By any measure, the United States is a violent society, marked by high rates of murder, assault, child abuse, and rape. Women suffer disproportionately from this violence. Gendered violence has thus prompted new thinking and writing about pornography, but the renewed interest in pornography's social consequences has created new confusions. Traditional, right-wing advocates of censorship have been joined by people seeking to lighten the burden of gendered violence through forbidding its representation. And old dilemmas about the very act of representing the forbidden, once framed in aesthetic terms, have reappeared as political and social issues, which has not made them any clearer.

For anyone who writes sexually explicit fiction, as I do, the sociological weight now given to representations of sexual violence can prove an artistic burden, as the new advocates of censorship indeed intend. Smutty texts are as old as literature itself. Graphic writing about the juncture of sex and violence began to accumulate at the time of the French Revolution, notably in the work of the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), a literature which aimed at exposure and subversion of the reigning social codes of bodily propriety. The family tree of such writing has now become elaborately branched, including writers and artists who explore child abuse, such as Russell Banks and Dennis Cooper; sadomasochism among gay and lesbian partners, such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Joan Nestle; as well as more mainstream artists exploring more mainstream, heterosexual violence, such as John Updike and Martin Amis.

Some of the new advocates of censorship seek to distinguish between pornography that does harm to women and serious artistic efforts which aim to explore sexual violence; Cass Sunstein does so, for instance, in Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech, perhaps the most intellectually distinguished of the recent arguments in favor of censorship. The guarantee of freedom of expression to “real” artists is often derived in turn from the artistic distinction between the pornographic and the erotic. In literature, pornography divorces sex from personality, from narrative, and from a larger setting; these serve the pornographer as mere props for the real action, which is up-close description of cocks, anuses, cunts, and breasts. Erotic writing, by contrast, should tell something about people's characters by describing sexual pleasure and pain in their bodies, and something indeed about the society in which they live.

The trouble with this distinction is that the truly erotic writer may reveal a social vision which is deeply offensive to the moral, communal standards of his or her readers. As Maurice Lever's new study of the Marquis de Sade makes clear, Sade offends as an erotic, rather than a pornographic, writer; he constantly explained and indeed moralized about his orgies, though it is not an explanation which most of his readers want. The scenes of rape and defilement he created express a peculiarly aristocratic vision of worldly pleasure, the bodies of other people serving only the master's desires; there is no sexual equality, no mutual pleasure, in Sade's writings, only command and obedience. When Sade's writings excite his readers erotically, it means that we are drawn by pleasure's complicity into that disturbing vision.

In the practical world, the distinction between the erotic and the pornographic therefore often founders. While the feminist censors Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon have often sought to draw a line between the two in statutes they have drawn up for various communities, their tradition-minded partners in those communities have not done so, because of the very power of erotic art like Robert Mapplethorpe's to upset, provoke, and destabilize communal values.

The new debate about pornography involves, however, a perhaps deeper debate, concerning the very nature of representation. Forty years ago the British barrister John Sparrow defended the publication of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover by invoking the principle of the neutrality of representation. Sparrow argued that reading about a woman committing adultery did not necessarily lead a reader to commit adultery. Other defenders of freedom of expression have argued that explicit representations both of sexuality and of violence in fact have a discharging rather than activating effect, dissipating in a reader's fantasy life desires that might otherwise build up like steam pressure and lead a person to transgress.

Recent scholarship challenges this assertion of the neutrality of representation. To the debate about the power of literary imagery, it adds new insights into visual representations of gendered violence, particularly in the mass media. The most impressive modern scholarship in this vein has come from outside academic sociology, in the humanities from art historians and critics of film like Richard Slotkin and Laura Mulvey, in the social sciences from political theorists and legal scholars like Cass Sunstein and Catharine MacKinnon. Yet the variety of this work turns on a shared sociological premise: Representation leads to mimesis; that is, looking at gendered violence leads to copying it.

In place of the neutrality of representation, art historians have explored the “politics of the gaze,” apparent in nineteenth-century depictions of nudity which place the male viewer in a position of mastery looking at a naked female subject. Linda Nochlin has argued that Courbet's viewers, for instance, in gazing at such sexually graphic works as “La Creation du Monde” legitimated through the image a host of attitudes demeaning to women which could be made licit only within the domain of high art. Film critics like Laura Mulvey have in turn applied this “politics of the gaze” to popular art, film, and advertising, arguing that sexualized violence against women becomes normalized and routinized through the image as it could not be through the spoken word. Cass Sunstein draws on such challenges to the neutrality of representation to make the case for the legitimacy of censorship per se: “The problem consists of tangible real-world harms, produced by the portrayal of women and children as objects for the control and use of others, most prominently through sexual violence” (p. 213).

The theoretical foundation for the proposition that representation leads to mimesis derives largely from the writings of Michel Foucault. Representation, in Foucault's view, activates behavior in which the image serves as a neutral standard with anything but neutral consequences, and this is particularly true of the kinds of visual representations conveyed by films and television. The viewer doesn't participate in making such visual imagery as the reader's fantasies enter into the mental imagery conjured by words; instead, the visual images of the mass media are received just as themselves transcriptions or glimpsed records of actual experience. Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish that the “innocent” image thus more powerfully shapes behavior than words or verbal laws subject to challenge and debate (and this is why Foucault calls the Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham the first “innocent machine,” distinguishing its visual powers from older verbal techniques of examination or confession).

The greater emphasis on regulating images than words in the new censorship derives from this insight. Sunstein writes that “the evidence on pornography as a stimulus to violence deals mostly with movies and pictures, and the immediacy and vividness of these media suggest a possible distinction from written texts” (p. 218). As a practical correlation, the protections for free speech that apply to literature should not apply in the same way to film or television.

The proposition that representation leads to mimesis is now the real issue in a great empirical debate about the sociological effects of pornography. An excellent summary of the research favoring this proposition has been edited by Catherine Itzin. Pornography: Women, Violence, and Civil Liberties brings together a large number of essays by both English and American writers; part 3 of this collection presents, in particular, ten research articles laying out the evidence of harm on which a politics of censorship could be based. Feminist groups disputing this evidence include the Feminists against Censorship group in the United Kingdom and FACT (Feminists against Censorship Taskforce) in the United States, the latter group linked to the American Civil Liberties Union. The writings of their members can be found in another anthology, Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate, edited by Lynne Segal and Mary McIntosh; a focused attack on the data presented in Catherine Itzin's anthology appears in Marjorie Heins's book Sex, Sin, and Blasphemy.

I cannot imagine that this empirical debate would satisfy a sophisticated statistician, and indeed the Segal and McIntosh volume is at its best in criticizing the measures of harm used by Itzin's colleagues. Moreover, the discussions frequently degenerate into simplistic cause-and-effect scenarios, neglecting the characteristics of who does harm for the sake of debating what does harm. A deeper difficulty lies in using the extremes of pornography as data indicative of more general social experience. As two of the contributors to Itzin's volume, Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer, remark, “The recent focus of so many writers on causal models of sexual violence … often impl[ies] that the problem is non-normal individuals and extreme sexual practices” (p. 381).

I note, for instance, a recent evening of family entertainment on television which featured a serial killer holding a knife to a woman's breast just below her nipple. To qualify as “pornographic,” the breast would have been bared; since this was family entertainment, the young lady was shown wearing a sweater. Clothing her accomplishes the legitimation of gendered violence, as stripping her naked would not; the violence against her becomes a licit image precisely by not being sexually explicit. Or, in Foucault's terms, the image of gendered violence becomes “innocent” and normative by observing a convention of sexual discretion which allows the depiction of violence free rein, making the violence palatable to a mass audience.

It was for this reason that writers of and about explicit sexuality, from the Marquis de Sade to Georges Bataille, have argued that graphic representation can indeed become a subversive experience by removing the screen of normality from desires otherwise clothed. Bataille has argued that only when violence is literally bared, in the sexual play of pornography, can people see it as they never will see violence, no matter how graphic, which still observes the normalizing rule of sexual dissimulation.

One of the few proponents of censorship to take up this connection is the legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon. MacKinnon's early writings shocked many readers because she argued that gendered violence derives from gendering as such. Heterosexual erotic relations are in modern society inherently unequal relations of power, she has argued, an inequality expressed through violence; the more explicit the representation of sexuality, the more evident the link between violence and sex.

A serious exposition of MacKinnon's views is to be found in her essay “Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech” (reprinted in the Itzin collection), where she makes a strong argument that the domination of women is unlike other forms of domination in that it must be inherently sexually brutalizing. She argues that “the object world is constructed according to how it looks with respect to its possible uses. Pornography defines women by how we look according to how we can be sexually used” (p. 463). If in general MacKinnon hopes to stifle gendered violence by repressing its display, she more specifically hopes that women will sense themselves to be empowered by the very struggle to forbid depictions of gendered violence.

This practical proposition flies in the face of her deeper understanding of the relation of sex and power; indeed, it would only reinforce the normalizing tendencies of the violent image. Just as it is licit to show a knife menacing a clothed breast, so too can images of serial killings, of torture, and of war crimes all be rendered legitimate precisely by following the rules set out by MacKinnon and Sunstein. To act logically on their analysis, the censors ought to direct their efforts at a massive program of regulating the mass media rather than focus on the supposed extremes pornography; the censors ought to attack licit rather than illicit representations of violence, for it is in these mass-media images, if anywhere, that representation gives rise to mimesis; it is in the shared community of images that violence is normalized by observing certain representational conventions concerning sex.

Here, it seems to me, lies a sociological, rather than a legal, problem. What social purposes are served by structuring representation such that violence acquires legitimacy through codes of sexual discretion? To answer this question, we might consider pornography's historically older cognomen, obscenity.

Since early Roman times, state power has needed obscenity. Roman emperors imprisoned their enemies for obscenity when they lacked other sufficient reasons; Roman generals sought to explain away lost military campaigns as the result of lax morals in order to deflect blame from themselves to the troops. Christian attitudes toward Jews in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance similarly constructed “the Jew” in an obscene body in order to justify state powers of repression. In modern times, fascist and communist regimes have used obscenity as a synonym for dissidence, in ordinary politics as well as in art and literature.

This familiar pattern has ruled in American history as well, but with a further twist. American society has made use of obscenity to do the work of community building. In a country whose population is diverse and highly mobile, whose settlements are geographically fragmented, codes of sexual probity have formed a way to define what community is all about. The popular language of “family values” and of “values” per se is a barely disguised language of sexual prohibitions, the popular allies of MacKinnon and Sunstein taking the breakdown of family values and community standards to be synonymous with sexual explicitness.

It isn't quite historically accurate to trace this juncture of community formation and sexual prohibition back to the Puritans; the Puritans spoke a language about the body which was far more frank than bodily discourse in the later Colonial era. But there was one Puritan source for the current identification of community with sexual probity. Violent expulsion from the community promised moral regeneration to the Puritans: Once obscene influences are banished, the community will be reborn.

In a remarkable series of books, the historian Richard Slotkin has sought to trace the history of this intrusion of violence into the links between community and sexuality: Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860; The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890; and most recently the conclusion to this trilogy, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (reviewed in CS November 1993, pp. 854-55). Unlike the discourse of many of the new censors, who assume, as did the Marquis de Sade, that sexuality and violence are nearly biologically inseparable, Slotkin has sought to show how in America they became entwined historically as Americans dealt with the traumas of building community.

Through the vast panorama of these remarkable books, he shows, for instance, how ideas of masculinity were shaped through the violent imposition of European settlement on the native American landscape, and how that violent, conqueror's masculinity gradually turned inward within the European community to define the relations between American men and women. The final volume, Gunfighter Nation, particularly in parts 3 and 5, takes up mass-media violence in the context of American uncertainties about the durability and certainty of community life; the peculiar combination of unbridled aggression and clothed sexuality in film appears to him as providing a seductive bond between power and probity, recovering “the ideological values, if not the material reality, of the mythic Frontier” community (p. 228).

There are curious echoes of Slotkin's theme in Catharine MacKinnon's most recent book, Only Words. It is, unfortunately, the weakest of her writings: its scholarly apparatus is nil, and the author shows herself intolerant of all contrary argument. The immense popularity of this tract owes everything to its rhetoric. It begins, for instance, in a spirit which Sade might have thoroughly approved:

You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs. When you are older, your husband ties you to the bed and drips hot wax on your nipples and brings in other men to watch and makes you smile through it. Your doctor will not give you drugs he has addicted you to unless you suck his penis.

[p. 3]

This rhetoric draws its strength from many of the themes Slotkin has traced through his history: the settler's sense of living in a brutal environment; the need to fight implacably for survival, denying the claims of those who differ; the belief that a community will take form among those who fight together in a hostile land—for the word colonist one need only substitute the word feminist. Only Words owes its enormous American popularity, I think, to the assimilation of feminism into a rhetoric of aggression, sexual repression, and community building which marked the mythology of the American frontier.

I remarked at the beginning of this review that, as a writer of books which have been attacked as pornographic, I could not read the new literature of censorship with an unbiased mind. The social justification of erotic violence seems to me to consist exactly in its explicitness and openness, in its power to disturb. If it is true that representation leads to mimesis, then the socially consequent forms of censorship have to address licit representations, rather than communally illicit forms, and would require a regulatory apparatus of control on the model of the Catholic Inquisition during the Counter-Reformation.

If censorship is understood as a sociological phenomenon rather than as the political event Cass Sunstein imagines, the peculiarly American resonances in MacKinnon's rhetoric ought to give pause to everyone involved in this debate. What does “empowerment” mean? Does it mean community building? The undertow of community building in our society mobilizes aggression and violence; the myths of communal regeneration are inflected peculiarly in America because the tissues binding people together in this country tear so easily. Gendered violence is an enormous problem in this country, but its center of gravity lies in that perverse condition Foucault calls “innocence,” in the domain of the normative rather than the deviant.