[In the following review, Fraiman summarizes the debate among feminists regarding pornography and highlights the strengths of MacKinnon's arguments in Only Words.]

Those of us in academe all know by know that sexuality is constructed. We also know that it may feel rather unreconstructed, even untheorizable. In spite of our training, sexuality may nevertheless seem to us irrational, unmediated, and very personal. Sometimes it seems downright natural. As Catharine MacKinnon observes, “Because of its location in intimacy, harassment that is sexual peculiarly leaves nothing between you and it: it begins in your family, your primary connections, those through which the self is developed” (60). There is, of course, another sense in which sexuality does not begin in the family as much as in the courtroom, medical treatise, or literary text, but it is equally true that we live it in the tender, psychological interstices MacKinnon describes. Given this double sense of sexuality and its representations—as both public and private—I want to preface my comments on Only Words with an anecdote that I hope will do double duty as it suggests at once my personal relationship to Catharine MacKinnon and the antipornography movement and establishes something of a historical context for her most recent book.

The year is 1982, and the Reagan era is still in its appalling infancy. I am a graduate student at Columbia and active in the feminist community. A few years back, I have seen the slide show put together by Women against Pornography, and I take for granted the connection between pornographic images of women and material violence against them. Now I am looking forward to the ninth annual Barnard conference on feminism and scholarship; the theme, this year, is the politics of sexuality. On the morning of the conference, I am surprised to find my way blocked by a line of angry picketers. What species of antifeminist are these? What faction of the new right has gotten up bright and early to keep women from talking about sex? Imagine my astonishment to learn that the protesters, like the conference-goers, are feminists; they are, in fact, my old allies, Women against Pornography, and they see the conference as an endorsement of sadomasochism and other power-driven sexualities.

I walk a little more eagerly toward the opening session. The protesters are right—conference speakers do indeed explore the controversial topics of butch-femme lesbianism, feminism and fetishism, intergenerational sex, and other erotic practices long taboo in high feminist circles. The upshot is that a host of well-credentialed feminists—Gayle Rubin, Ann Snitow, Carole Vance, Pat Califia, and Ellen Willis, among others—are earnestly calling feminism to task for a regime of sexual correctness that was leaving lots of people out in the cold. Newsweek take note: feminists themselves have been worrying the issue of “sexual correctness” since 1982.¹ In the next few days, I am asked to sign a petition sponsored by a lesbian S/M group and critical of Women against Pornography. I am still used to being, precisely, a woman against pornography, and I have never understood my feminism as a defense of bondage—quite the opposite—but I begin to understand that we have become too prescriptive about what people do in bed (or wherever), and I end up signing.

In retrospect, the whole confusing event marked not only a turning point in my own thinking about feminism and sexuality but also the explosion into print of a division among feminists that had been present for some time—stretching back, arguably, even to the nineteenth century, when “social purity” and “free-love” feminists fell out along similar lines.² This time around, the decade-long, sisterly skirmish would come to be known by those in the trenches as the “Sex Wars” or, more specifically, the “Porn Debates.” Briefly, the antipornography side sees porn as a form of violence against women that is best combatted through legislative means. It points to coercion used in the making of pornography and offers the ultimate example of the “snuff film,” in which a woman is actually murdered. It also argues that porn causes copycat violence and cites studies about pornography's influence on sex offenders. Its emphasis, generally, is on the danger posed by sexuality for women—an emphasis that clusters the phenomena of pornography, prostitution, rape, and battering as the linchpins of women's oppression. The major strategy of this side has been various legal ordinances designed to restrict the circulation of pornographic materials. Having drafted most of these ordinances, Catharine MacKinnon, along with co-author Andrea Dworkin, is by far the most visible advocate of this position.

The other side—known as “anticensorship” or “prosex” feminism—is wary of legislative remedies. It points to the problem of defining harmful images and fears that conservative lawmakers will end up banning images we have fought for: women's health-care and sex education manuals, depictions of lesbianism, the vulval ceramics of Judy Chicago. It condemns violent porn but does not isolate the sexually explicit—or sex—as the root of all evil. Hustler is placed, rather, on a misogynist continuum that includes the glossiest of mainstream advertisements and the highest of cultural artifacts, and sexual violence is seen as but one locust in a plague of social, economic, and political crimes against women. This position also wants, more positively, to claim female sexual agency, in all its many and sometimes disconcerting forms. To the other side's cry of “danger,” its response is pleasure and pluralism. Without actually defending the pornography industry, prosex feminists deny that all sex workers are coerced, that sadomasochistic porn naturalizes female submission, and that images of female body parts necessarily reduce women to those parts. And prosex feminists have their own studies disproving the link between pornography and rape.

Needless to say, the clash between these views has been fierce and has fostered rival organizations in England, as well as the United States, and a flow of publications that has yet to abate.³ Antipornographers are accused of being antisex, of regressing to the puritanism and class condescension of many Victorian feminists, of abetting the Moral Majority, and of jeopardizing free speech. Prosex feminist, for their part, are accused of condoning a multibillion dollar, global industry of sexual violence against children and women, its worst victims frequently from third-world countries. This, then, is the heated context for Catharine MacKinnon's newest publication and also—in the aftermath of my Barnard conversion—for the skepticism with which I inevitably approached it.

The book itself is a moving volume in many respects, but it nevertheless finally reinforced my alliance with, as the terms of this debate would have it, leather over legislation. For example, MacKinnon denies, at one point, that her polemic against pornography presumes the use of coercion in its making (20). In fact, however, the rhetorical force of her argument relies heavily on an implicit equation between the specific abuses she itemizes and the production of porn generally. Linda Marchiano, who has testified she was raped for the filming of Deep Throat, is taken to stand for all sex workers; the snuff film, its horror obvious but actual existence doubtful, is taken to stand for all pornography. Few people would deny that women should not be raped or killed for the camera—and I agree with MacKinnon that, in such cases, the pornography itself should be implicated. What I do question, though, is her reference to a totally undifferentiated pornographic field—as if magazine and video, soft-core and hard-core, commercial and underground, heterosexual and lesbian porn could all be effortlessly conflated. The same goes for the experience of women in the business. It is important to acknowledge that, for every Linda Marchiano, there is an Annie Sprinkle or Nina Hartley who sees herself as empowered by pornography, and sex workers speaking on their own behalf have, for the most part, demanded not better work, but better working conditions.⁴ MacKinnon has argued that women, like children, cannot consent to posing for pornography since they are unequal parties to the transaction (36); yet no heterosex is purely consensual by this definition, and, unequal as women may be, I would want to insist that when women say “yes,” unlike children, they mean “yes.”

So much for the production end of pornography. As for the harm caused by consumption, I do not need any scientific studies to convince me that sexist porn contributes to the oppression of women—I teach literary and cultural studies largely because I share MacKinnon's view that words are never “only words,” that language has the power, for better or worse, to organize our lives. But if I tried to outlaw all misogynist texts, the planet would be greatly diminished—with few great books and fewer mainstream films, not many newspapers, and probably no fairy tales. Somehow, practically, the legal meaning of discriminatory language has to be constructed more narrowly than that which contributes to inequality. MacKinnon's claim that watching a rape on video is tantamount to raping often involves the implication that men turn around and act on what they have seen. When this is actually the case, I have no trouble prosecuting the flick along with the dick. But MacKinnon also wants to charge both instruments even when the only victim is on screen. “What is real here is not that the materials are pictures,” she says, “but that they are part of a sex act. The women are in two dimensions, but the men have sex with them in their own three-dimensional bodies, not in their minds alone” (17). MacKinnon's point is that such a scenario involves an act, not mere speech—so First Amendment speech protections do not pertain. I agree with her that an erection is an act, but it does not seem to me an inherently culpable one, and it should certainly be distinguished from the act of going on to restage a scene of violence. More important, however, is that pornographic materials do not, by and large, involve violence. As others have noted, women are brutalized far more often on prime time and are far more apt to be punished for sex in a Hollywood thriller.⁵ The typical consumer of pornography is not even necessarily a male, much less a rapist; heterosexual and lesbian couples now comprise a sizable part of the home-video market.⁶ The problem is, once again, MacKinnon's tendency to homogenize her subject—to deny the diversity and complexity of porn, as well as the possibility that its consumption might ever entail pleasure instead of danger for women.

MacKinnon's attempt to define pornographic speech as a discriminatory act is more successful, I think, when it comes to sexual harassment. Here the women at the receiving end are, significantly, not two- but three-dimensional, and this makes MacKinnon's claim that assaulting them with sexual words and pictures does not involve protected speech far more credible. I agree with her in this case that such words “do not merely describe sexuality or represent it. In a sense, they have sex” (58). But, nonlawyer that I am, I cannot help wondering if the legal debate about pornography has not boxed MacKinnon into the sometimes limiting contention that words, when sexual, are actions. I understand that MacKinnon needs to do this strategically, in response to those who wave the First Amendment in defense of pornographic expression. As a result, however, she is forced to deny the ways that sexual images function not as actions but as representations. For this reason, I am most persuaded by her final chapter, in which she shifts ground to take up speech primarily as speech, arguing that the Constitutional defense of its freedom should be balanced by the no less Constitutional commitment to equality—First Amendment protections brought into dialogue with Fourteenth Amendment ones. According to MacKinnon, courts should have to weigh the right of pornographers to speak against the right of women to be treated fairly, and any consideration of speech rights should also address the issue of equal access to speech. This last strikes me as an especially salient point: discussions of speech must, as MacKinnon insists, recognize that some groups are more empowered to speak than others (102).

So I find some things to praise about Only Words, though I continue to take the “pleasure” side of this particular intrafeminist dispute. MacKinnon's ideal society, liberated from sex between “human beings and pieces of paper” (110), strikes me as a place deficient in imagination. Yet, as I have tried to suggest, my trouble with the views MacKinnon has come to symbolize is very much the product of a specific history, in which the pendulum between stressing the pleasures and stressing the dangers of sexuality for women had swung, in my opinion, too far in the direction of the latter. This coincided with a moment in the early 1980s when the Moral Majority was already mounting a campaign to persecute sexual dissidents, and the Right was poised to commandeer any feminist law restricting the sexually explicit. The truth of the matter, however, is that sexuality remains rife with dangers, as well as pleasures, for women, and that feminism needs to articulate both the positions I have noted, including a stringent critique of pornography and other tools of compulsory heterosexuality. For risking personal attack to give us this, I am grateful to Catharine MacKinnon. Moreover, in light of recent attempts to discredit the feminist antirape movement on campuses—a backlash that ignores prosex feminism altogether while denying that male sexuality ever has its victims—I sometimes think the time has come to cross back over to her side.⁷

Notes

1. See Sarah Crichton's much-discussed article, “Sexual Correctness: Has It Gone Too Far?” Newsweek, 25 Oct. 1993.

2. See Linda Gordon and Ellen DuBois, “Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield: Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth-Century Feminist Sexual Thought,” Feminist Studies 9 (spring 1983); Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880-1930 (London, 1985); and, on the range of sexual attitudes in New Woman novels, Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick, N.J., 1990), 83-114.

3. A select list of publications on the antipornography side includes Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (New York, 1979); Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (Chicago, 1979); Laura Lederer, ed., Take Back the Night (New York, 1980); Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence (London, 1981); Susanne Kappeler, The Pornography of Representation (Minneapolis, Minn., 1986); Catherine Itzin, ed., Pornography (Oxford, 1992); and Diana E. H. Russell, ed., Making Violence Sexy (New York, 1993); Writings on the prosex side include the special sex issue of Heresies (New York, 1981); Ann Snitow et al., eds., Powers of Desire (New York, 1983); Carole Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger (Boston, 1984); Varda Burstyn, ed. Women against Censorship (Vancouver, 1985); Kate Ellis et al., eds., Caught Looking (Seattle, 1986); Linda Williams Hard Core (Berkeley, 1989); and Lynne Segal and Mary McIntosh, Sex Exposed (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992).

4. See F. Delacoste and P. Alexander, eds., Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry (London, 1988).

5. See Linda Williams, for example, “Pornographies on/scene, or Diff'rent Strokes for Diff'rent Folks,” in Segal and McIntosh, Sex Exposed, 263.

6. Anne McClintock, “Gonad the Barbarian and the Venus Flytrap: Portraying the Female and Male Orgasm,” in Segal and McIntosh, Sex Exposed, 130.

7. For a conspicuously ugly attack on MacKinnon (fantasizing her rape), see Carlin Romano's review “Between the Motion and the Act,” The Nation, 15 Nov. 1993. Notable trashings of feminists against rape have come from Camille Paglia in Sex, Art, and American Culture (New York, 1992) and Vamps and Tramps: New Essays (New York, 1994); and from Katie Roiphe in The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus (Boston, 1993).