English 122: Free Speech, Censorship and Copyright
from the Declaration of Independence to Napster

Professor William Warner

English, UCSB, Winter 2003

Master-sheet: reading MacKinnon's Only Words as Anti-Porn, Anti-Media Polemic

I. The Powers of Porn: Pornography is a media machine which produces texts where there is no ambiguity of meaning, no interplay between spectator and spectacle. It induces behavior which is "more real than reality" [24]; Porn becomes an ambient general social reality conditioning what sex is.

II. In the Porn spectacle, woman's body is the object which draws all women, the "you" of page 3-7, into itself, inscribing women into the apparatus of representation as victim to be consumed, known, [i.e.] raped. Men are the consumers of this spectacle, and function as the penis-ram which must assume the active raping position scripted by the porn they are compelled to consume. There is no variety or individuality or significant difference in the way men are positioned as the consumers and repeaters of Porn: [20-21 (men from judges to rapists)] and "the physical response to pornography is nearly a universal conditioned reaction, whether they like or agree with what the materrials say or not": [37]

III. MacKinnon's basic claim about Porn's effects on culture: there is a perfectly efficient relay between the "World of Porn" [mistakenly understood to be "only words"] and the "Social World" of lived reality. Porn's scripting of victim and violator is repeated in the social world.
This causal sequence goes like this: Men consume images of women as porn objects then, Men turn the social world into a copy of Porn. This thesis gives Porn a almost magical metamorphic power to transform the world in which it is consumed [58-59] Correlary: sex murder can use "porn" as excuse in his defence. MacK agrees that Porn has power to "make rapists unaward that their victims are not consenting."[96]

IV. MacKinnon's response as writer: to give her own anti-Porn text all the intensity and power she ascribes to Porn: she offers a pornographic refiguring of the primal scene of porn [3-7], uses shocking words precisely quoted [50], repeats images of literalized sexualized violence, piling these words up with a multiplicity which creates a 6 O'Clock news sense of a torrent of irrational violence. The social world becomes an alarming spectacle for her reader/consumer; there is an emergency requiring our immediate intervention.

V. The First Amendment Tradition-- by trying to define a space for free speech, apart from government intervention-- is ludicriously inadaquate for dealing with the power of Porn [summary of tradition: 75-76]. It fails to cope with Porn because this reality conditioning spectacle it treated as ideas or opinions; it offers an abstract and formal protection of every kind of speech; it fails to take account of social inequality and the resulting unequal access to speech; finally, it can't confront that Porn is more than "Only Words"

VI. Changing Law to Fight Porn: Not Speech But Equality: from the US to Canada via the XIVth Amendment:
To respond to the dangers of Porn one must take a different tact, by pursuing the goal of social equality said to be central to the XIVth Amendment: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" (Section 1)
An activist, interventionist use of "equality" instead of "speech" to fight Porn is demonstrated by Canadian law. Under the Canadian Charter James Keegstra is denied the freedom of speech to teach anti-semitism because it harms the whole society by teaching inequality [98-100]. In the Butler porn store case, the Canadian Supreme Court finds Porn = "harms" which produce "inequality" [100-102]*

VII. Where does this argument lead? Most obviously, it down grades the value of free speech: no spontaneous, various, "market place of ideas" [102]; no "slippery slope" of speech control to avoid [102-103]; no reduction of "harms" to "offensiveness" [104]; finally, rejecting idea of "no false idea" [106] ----> Instead, "under equality law, in some sense there is [a false idea]": the idea of inequality, whether through hate speech, pornography, or theories in the classroom: "expressive means of practicing inequality can be prohibited."

Conclusion: there is a place for censorship in culture and in the classroom: if there is teaching like that listed on page 107*: "academic books purporting to document women's biological inferiority to men, or arguing that slavery of Africans should return, or that the Foruteenth Amendment equality should be repealed;" and in the classroom "pornography should never be imposed on a viewer who does not choose... to be exposed to it."[108] Censorship, through the use of courts of law, is the only way to destroy the media mechine of Porn, and bring a better social world [109-110] Do you agree?

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