnson, among others, indicates that many women do) were really "asking for it." But as Dr. Diana Russell is very careful to state: "It cannot be overstressed that having voluntary fantasies of being raped and wanting to be raped in actuality are two entirely different things."

I agree. But I believe that having fantasies of rape and committing rape are also two entirely different things. As the British Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship concluded: "The cases in which a link between pornography and crime has even been suggested are remarkably few." The basic response to these results by the contributors to Take Back the Night is that, in the words of feminist author Kathleen Barry, "It is costly for us to be diverted to false issues like freedom of speech or busy work (such as trying to prove through research what we already know through common sense)."

Although there is a great deal of genuine and affecting pain--and anger--in T.B.T.N., the sad truth is that there isn't nearly enough common sense. Nor is this book an accurate reflection of the diversity of feminist thought on the issue of pornography. Where is Susan Jacoby's view that "the arguments over pornography blur the vital distinction between expression of ideas and conduct"?

Where is Ellen Willis, saying, "If feminists define pornography, per se, as the enemy, the result will be to make a lot of women ashamed of their sexual feelings and afraid to be honest about them. And the last thing women need is more sexual shame, guilt and hypocrisy--this time served up as feminism"?

And where are Lindsy Van Gelder's observations, published in Ms.?

What especially bothered me was what I perceived to be the frequent failure to address the complexities of sexuality and sexual fantasy.... I know plenty of women who like porn--including porn themes of rape and humiliation that have nothing whatsoever to do with their real-life sexual behavior or desires. At best, I worry that the current feminist antiporn analysis has no credibility with such women, who can legitimately conclude out of their own experience that porn is harmless; at worst, I fear that being labeled as brainwashed degenerates (by feminists, yet) can push women right back into the closet of sexual guilt.

The failure in T.B.T.N. to recognize the subtleties and complexities of sexuality, pornography and violence, coupled with its underlying theme that "men have a propensity to rape and beat women," is likely to mean that the book will preach primarily to those who are already fervently committed.

The issues raised by Lederer and her associates need to be addressed, but what the next collection of essays should offer is a positive vision to counter the ugliness and misogyny that are present in much of today's pornography. Charlotte Bunch writes that "if we had even one quarter of the money that goes into pornography, we could produce some genuine erotica about lesbian love, portraying the real beauty of women and of women loving women.... And I promise you--there would be a difference." There can also be a difference in the portrayal of sex between women and men. And Bunch should recognize that the national crusade to restrict heterosexual pornography--violent or otherwise--is not likely to stop short of graphic depictions of lesbian love.

I share Deirdre English's belief that "maybe what we need even more than women against pornography are women pornographers--or eroticists, if that sounds better. Without proscribing the images that exist, feminist sexuality would confront misogyny with new images." We don't need a feminist antipornography perspective, so much as more unconstrained feminist exploration of what Lederer highlighted in her letter to the Playboy Foundation: "healthy, happy relations between the sexes."