Piecework

The world as MacKinnon sees it is now “a pornographic place” and, as a result, women are being held down, tied up and destroyed. “Men treat women as who they see women as being,” MacKinnon writes. “Pornography constructs who that is. Men’s power over women means that the way men see women defines who women can be. Pornography is that way. … It is not a distortion, reflection, projection, expression, fantasy, representation or symbol, either. It is a sexual reality.”

Of course, common sense tells us otherwise. The vast majority of men simply don’t use pornography to “construct” women, because the vast majority of men don’t ever see much pornography. And the vast majority of men don’t spend their days and nights dreaming of inflicting cruelties on women and then carrying them out. If they did, Americans would be up to their rib cages in blood. There are violent men and there is violent pornography (estimated by one study at about five percent of the total produced in the United States). But MacKinnon isn’t attacking only the violence she says suffuses the “pornotopia”; she is after pornography itself, as she and her allies define it.

The word that names that concept, as Walter Kendrick points out in his 1987 history of the subject, The Secret Museum, can be traced back to the Greek pornographoi (“whore-painter”), apparently coined by the second-century writer Athenaeus and promptly forgotten. The word was revived, appropriately, during the Victorian era, and by 1975 the American Heritage Dictionary was defining it as “written, graphic, or other forms of communication intended to excite lascivious feelings.”

The inequality of women and men in this poor world goes back at least to the late Neolithic Period, long before the creation of pornography or its naming. But MacKinnon and the radical feminists insist that such inequality was “constructed” by pornography. And obviously, the current usage of the word was too mild to serve their purposes. They needed to make it more specific. In Pornography and Civil Rights, a 1988 pamphlet that MacKinnon wrote with Dworkin, it is defined as follows:

Pornography is the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words that also include one or more of the following: (i) women are presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things or commodities; or (ii) women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or (iii) women are presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or (iv) women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or (v) women are presented in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility or display; or (vi) women’s body parts — including but not limited to vaginas, breasts or buttocks — are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or (vii) women are presented as whores by nature; or (viii) women are presented being penetrated by objects or animals; or (ix) women are presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.

The use of men, children or transsexuals in the place of women in [the acts cited in the paragraph] above is also pornography.

Obviously, in spite of the specifics, this is a great vague glob of a definition. MacKinnon would most certainly ban Playboy, which she says reduces women to mere objects for the use of men. But her definition of pornography limned in Pornography and Civil Rights could cover everything from the latest Madonna video to the novels of Henry Miller, Al Capp’s Moonbeam McSwine and Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo, acres of surrealist paintings, the Koran and James Cagney hitting Mae Clarke with that grapefruit. We would see the last of Black Bun Busters, but we could also lose Don Giovanni. The great flaw in the antiporn agitation is that it’s based on a mystery: the elusive nature of sexuality.

MacKinnon and Dworkin assume that descriptions of sexual cruelty incite men. They write: “Basically, for pornography to work sexually with its major market, which is heterosexual men, it must excite the penis.” And “to accomplish its end, it must show sex and subordinate a woman at the same time.”

And they follow with an immense leap of logic: “Subordination includes objectification, hierarchy, forced submission and violence.”