In these hearings—Minneapolis in 1983 to Massachusetts in 1992— women testify about being hurt in and by pornography. This hurt in cludes every kind of sexual exploitation and abuse. The hearings are road maps of injury, made graphic through the speech of those who had their legs spread, their hands tied, their mouths gagged. These hearings and the political organizing that went into creating them pushed silence off the women in these pages—they stood up and spoke. But while some legislators listened—and while other hurt women, still silent, hoped—so ciety at large pretty much turned its back on the suffering caused by pornography and refused to consider honorable and equitable remedies. These hearings also contain all the familiar leftist arguments for pornog raphy: it is free speech or free sexuality in a free marketplace of ideas. Only when women’s bodies are being sold for profit do leftists claim to cherish the free market. The protectors of pornography have arguments and principles; the status quo supports the validity and legitimacy of their world view. Their arguments and principles help to continue por nography’s current status as constitutionally protected commerce in women and maintain the colonialization of women’s bodies for male pleasure.
Listening to the arguments for pornography is like listening to the refrain of a song one can sing in one’s sleep. Listening to the victims, on the other hand, requires patience and rigor; it requires the courage to take in what they have to say—to feel even a tiny measure of what they have endured. Many women try to distance themselves from the shame and squalor of sexualized violation—and refuse to empathize with hurt women. They especially do not want the hurt to be public; they reject what they consider a politics of victimization. In reality, they are rejecting
the facts of women’s lives, often including their own, and a politics of resistance to male power over women.
I come from a generation of women who. did not have feminism. I was born in 1946 and graduated from high school in 1964. Women were invisible in history and culture, literature and politics, art and athletics. The best way to see a woman protagonist would have been to go to a play by Euripides. After the Greeks, it was all downhill. I found myself on the political Left because of the issues I cared about as a child: preju dice against blacks, including de jure segregation in the South and apart heid in South Africa; abortion and contraception, both of which were then criminal in the United States; anti-Semitism, from pogrom to Holo caust, all of which my family, mostly dead, had experienced; the rights of the working man, because my father, who was pro-union, worked in a post office as well as being a teacher; literacy and access to books; pov erty; peace in the face of nuclear threat and the Cold War; and I liked Lenny Bruce, Bessie Smith, and jazz. My concerns had to do with human suffering—I was against it—and social fairness—I was for it. This may sound simplistic, but concentrating on suffering and fairness is an exact ing and difficult discipline. For me, these were urgent and troubling is sues of conscience, not ideology. I never took a stand based on what is now called theory, although I did read Marx and Engels, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Prudhomme, Henry David Thoreau, and even Ernesto Che Guevara’s Guerilla Warfare, which, in high school, along with Catcher in
the Rye, I studied and adored. There weren’t any mountains where I lived in New Jersey, but I practiced possible assault strategies on the first shopping mall built in the United States, just blocks from my parents’ home. My understanding of politics has always been concrete: humans are being hurt; here are actions that must be taken and institutions that must be changed. And I read to learn: more about suffering, more about fairness. As with many of my generation, maybe all, the Vietnam War was the defining event of my young adult life. I was against it. I fought against it from 1965, when I was arrested at a sit-in at the United States Mission to the United Nations, until April 1975 when it ended.
It has been a devastation to me to see the U. S. Left’s disregard for women and women’s rights over the last twenty-five years: a nearly abso lute indifference to our suffering and an unapologetic disdain for what is fair. In the 1960s many women my age lived as militant left-wing radicals or flower children or both; but by 1970 some began to apply to women the standards of justice applied to other disempowered groups. On the
Left women were used as menial labor, and our sexual availability was taken for granted. Fighting for others, some of us learned to fight for ourselves. Radical feminism emerged from the Left and brought left-wing values of equality to women. The Left opposed feminists every step of the way—and not just because the boys were losing cheap labor and cheap lays. They were blind to injustice against women: injustice that had their names on it. The Left especially opposed emerging consciousness and activism regarding rape, wife-abuse, incest, pornography, and prostitu tion. In the early 1970s, rape became a cutting-edge issue. The organized Left opposed prosecuting rapists without fear or favor because bogus charges of rape had been used to persecute black men. Convicting white men who raped did not seem to the men on the Left a fair move—one that would change everyone’s perception of rape and of black men. Re defining rape from the point of view of the victims was taken to be vin dictive and mean. Men of the Left wanted female voices on rape silenced. In the mid-1970s, battery became a cutting-edge issue. Left-wing lawyers conjured up the specter of the “knock on the door, ” police-state entry into the home that is, after all, a man’s castle. They wanted the voices of beaten women and feminist advocates silenced. Rather than face the suffering of the victims, they became militant on the due-process rights of the perpetrators. A few years later, incest became a cutting-edge issue. The Left denied its existence while protecting the sexualization of chil dren under the rubric of free sexuality for children. The Left simply denied the harm done to children by pedophiles, rapists, sadists, and pornographers, any of whom might be strangers or acquaintances or family. Efforts to protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation were characterized as a tyranny of the repressed. The Left wanted the voices of adult survivors silenced and refused to listen to child victims without a mountain of independent corroboration. In the late 1970s, pornography became a cutting-edge issue. The Left took the position that pornography was liberated sexuality and that those opposing it were right-wing collaborators. A free-speech absolutism, which in earlier years the Left abhorred with respect to racism, became the Left’s iiber- principle. When prostitution and the trafficking in women globally be came cutting-edge issues in the mid-1980s, the Left suddenly honored money, contracts, and exploited labor—as if it were the dream of all girls to suck cocks for a few bucks.
This chronology of issues is only approximate, because victims, sur vivors, and organizers worked on all these issues (always with opposi
tion from the Left) before the larger public became aware of them. For instance, the first antipornography demonstration by feminists was in 1970 in New York City: a sit-in to denounce both the low pay of women workers at Grove Press and its publishing of pornography. Barney Rossett, owner of Grove, condemned the sit-in as a CIA plot. The charge of right-wing collaboration was born then. Earlier, in 1968 and 1969, there had been protests against the Miss America Pageant: protests against objectifying and dehumanizing women through sexual voyeur ism. In the public’s perception, one issue followed on the heels of another, often supplanting attention paid to the prior agitation; but for feminists who worked against violence against women, the 1970s and 1980s were two decades of constantly expanding knowledge, all related through speak-outs, consciousness-raising, books, conferences, demonstrations, marches, civil disobedience, lobbying, drafting legislation, and building women’s studies departments. It started with rape, what is now called “stranger rape. ” But once women began to understand rape, to unravel the lies about it (legal and vulgar), each of the other issues began to show through what had been a lead barrier of obfuscation, denial, indifference, and outright cruelty. These issues were all connected, intertwined; in any given woman’s life, they intersected in complex ways.
The Left has pretty much failed in its efforts to block feminist work against rape, wife-abuse, and incest, but it has been more successful in protecting pornography and prostitution. Every conceivable effort has been made to silence women who have been hurt in or by pornography: they are slandered, stigmatized, stalked, and shunned. Similarly, survi vors of prostitution are expected to disappear into that thin gray line between night and day, not living or dead: touched too much inside; dirty vaginas, dirty mouths; not citizens, not like us, not of us; nothing to say. The men who rape or batter or incestuously rape or sexually abuse chil dren or make pornography out of women and children or use pornogra phy made of women or children or use prostitutes or pimp prostitutes always have something to say. On the Left, these men are deemed to have ideas; their experience is respected—the more low-down, dirty, or vio lent, the better; they are crowned as liberators, rhetorically worshiped as freedom-fighters—each woman or girl used (plugged or boned or what ever the current hostile slang is) representing a triumph over repression or suppression or oppression; in fact, a triumph of expression.
In addition to romanticizing forced sex and celebrating sexual exploi tation, the Left has joined the Right in defending the culture of dead
white men: protecting it from criticism or change; keeping it Inviolate, immune from contamination by creative persons not dead or white or male. The culture of dead white men, built on the bodies of silenced women and colonialized people of color, has become a weapon to keep living women of all races silent. Like a private club that keeps out all but an elite few, art and books especially are used to tell the emerging women—emerging not only from silence but often enough from hell— that they are not good enough or important enough or worthy enough to be listened to. The proof of their insignificance is in their suffering: hav ing been raped or beaten or prostituted. Was Aristotle? Was Descartes? Why listen to women who are more pleasing laid out flat, legs spread, than standing up, talking back, talking real? Why should the men of liberation interrupt the liberatory act itself to listen to the person whose hole he was sticking it in? And if I were to say that hole is not empty space waiting to be filled by anyone or anything, what would my author ity be? How do I know? But he knows—every “he” knows.
The books I read growing up—the books of dead white men, or near dead, the men living but remote by virtue of their own presumed supe riority to women—did not, could not, tell me about the suffering of women or what it would take to make society fair for women. I read the men of conscience— but Camus did not consider these questions, nor did Sartre or Whitman or Shelley or Lord Byron. I read the men of suffer ing—Dostoevsky, Proust, Rimbaud— but they were silent on the suffer ing of women. The things I wanted in life were in the realm of men, of culture: to write books, to be politically engaged; to strategize against injustice, to expose it; to break down institutions that supported suffer ing—laws, manners, habits, threat of force or threat of the mob or threat of prison or threat of exile. I simply did not understand that girls in my generation were excluded by definition from doing virtually everything I wanted to do. The exclusion was egregious; but so was the consequence of not identifying the excluded group by name—women. I empathized with every group I knew to be excluded and I knew them by name: blacks, the poor, exploited workers. But men were the real people; women did not exist in consciousness. Men were actors on the stage of history, doers in the culture of intellect and creativity. Women were ab sent; and it is impossible to empathize with a vacuum, a blank space, a nonentity. There was no injustice in this invisibility; it was the nature of women to be absent from action. There was no political conception that women were excluded, thus disenfranchised, socially stigmatized, politi
cally powerless—only that women had a different, opposite function to men, a preordained, predetermined purpose that precluded heroism and originality. History, culture, justice were not our province; romance was, marriage was, babies were. In truth, one’s body got touched and pushed into and hit and knocked around by men who had a birthright to invade using force, which was taken to be a measure of desire: and one rooted for the invader, the action hero, and disavowed her, the culpable victim. Wanting to be the hero, a girl did not recognize rape as rape even when it happened: she’d stumble around hurt and confused, trying to forget. Wanting to be human, even when one was pushed down and pushed over and drilled into, one did not recognize the generic nature of the event. Any such recognition would strip one’s life of dignity and individuality; one would lose all credibility, even in one’s own mind. Wanting to love, even when treated with contempt wrapped in seduction and condescen sion, one could not draw a line, even around one’s own body, because he, not she, was the significant person, the one who acted, the line drawer: the real person. Girls wanted so much, not knowing they wanted the impossible: to move in a real world of action and accomplishment; to be someone individual and unique; to act on one’s own feelings, not to have to wait passively until a boy felt something so that one might react—he turns on the switch and then the current flows; which switch will he flick? One had appetites and ambitions, talents and desires, capacities and potential, drive and vision, questions and curiosity. Almost inevitably in my generation, girls were raped in response to assertions of self: being in a proscribed place; being alone; being outside; being inside; showing affection or interest or delight; asserting ambition—intellectual, creative, athletic: every act was a provocation, and eventually a man punished one for wanting either something or anything.
It was the biblical god of the Old Testament who said that knowledge and sex were synonyms and made knowledge a male domain: he knew her. She knew nothing and ate the apple from the Tree of Knowledge because she was pliable and weak; she got expelled from the Garden, her home, and got pregnant and multiplied, her labor painful and bloody to punish her for daring to want to know, or for daring to act—to pick an apple. There is no divinely inspired paradigm for a woman’s wanting to know without her also deserving and getting punishment: not, at least, in the Judeo-Christian world. The punishment is against her body: taking it, using it, entering it, causing her pain, her will irrelevant. The punisher has power and gets pleasure, his recompense for being mortal. The girl, erased and mute in the culture originating in that old book, increasingly
becomes invisible and silent to herself. The ambitions die. The dreams die. The adventurei1, the explorer, the creator in her dies. She becomes whatever her body means to men. Her mind is hurt by rape and other physical assault to her body; it fades and shrinks and seeks silence as refuge; it becomes the prison cell inside her. Rape and physical assault damage the mind; and rape is concrete and consistent, mandated by the man’s ownership of the woman and by her separate destiny, her bloody, painful destiny. Every invasion of the body is marked in the brain: contu sions, abrasions, cuts, swellings, bleeding, mutilation, breaking, burning. Each capacity of the brain—memory, imagination, intellect, creation, consciousness itself—is distressed and deformed, distorted by the sexual ized physical injuries that girls and women sustain. No matter how much we are undressed, the shadow of unexplained, undeserved pain covers us with shame and despair. All around us there are other women, seemingly not hurt, making small talk, acting normal, which means happy, not discontent, certainly not devastated. Girls are still being socialized not to identify with—feel empathy for—other females: she got hurt because she did x, y, z—I didn’t, so I didn’t get hurt; she’s at fault, I’m not; the punishment fits her crime; blame her, exonerate him. This continuing, culturally applauded socialization of women not to empathize with other women is a malignant part of the culture of men, dead white ones or not. Women are perceived to be appalling failures when we are sad. Women are pathetic when we are angry. Women are ridiculous when we are militant. Women are unpleasant when we are bitter, no matter what the cause. Women are deranged when women want justice. Women are man- haters when women want accountability and respect from men. Women are trash when women let men do what men want. Women are shrews or puritans when we do not.
We learn—still, now, despite the gains of feminism—not to call atten tion to ourselves, only to the signets of our conformity: the sexualized conventions of grooming. We cover over being the victims of sexual abuse, because otherwise we are exposed in poses and positions and with bruises that excite some men or many men or nearly all men or the next man. Each abuser makes his cut, adds his mark, his smell, his ejaculate, his contempt, his destruction, to the social identity of a woman exposed. She is in the male mind—the minds of men—as the spread-out thing, or the bruised and brazen thing, or the serially fucked thing. She’s rarely