PORN ROW
Jack McIver Wetherford
New York: Arbor House, 1986
248 pp., $16.95
Over twenty years ago the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart uttered the famous "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it." Despite all the attention that has been paid to pornography, especially of late, we haven't really moved very much beyond Stewart. Trying to define pornography is like peeling an onion. Beneath each layer emerges another layer. Each conclusion only suggests deeper analysis, further investigations. And at each level debate rages. It is impossible to come to some societal agreement on even the simplest of the basic questions, those surrounding issues of civil libertarianism versus community standards. If we could arrive at some consensus on these first questions - whom do we protect? what is free speech? what is the line between art, erotica, and pornography? - we would still have only scratched the surface of the pornography question. It goes deeper and deeper the more we dig. It seems simpler, at least to the Meese Commission and the evangelical Right, to just suppress porn, and to assume that out-of-hand is out-of-mind.
What becomes additionally confusing about the various pornography debates which currently flourish is that they seem to be several simultaneous debates about substantively differently subjects, all under the very loose umbrella of the pornography question. What evangelicals Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are discussing is wholly different from what feminists Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin are talking about. That both these constituencies should be joined in some gerry-rigged coalition against pornography is ludicrous and worrisome. It is ludicrous because most of what Falwell and Robertson represent is anathema to the beliefs of Mac-Kinnon, Dworkin, and other feminists; worrisome because feminists stand to lose much more than they can gain through the victory of the anti-porn coalition. In a photograph accompanying an article on the Meese Commission in the July THE WORLD & I, a group of picketers is marching in front of a 7-11 store, protesting the store's carrying of Playboy and Penthouse. One woman is carrying placard "Porno is Anti-Women," a sentiment with which many feminists agree. Further down the picket line, a second woman carries a sign "Porno is Anti-Christian." It takes no great leap of imagination to replace the word 'porno' on each of these signs with a number of other terms, dear to feminist hearts, such as 'Abortion,' 'Day Care,' 'Comparable Worth,' and so on. What is at issue for the Right is not what is at issue for the feminists. It is, in fact, more likely that their notions of what is and is not pornographic are widely divergent.
In the Time cover story that accompanied the publication of the Meese Commission report, the findings of the commission were linked with the recent Supreme Court decision on homosexual sodomy. Both were seen as symbolic of a turn back toward "traditional family values." This is, to begin with, an unclear concept given the fact that the family has evolved and changed so many times over the last centuries. Feminists, including Andrea Dwokin and Catherine MacKinnon, have fought hard against notions that heterosexuality is, by God and nature, normal and that homosexuality is abnormal. The basic notions of what Adrienne Rich first called "compulsory heterosexuality" underlay MacKinnon's analysis of pornography and its use in the oppression of
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