SOURCE: "The Art of Confrontation," in Without Apology: Andrea Dworkin's Art and Politics, Westview Press, 1998, pp. 78-93.

[In the following essay, Jenefsky and Russo examine Dworkin's political methods and rhetorical discourse as an antipornography activist. According to the critics, Dworkin's approach centers upon strategies of "concretization" and "de/centering," by which she draws attention to the real-life implications of pornography while undermining familiar constitutional arguments in its favor.]

Dworkin's advocacy against pornography is shaped by her commitment to confrontational politics as "the essence of social change." "The way that you destabilize male power," she says, "is basically not by seduction, and not by begging, and not by any of the female stratagems that [women] are essentially taught should be the basis of our politics…. The places where society has moved, it has been because of confrontation." Accordingly, Dworkin rejects all "female stratagems" as ineffective political methods and expressly devotes herself to confrontational politics: "My activism is centered on my notion that what's important is to confront male power; that's the standard by which I decide what I will and won't do." This standard abides in her artistic practice and demands that the form and content of her writing be as direct and concrete as possible:

The form, the voice, the diction of the writing itself confronts male power directly. My writing is concrete as opposed to abstract. It goes right to the political heart of things. It doesn't go through a veil of ideas nor does it interpret the world through others' ideas, weighing and balancing them. It's very direct, and that's something about both form and content that's extremely important and substantive.

Both substantively and stylistically, Dworkin's antipornography discourse enacts this political commitment to confrontation through two prominent rhetorical strategies: concretization and de/centering. Concretization—making something concrete by focusing on its tangible properties—strips pornography of its ideological garb of sexual libertarianism and directly zooms in on its real-life harm. De/centering places women's destructive experiences with pornography at the center of her texts and de-centers all other experiences and competing perspectives on pornography. Combined, these two strategies enable Dworkin to confront pornography in a direct manner by "go[ing] right to the political heart of things" (concretization of harm) and refusing to "interpret the world through others' ideas" (de/centering). With these strategies, Dworkin produces a set of ironic reversals that switch the premises upon which pornography has been widely debated, radically substituting her concerns about pornography in place of those of pornography's defenders. These reversals constitute an act of political disruption boldly displacing the premises of the status quo. This chapter examines this confrontative form of Dworkin's antipornography advocacy, focusing on the political utility of her artistic practices.

Privileging the Concrete

Throughout all of Dworkin's work, she expresses contempt for abstraction and stresses the necessity to understand social phenomena in concrete material terms. She writes in "The ACLU: Bait and Switch": "There is nothing as dangerous as an unembodied principle: no matter what blood flows, the principle comes first." Dworkin says she refuses "to sit around and argue ideas with people." Ideas are important only insofar as they are relevant to real people's lives and the material conditions underlying them: "I care about some idea where somebody's life is at stake; and if there isn't that interrelationship between idea and somebody's life, you know, I don't care about the argument." She often characterizes abstract discussion as a frivolous practice of the privileged—that is, as an activity performed by those who do not recognize or experience the harmful consequences of the "ideas" they discuss. For example, she says of the abstract conception of censorship in the United States:

It gets to be, in silly countries like this one, whatever people say it is, separate from any material definition, separate from police power, separate from state repression (jail, banning, exile, death), separate from devastating consequences to real people (jail, banning, exile, death). It is something that people who eat fine food and wear fine clothes worry about frenetically, trying to find it, anticipating it with great anxiety, arguing it down as if—if it were real—an argument would make it go away; not knowing that it has a clear, simple, unavoidable momentum and meaning in a cruel world of police power that their privilege cannot comprehend.

In contrast to such abstraction, Dworkin describes her own approach to political issues as a process of drawing conclusions inductively from lived experiences (her own or other people's). For example, she says of her process of writing Woman Hating after escaping the brutality of her marriage: "The battering destroyed me. I had to decide whether I wanted to live or die. I was broken and shamed and empty. I looked at pornography to try to understand what had happened to me. And I found a lot of information, about power and the mechanisms by which the subordination of women is sexualized. I want you to understand that I didn't learn an ideology. For me, it's been a living journey." Similarly, she says of her antipornography work generally: "I know about the lives of women in pornography because I lived the life"; and again:

I knew how women were hurt by pornography. My knowledge was concrete, not abstract: I knew the ways it was used; I knew how it was made; I knew the scenes of exploitation and abuse in real life—the lives of prostitutes, daughters, girlfriends, wives; I knew the words the women said when they dared to whisper what had happened to them; I could hear their voices in my mind, in my heart.

Dworkin thus characterizes her concrete approach to political analysis in explicit contrast to ideological approaches that begin with a theoretical framework which is then applied to life. "What I try to do in my work," she states, "is to look at what the concrete scenario is and then understand the meaning of it from that, rather than go backwards…. I just think it's pointless to have one's ideas about society and then try to lay them on the pornography—that you find out more if you look at the pornography and try to figure out what it is that it's doing in relationship to everything you know about the ways in which various groups are being hurt in society." She claims that she must be able to see a phenomenon "in action" before she can understand it and write about it. "In other words, I don't accept it from an ideological point of view or a dogmatic or programmatic point of view … My books don't come from dogma." As she says, they come from lived experience: "mine or other people's, all experience that I know of that is available to me in any way: through books, through what happens to people."

Dworkin's rejection of abstraction is manifested stylistically in her own rhetorical practice: her analyses of social phenomena are directed toward that which is concrete—behaviors, life experiences, material conditions—rather than ideas and principles. Her ideas are always embodied in her discourse; she presents them in terms of their concrete implications for real people's lives. Her analysis of pornography is no exception. In contrast to usual public debates about pornography, she does not address pornography in terms of what it symbolically presents (its ideas about women or sex or perversion) or symbolically presents (such as being a metaphor for women's oppression or a symbol of free speech, sexual freedom, or moral depravity); nor does she frame her discussion in terms of constitutional principles (such as the First or Fourteenth Amendment). Her analysis of pornography centers on what pornography does: its tangible function in sustaining male sexual domination and the tangible ways it harms women. Her "ideas about" pornography are made concrete by embodying the lived experiences of those women—including herself—exploited, used, humiliated, and abused through the production and consumption of pornography. "Autobiography is the unseen foundation of my nonfiction work," writes Dworkin; "when I wrote Intercourse and Pornography: Men Possessing Women, I used my life in every decision I made. It was my compass. Only by using it could I find north and stay on course. If a reader could lift up the words on the page, she would see—far, far under the surface—my life. If the print on the page turned into blood, it would be my blood from many different places and times." She is intolerant of pornography "being treated as if it's some kind of university debating issue. That's never been what it's been. Women's lives have always been at stake." She summarizes this point in "Pornography Happens to Women." She states that the sexualization and dehumanization of women in pornography are "always concrete and specific"; they are "never abstract and conceptual."

That is why all of these debates on the subject of pornography have such a bizarre quality to them. Those of us who know that pornography hurts women and care, talk about women's real lives. Insults, and assaults that really happen to real women in real life—the women in the pornography and the women on whom the pornography is used. Those who argue for pornography, especially on the ground of freedom of speech, insist that pornography is a species of idea, thought, fantasy, situated inside the physical brain, the mind, of the consumer no less.

In fact we are told all the time that pornography is really about ideas. Well, a rectum doesn't have an idea, and a vagina doesn't have an idea, and the mouths of women in pornography do not express ideas.

Accordingly, Dworkin describes pornography exclusively in terms of its tangible qualities. The above passage, for instance, contrasts defenses of pornography based on concepts of free speech, ideas, thoughts, and fantasies with her concretized notion of pornography's use of women's rectums, vaginas, and mouths. A short three sentence excerpt from "Against the Male Flood" also captures this strategy of concretizing social phenomena. She writes: "The pornographers actually use our bodies as their language. We are their speech. Our bodies are the building blocks of their sentences." Note how she focuses not on what pornographers say but on how their speech entails doing something concrete to women: literally using women's bodies, not merely spreading false ideas about women. Pornographers' speech is not just words or pictures here but is comprised of women's bodies: "our bodies as their language," "We are their speech." "Our bodies are the building blocks." Without women's bodies, pornography as such would not exist.

In a similar example from her 1986 testimony to the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, Dworkin states: "Our bodies are their language. Their speech is made out of our exploitation, our subservience, our injury, and our pain, and they can't say anything without hurting us, and when you protect them, you protect only their right to exploit and hurt us." By presenting pornography solely from the perspective of women harmed by it. Dworkin frames pornographic speech in terms of physical properties: "our bodies," "our injury," "our pain," "exploit and hurt us." Pornographic speech is thereby transformed from a cultural artifact to a concrete practice within her prose by infusing it with material harms done to women. In "Silence Means Dissent" (1984), Dworkin concretizes the usually abstract concepts of "sexual subordination" and "hierarchy"—two practices central to her conception of pornography—by describing how these practices are manifested behaviorally in women's lives:

Pornography is the sexualized subordination of women. It means being put down through sex, by sex, in sex, and around sex, so that somebody can use you as sex and have sex and have a good time. And subordination consists of a hierarchy that means one person is on the top and one person is on the bottom. And while hierarchy has been described in beautiful ideological terms over thousands and thousands of years, for us it is not an abstract idea because we know who is on top. We usually know his name and address.

Whereas many perceive pornography as the sexual expression of pornographers, Dworkin sees it from the perspective of women used in pornography and the tangible acts done to them: "Society … says that pornographers must not be stopped because the freedom of everyone depends on the freedom of pornographers to exercise speech. The woman gagged and hanging remains the speech they exercise." And again: "pornographers use our bodies as their language. Anything they say, they have to use us to say … we … are their ciphers, their semantic symbols, the pieces they arrange in order to communicate." In every instance, Dworkin linguistically concretizes pornography by embedding within it the experiences of women exploited.

No matter which dimension of pornography Dworkin addresses—sexual subordination, sexual objectification, racism, economic exploitation, discrimination—her descriptions always revolve around actual harms done to women. In each of her works on pornography she focuses on a range of harmful behaviors: from dehumanization and humiliation to various forms of violence and even death—essentially, all of the ways she claims pornography sexually subordinates women though its production and consumption. And as all of the examples in the previous two paragraphs illustrate, Dworkin never simply claims pornography is a concrete practice that harms women; rather, she always linguistically constructs pornography as an active agent responsible for material consequences to women's lives. Her texts function iconically, as pornography's performance in her texts mirrors its performance in society.

Dworkin's lengthy description of pornography in "Against the Male Flood" summarily represents this stylistic strategy of concretization. In each sentence, "what pornography is" (its ontology) consists of "what it does" to women. In this way, pornography is textually comprised of its tangible acts of sexual subordination. She writes:

In the United States, it is an $8-billion trade in sexual exploitation.

It is women turned into subhumans, beaver, pussy, body parts, genitals exposed, buttocks, breasts, mouths opened and throats penetrated, covered in semen, pissed on, shitted on, hung from light fixtures, tortured, maimed, bleeding, disemboweled, killed.

It is some creature called female, used.

It is scissors poised at the vagina and objects stuck in it, a smile on the woman's face, her tongue hanging out.

It is a woman being fucked by dogs, horses, snakes.

It is torture in every prison cell in the world, done to women and sold as sexual entertainment.

It is rape and gang rape and anal rape and throat rape: and it is the woman raped, asking for more.

It is the woman in the picture to whom it is really happening and the women against whom the picture is used, to make them do what the woman in the picture is doing.

It is the power men have over women turned into sexual acts men do to women, because pornography is the power and the act.

It is the conditioning of erection and orgasm in men to the powerlessness of women: our inferiority, humiliation, pain, torment; to us as objects, things, or commodities for use in sex as servants.

It sexualizes inequality and in doing so creates discrimination as a sex-based practice.

It permeates the political condition of women in society by being the substance of our inequality however located—in jobs, in education, in marriage, in life.

It is women, kept as a sexual underclass, kept available for rape and battery and incest and prostitution.

It is what we are under male domination; it is what we are for under male domination.

It is the heretofore hidden (from us) system of subordination that women have been told is just life.

Under male supremacy, it is the synonym for what being a woman is.

It is access to our bodies as a birthright to men: the grant, the gift, the permission, the license, the proof, the promise, the method, how to; it is us accessible, no matter what the law pretends to say, no matter what we pretend to say.

It is physical injury and physical humiliation and physical pain: to the women against whom it is used after it is made; to the women used to make it.

As words alone, or words and pictures, moving or still, it creates systematic harm to women in the form of discrimination and physical hurt. It creates harm inevitably by its nature because of what it is and what it does.

Pornography—its production, products, dissemination, and use—is the subject of each sentence; "what happens to women" is the predicate of each sentence. Pornography is concretized within the texture of her discourse by being constructed as an agent acting upon women's bodies. The audience is thus invited to experience "Pornography" within her texts exclusively in terms of the concrete experiences of those it harms.

Pornographers do not do something as benign as "speak" in Dworkin's discourse: "they traffic in women … they sexualize inequality in a way that materially promotes rape, battery, maiming, and bondage; they make a product that they know dehumanizes, degrades, and exploits women; they hurt women to make the pornography and then consumers use the pornography in assaults both verbal and physical." Looking at pornography narrowly as a form of speech elides all of the ways it also functions as an act; it eliminates from view all of the women whose lives are diminished by pornography. Just as pornographic speech never exists in isolation from its production and consumption, so "pornography" in Dworkin's work always textually embodies actual harmful experiences of women used to make pornography and women on whom pornography is used. "Pornography happens," states Dworkin in a 1993 speech delivered at the University of Chicago Law School: "It happens. Lawyers, call it what you want—call it speech, call it act, call it conduct … but the point is that it happens. It happens to women, in real life." Through this strategy of concretization, she asserts women's lived experiences as the basis of her "theory" about pornography's function in our male supremacist society. Dworkin writes a "theory in the flesh"—one that uses "the physical realities of [women's] lives": "flesh and blood experiences to concretize a vision" of pornography as she knows it.

Centering the Margins

Noticeably omitted from Dworkin's textual representations is mention of benign or valued properties of pornography. For Dworkin, discussing pornography's social, educational, political, or entertainment value is akin to discussing Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda in terms of its merits as intellectual, artistic, entertainment, or educational media: in both cases, it requires one to close one's eyes to systematic cruelty and atomistically sever the product from all the ways it harms real people. Dworkin never denies that pornography gives people pleasure; rather, she problematizes the pleasure as a source of pornography's propagandic success and renders it insignificant in comparison to pornography's harm. "The pleasure." She states.

is at a cost to women, including when it comes from dehumanization and not from violence…. The fact that somebody gets an orgasm from anti-Semitic material makes the anti-Semitic material, what, good? Legitimate? What? With women, we're talking about a fundamental political condition where people's pleasure is coming from the subordination of women. It's whole range of pleasure. So if what you're going to say is, "pleasure is our ultimate value," then essentially you're going to be defending the subordination of women all across a long continuum of acts.

For Dworkin, pornography's harm outweighs all other possible values attached to it. Any positive value accorded pornography—whether it be pleasure, edification, or political import—exacerbates and veils its real human destructiveness. Consequently, all positive associations with pornography are rendered invisible in her discourse; only the negative dimensions are given presence in her work.

The absence of competing perspectives within Dworkin's works is a brazen artistic and political choice. She places the harm to women at the center of her discourse and marginalizes all contrasting ideas about pornography. As a result, she gives undivided attention to the experiences of those whom pornography harms, particularly poor women, prostitutes, and survivors of incest, rape, and other forms of sexual violence. This shift in perspective—from prevailing interpretations of pornography to her radical reconception of it—enables previously invisible qualities of pornography to be seen. As Deirdre Lashgari writes in her introduction to Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women's Writing as Transgression: "When those who are marginal to the dominant power re-place the center, making the margin the new center of their own subjectivity, different perspectives on violence become possible…. Shifting the vantage point of the subject allows one to see forms of violence that had been invisible, or to see in unfamiliar ways." In describing pornography exclusively from the perspectives of those it most exploits, Dworkin places pornography's harm at the center of her audience's vision. "What I'm concerned about," says Dworkin, "is the way that the hierarchies are arranged in each situation … and then the meaning that comes from that for the people who are the ones exploited."

In the introduction to Returning the Gaze: Essays on Racism, Feminism, and Politics, Himani Bannerji describes this rhetorical de/centering as a revolutionary strategy for disrupting and reconfiguring hegemonic representations. She writes: "By understanding 'representation' to mean representation of our realities, from a foundationally critical/revolutionary perspective, there can emerge the possibility of making our very marginality itself the epicentre for change. This has always been the principle of any fundamentally revolutionary or critical perspective." Similarly, bell hooks finds revolutionary potential in utilizing the margins as "a space of resistance": "a central location for the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse." According to her, moving the margins to the center of one's vision is a radical act of intervention. While hooks insists on not "only speak[ing] your pain" when speaking from the margins, Dworkin's rhetorical intervention articulates only the "pain." Her texts are spaces where the harm of pornography is made central and prominent, with all other perspectives absented from the discussion.

Moving the margins to the center and excluding competing perspectives within her texts is a form of rhetorical distillation that enhances the direct, confrontative quality of Dworkin's work. By articulating only the experiences of those harmed by pornography, she presents her messages in a concentrated form, neither diluted nor distracted by opposing perspectives. Such rhetorical distillation is a bold artistic move that reflects her expressed determination to engage her audience in the most direct manner possible. As she says, she will not "go through a veil of ideas nor … interpret the world through others' ideas." She resists all pressures to frame her knowledge in relationship to other, existing bodies of knowledge on a topic and insists, instead, that her texts be inhabited by her insights alone. In doing so, she violates what she calls "a whole bunch of unwritten rules for women": "Some of the rules are academic, some of the rules are clearly gender-related. All of them have to do with hedging your bets—you know, with expressing ambivalence, with never really asserting that you know what it is you see or what you're about." She says female writers in particular are expected to couch their ideas in relationship to a host of other perspectives in order to demonstrate knowledgeability. "You're supposed to say," says Dworkin:

"now there's that, now there's that, there's that, there's that and there's that, and this one's wrong, this one's wrong, this one's wrong, this one's really stupid and dedadedadeda, and I hate oppression, I hate racism, I hate classism, and I hate this," and then you come to your conclusion. And what you've demonstrated is that, yes, you know how to dance. I mean, that's it; that's all you've done.

Dworkin also rejects these unwritten rules as middle-class conventions inapplicable to her life as a writer. She says,

I'm not a middle-class writer. I can't be. It's not the kind of life I've had … the forms of courtesy [others] expect in writing are essentially middle-class conventions that mean nothing to me … manners, and a sense of respect and, especially, a belief that there is a tomorrow so you can hoard your resources, and there's time—that if you don't do it now, you'll do it later. First you'll say this, and then you'll wait five years, and then you'll say that. Whereas for me, every day is the last day, and that's not going to change. If I don't do it now, if I don't say it now. I don't get it done now. I don't have tomorrow…. I don't write with the sense that I have anything to lose.

Rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke provides a useful framework for explicating the difference between Dworkin's direct writing style and the style Dworkin describes as "academic" or "middle-class." The latter is labeled a "proportional" mode of interpretation, whereas the former is termed an "essentializing" mode. The proportional mode seeks to interpret something by explicating its meaning explicitly in relation to all of the parts that make up the whole. For example, in a proportional interpretation of a proposed law, "the court would note that the legislation in question would be wholly irrelevant to certain of the wishes, would wholly gratify one or some, would partially gratify others, and would antagonize the rest. And its judgment would be rationalized with reference to this total recipe." An essentializing interpretation, in contrast, would pick one representative clause in the Constitution and evaluate the legislation in reference to it alone. Similarly, a proportional interpretation of pornography might present it in terms of the broad expanse of pornographic media and images, the wide variety of people's responses to it, people's many uses of it, the sexual pleasure and sexual freedom it provides to some, the detriment it causes to others, etc. Or it might present one perspective on pornography and contrast it in relation to a spectrum of differing viewpoints. But in Dworkin's essentializing interpretation, she defines pornography strictly from the perspective of those harmed by it. All other perspectives are excluded from her texts. She thereby requires her audience to step into her world as she sees it, rather than presenting her world in relation to the perspectives of others. When her perspectives stands alone, she states her message directly without interference or distraction.

This refusal to entertain competing perspectives within her discourse has resulted in characterizations of her work as myopic, distortive, hyperbolic. Alice Echols criticizes Dworkin for leaving "no room for ambiguity, contradiction, or nuance in her writing." In a review of Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Ellen Willis writes: "The misogyny Andrea Dworkin decries is real enough—it is just not all of reality." In David Pannick's review of the same book, he maintains, "A lack of perspective and proportion considerably weakens the worth of this book." Alan Wolfe claims that Dworkin's thought (and that of others who fight against pornography) has "none of the contingencies and ambiguities of language, representation, and meaning that one finds in thinkers like Derrida or Rorty." Based on his belief that all representations are open to multiple interpretations, he insists that "pornography is not, as Dworkin claims, only about men brutalizing women." Janice Winship's review of Pornography also criticizes Dworkin's exclusive focus on male domination in pornography as reductive and unreflective of people's capacity "to make different readings." And similarly, Nancy Wechsler impugns the book for its "blanket assertions" about pornography that dismiss the experiences of "the women who use porn, who enjoy it, who are turned on by it. Women who enjoy porn are silenced by these books." Each of these critics judges Dworkin for failing to present a proportional portrait of pornography, yet each also omits any consideration of the possible artistic or political functions of her rhetorical form. Their judgments are confined to the referential content of her political analysis and fail to recognize the meaning imparted by the artistic form she has chosen.

Dworkin interprets "that expectation about giving the whole picture as a serious part of the double standard around gender." She says:

Women academics are presenting it as if it's academic, but it's not. It's a lie. Foucault does not give the whole picture. Derrida does not give the whole picture. They don't spend any single part of their time essentially describing the world from other people's point of view unless their point is to undermine or destroy that point of view. And to me all that it means is that it's an expectation of gentility and politeness and courtesy and a notion that I have to prove that I'm a good girl, in this case meaning a good student, before I'm allowed to say what it is I think. Whereas my view is that my relationship with the world is a direct one.

Woman Hating and, especially, Right-Wing Women, contain elements of a proportional writing style. So does the book she coauthored with MacKinnon, Pornography and Civil Rights, as well as a few of her speeches and essays. But most of her work on pornography and her two most artistically sophisticated nonfiction writings, Pornography: Men Possessing Women and Intercourse, contain exclusively her own vision in its most intense, distilled, and direct form. "By the time I wrote Pornography," says Dworkin, "I was determined that I was going to write a book that did not have a word of apology in it…. And that became to me a fundamental principle of the politics of writing."

Ironic Reversals: Switching the Grounds of Debate

The two prominent rhetorical strategies in Dworkin's advocacy—concretization and de/centering—produce a set of ironic reversals; that is, they switch the foci and premises that underlie the public debate on pornography from a concern with the individual rights of pornographers and consumers to the civil rights of those exploited through pornography's production, distribution, and consumption. Dworkin rejects a narrow view of pornography as a cultural artifact (desirable to some, undesirable or immoral to others) and constructs a contextualized portrait of an exploitive social practice with concrete, damaging consequences to women. In the process of centering and concretizing these harmful experiences, Dworkin implicitly switches the guiding constitutional framework circumscribing pornography. Even though she does not argue in constitutional terms, she nonetheless implicitly displaces pornographers' and consumers' First Amendment speech rights to the inaudible/invisible margins of her discourse and implicitly places women's Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection at the center of her vision. "I am not interested in hearing arguments by people who claim to be protecting their precious little rights as intellectuals," states Dworkin, "their precious little status quo in the face of what is massive sexual abuse of women presented as entertainment." Instead of couching her critique of pornography in terms of constitutional arguments (whether First or Fourteenth), she marginalizes constitutional arguments and simply speaks within a separate paradigm wherein the harm to women is palpable and visible.

Placing women at the center of her discourse displaces a host of other premises undergirding current defenses of pornography. Similar to Woman Hating, Dworkin is still challenging sexual libertarian notions about "sexual freedom." "There are those who say [pornography] is a form of freedom," she states. "Certainly it is freedom for those who do it. Certainly it is freedom for those who use it as entertainment, but we are also asked to believe that it is freedom for those to whom it is done." This statement evidences the shifting vantage point from the pornographers and consumers of pornographic products to the women on whose bodies the pornography is produced and used. "Freedom looks very different when you are the one it is being done on," she states. Dworkin displaces the notion of pornography as an expression of sexual freedom and couches it, instead, in terms of its role in sexual subordination.

Whereas civil and sexual libertarians express concern about sexual repression and state intervention in sexual expression, Dworkin expresses concern about sexual oppression and violence. She switches the terms of the debate by exposing how pornography's so-called sexual freedom is, in fact, a practice of sexual oppression. From this perspective, ridding society of pornography is not a repressive measure but an urgent, necessary tactic for liberating women from one of the key mechanisms of sexual subordination.

Another significant ironic reversal emerges in Dworkin's work when she talks about free speech rights. She refers to the speech rights of women harmed by pornography and not, as is usually implied, that of pornographers and consumers. In "Pornography Is a Civil Rights Issue," she writes:

Now, we have been told that we have an argument here about speech, not about women being hurt. And yet the emblem of that argument is a woman bound and gagged and we are supposed to believe that that is speech. Who is that speech for? We have women being tortured and we are told that that is somebody's speech? Whose speech is it? It's the speech of a pimp, it is not the speech of a woman….

The reality for women in this society is that pornography creates silence for women. The pornographers silence women.

The first women silenced are those in the pictures. The construction of the pictures and the discourse that accompanies them are from the perspective of the pornographers, not the women themselves. The pornographer's voice is made to seem as if it is the woman's voice and perspective, but in actuality the women have no control over the words attributed to them. The women's own voices are absent from the text. Dworkin writes in "Against the Male Flood": "The women flattened out on the page are deathly still, except for hurt me. Hurt me is not women's speech. It is the speech imposed on women by pimps to cover the awful, condemning silence." And then there is, as well, "the silence of the women not in the picture, outside the pages, hurt but silent, used but silent." Dworkin presents pornographic artifacts as material evidence of women's silence rather than material expressions of men's speech: "Splayed legs are silence. Being beaver, pussy, cunt, bunnies, pets—that is silence. 'Hurt me, hurt me more' is silence. And those who think that it is speech have never heard a woman's voice, not ever." Again, this shift in perspective is accomplished by writing from the perspective of women used in pornography and women against whom pornography is used.

In Dworkin's writing, the relationship between pornography and women's silence is not confined to descriptions of what pornography "represents." She sketches a dynamic relationship as multidimensional as her conception of pornography itself. Based on all the complex ways pornography is invested with social power to harm women, it serves as a powerful mechanism to enforce women's silence. Pornography as hegemonic speech, for instance, functions generally to silence dissenting interpretations of experience—by drowning out, rendering incomprehensible, or trivializing speech that counters prevailing interpretations of reality. As legal scholar Richard Delgado explains, "the dominant paradigm renders certain ideas unsayable or incomprehensible; and our system of ideas and images constructs certain people so that they have little credibility. Dworkin considers pornography "a weapon of power—used to destroy the expressive abilities of the powerless by destroying their sense of reality …" and their credibility. Pornography also actively suppresses women's speech in its function as an instrument of sexual abuse against those women used to produce pornography and those on whom the pornography is subsequently used. This dimension of women's silence includes the literal loss of speech incurred by victims of sexual abuse, especially victims of incest and wife battery. Every causal claim about pornography silencing women is based on these organically interrelated aspects. In direct response to these forms of silencing, Dworkin presents the civil rights antipornography ordinance as a means for silenced women to reclaim their voices. In speaking of the women who testified at the 1983 Minneapolis public hearings on pornography, she writes: "What the survivors said was speech; the pornography had been, throughout their lives, a means of actively suppressing their speech. They had been turned into pornography in life and made mute: terrorized by it and made mute. Now, the mute spoke."

Pornography's function as hegemonic propaganda and its role in sexual abuse and in other forms of sexual subordination operate dialectically with one another to silence women. As is evidenced in the following abridged excerpt from "Against the Male Flood," this dialectic is the foundation of Dworkin's conception of pornography's capacity to silence women:

Subordination can be so deep that those who are hurt by it are utterly silent. Subordination can create a silence quieter than death…. The women say pimp's words: which is worse than silence. The silence of the women not in the picture, outside the pages, hurt but silent, used but silent, is staggering in how deep and wide it goes. It is a silence over centuries: an exile into speechlessness. One is shut up by the inferiority and the abuse. One is shut up by the threat and the injury.

Note how subordination is the context in which women are silenced to produce pornography, which is itself a representation of women's silence and further creates the conditions and the incentive to intimidate, humiliate, and terrorize women into remaining silent about the ways pornography has exploited and subordinated them. These elements do not function in a linear manner, nor even in a neat circular manner—in this passage or in society; they build upon one another in an ever-expanding dialectical pattern. As is usual for Dworkin, she makes no explicit claims about the dynamic nature of the relationship between pornography and women's silence. Instead, she iconically reproduces it within the texts themselves.

Whereas defenders of pornography seek to preserve the speech rights currently exercised by pornographers, Dworkin seeks access to speech for those who are socially silenced by male domination. "I am talking about a deep silence," writes Dworkin:

a silence that goes to the heart of tyranny, its nature. There is a tyranny that preordains not only who can say what but what women especially can say. There is a tyranny that determines who cannot say anything, a tyranny in which people are kept from being able to say the most important things about what life is like for them.

Within Dworkin's texts, the social context of male domination and its attendant suppression of women's speech is central to her conception of freedom of speech. Her textual displacement of pornographers' and consumers' First Amendment rights is based upon both her contextualized portrait of pornography—detailed in the previous chapter—and this contextualized understanding of speech as consonant with power relations in society. It is within this larger social context that it is possible to see pornography's active participation in the institutionalized suppression of women's speech. Dworkin argues that, in fact, pornography's continued existence is dependent upon the coerced silence of those it exploits.

Contrary to those who claim that protecting the speech of pornographers is essential to protecting the speech of all, Dworkin claims that fighting against the pornographers "is as much a fight for my life as a writer as it could possibly be." She says she has "learned what it is that keeps women from being able to say anything at all; and the fact that I'm constantly engaged as somebody who is a professional writer, still trying to be able to get speech to exist socially, is something that keeps me from being able to be glib about it." Twice in her life Dworkin literally lost her ability to speak: once after she was raped in the Women's House of Detention in New York City and again after years of abuse from her husband. "I am talking about speech," writes Dworkin. "It isn't easy for me. I come to speech from under a man, tortured and tormented. What he did to me took away everything;… He hurt all the words out of me, and no one would listen anyway. I come to speech from under the brutalities of thousands of men…. And so for twenty years now I have been looking for the words to say what I know."

Based on the silencing effects of pornography, Dworkin's discourse accomplishes another ironic reversal: she casts pornographers as censors. "Writers do not do what pornographers do," states Dworkin. "Secret police do. Torturers do. What pornographers do to women is more like what police do to political prisoners than it is like anything else." Only if one isolates pornographic speech from its larger social context—including its production, dissemination, and use—is it possible to consider pornography merely a form of speech. Within Dworkin's framework, pornography is a "system of terror that stops speech and creates abuse and despair. The pornographers are the secret police of male supremacy: keeping women subordinate through intimidation and assault." From this perspective, intervention in pornographers' and consumers' so-called "speech" is not censorship; it is an act of justice designed to protect women from the harm pornography proliferates, including its role in intimidating women into silence. The issue of free speech rights is not whether pornographers get to retain their right to speak, but whether they are going to be stopped from creating hostile conditions that make it impossible or unlikely for women's contrary speech to be heard and believed. This ironic inversion of the issue of free speech is no more apparent than when Dworkin describes the civil rights anti-pornography ordinance as "women's speech." She writes: "It defines an injury to us from our point of view…. It breaks the silence. It is a sentence that can hold its own against the male flood. It is a sentence on which we can build a paragraph, then a page."

Dworkin never explicitly argues against the premises underlying contemporary defenses of pornography. But her analysis subverts these defenses without allotting any textual space to articulating competing voices. As she says of this strategy, "I know what the givens are of the world that I live in, and I'm trying to undermine them. I want to knock them loose. I want them to fall." These "givens" include the necessity to uphold First Amendment protection for all speech, especially that which we dislike (despite specified legal exceptions); trust in the neutrality of the law to protect the speech rights of all people equally; belief that state intervention poses the greatest threat to sexual freedom and freedom of expression; faith in the "marketplace of ideas" as the best means for sifting falsity from truth; the notion that pornography is a private matter in which the government has no right to intervene; belief that all attempts to legislate pornography are acts of repression that curtail sexual freedom and freedom of expression; belief that women pose in pornographic representations because they "freely choose" to do so; a conceptual distinction between pornographic artifacts and the labor used to produce them; and denial of the harm of pornographic artifacts.

In contrast, the premises underlying Dworkin's position include the necessity to uphold Fourteenth Amendment protection for all people, even when such protection demands abrogating First Amendment rights of others; a belief that the First Amendment is a tool for preserving the speech of only the most privileged in our society and that, thereby, it preserves existing power hierarchies; the belief that hegemonic speech is differentially more powerful than that of socially, politically, and economically dispossessed groups; a rejection of the public/private distinction in law as a false dichotomy preserving systems of domination that thrive in private domains; and a belief that pornography is a practice of discrimination that impedes women's equality and freedom, including sexual freedom, and therefore must be subjected to civil litigation by those who can prove its harm. In short, defenses of pornography are premised on the right of individuals to be free from government interference in their private lives, whereas Dworkin seeks freedom from sexual exploitation and a right to equal protection from discriminatory practices. Her strategic reversals in the grounds of the pornography debate culminate in a direct conflict of rights that demands resolution: pornography precludes women's civil equality; so either pornographers and consumers get rights or those women harmed by pornography do. There is no compromise possible here.

As Dworkin and MacKinnon point out in their coauthored book, Pornography and Civil Rights, this clash of rights echoes earlier conflicts, most notably the battles against slavery and segregation. In both of these cases, a dispossessed group sought the aid of the federal government in an attempt to gain rights to equal treatment. In doing so, each clashed with the existing constitutional rights of white supremacists to be free from federal intervention in their lives: defenders of slavery sought to keep the federal government from interfering with states' right to conduct their own affairs, and defenders of segregation sought to keep the federal government from interfering with whites' rights to free association. Dworkin's antipornography argument is analogous to both of these civil rights struggles: current constitutional interpretation protects the rights of pornographers to engage in practices which actively subordinate a class of people. "Those who have power over others," explain Dworkin and MacKinnon, "tend to call their power 'rights.' When those they dominate want equality, those in power say that important rights will be violated if society changes…. Change has come from sustained, often bitter rebellion against power disguised as 'rights.'"

Subverting Pornography

More than anything else, the strategies of concretization and de/centering enable Dworkin to confront audience denial of pornography's harm. Her use of concretization strips pornography of its abstract, theoretical defenses and reconstitutes it in terms of its material properties: its real-life tangible harms to women's bodies and lives. At the same time, she excludes all notions of pornography's so-called socially redeeming or benign attributes and centers her texts exclusively around its massive destructiveness to women. She simultaneously makes the harm visible and provides no relief from it in her texts. This enables her to confront her audiences with the problem in the most direct manner possible. And the resulting intensity matches the urgency of the crisis she addresses.

Her reconstitution of pornography in terms of its harm is a rhetorical intervention that subverts the premises upon which pornography is currently defended—primarily as an emblem of free speech and as a crucible of sexual privacy and freedom. As Dworkin explains, "virtually all power, in cultural terms, in 'winning an argument' comes from how you define the problem. I mean,… a person who sets up the premises is the person who sets up the conclusion. And so I am setting up my own premises, and I think they're premises that help to undermine the general premises and, therefore, the status quo conclusion."

The civil rights antipornography ordinance is constructed from the premises of Dworkin's analysis. It is designed as a material remedy to the material problem she addresses: it attempts to provide individual women with a legal mechanism for redressing class-based subordination perpetuated through the production, distribution, and consumption of pornography. It provides a legal definition and description of pornography's concrete discriminating practices from the perspective of those it subordinates. It draws upon the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection rather than the First Amendment right to free expression. It repudiates the public/private dichotomy that protects sexual exploitation in individuals' private lives. It recognizes the injury pornography does to women (and sometimes men) and empowers those harmed by pornography to hold accountable those involved in the subordinating practices.

As Dworkin explains, the ordinance is designed to change "the power relationship between the pornographers and women." Like her antipornography discourse generally, the ordinance undermines the premises of pornography by infusing the law with "the flesh-and-blood experiences of women … whose lives have been savaged by pornography." She writes:

Using the Ordinance, women get to say to the pimps and the johns: we are not your colony; you do not own us as if we were territory; my will as expressed through my use of this Ordinance is, I don't want it, I don't like it, pain hurts, coercion isn't sexy, I resist being someone else's speech, I reject subordination, I speak, I speak for myself now, I am going into court to speak—to you; and you will listen.

In a manner duplicating Dworkin's rhetorical confrontation with the pornography industry, the civil rights antipornography ordinance authorizes those harmed by pornography to use their concrete life experience as the basis for confronting pornography's subordination of women. The ordinance embodies the political imperative at the heart of Dworkin's feminist resistance: "to use every single thing you can remember about what was done to you—how it was done, where, by whom, when, and, if you know, why—to begin to tear male dominance to pieces, to pull it apart, to vandalize it, to destabilize it, to mess it up, to get in its way, to fuck it up." The civil rights antipornography ordinance communicates faith that women can transform pain into political knowledge useful for destroying the system of male supremacy.