In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (49 page)

In February 1976 a movie named
Snuff
—“Made in Latin America Where Life Is Cheap” the ads proclaimed—opened at a Times Square theater amid persistent rumors, fanned by the
New York Post
, that a real woman had been dismembered to achieve its effects. The rumors evaporated
under investigation, but the film’s eroticized torture was horrifying enough to ignite Andrea Dworkin, a long-time activist in the left, who mobilized her old friends and mentors in the pacifist movement to picket the theater in a nightly vigil. Andrea had been imprisoned a decade earlier for a Vietnam War sit-in with the pacifist War Resisters League. During the early seventies she lived among the radical Dutch provos in Amsterdam, in a nightmare of drugs and prostitution, until she
fled from her battering husband and returned to the States, where she published
Woman Hating
,
her first book. The
Snuff
protest was her first feminist action; it sparked similar protests in other cities where the movie was shown.

During the fall of that year, I met with Julia London and six members of WAVAW (Women Against Violence Against Women) in Los Angeles. London’s group, formed to combat the snuff film genre, was zeroing in on another unsettling trend, the sadomasochistic imagery creeping onto the covers of rock music albums. London’s politics had been honed as an organizer for the United Farm Workers in their national boycotts of grapes and lettuce. She wanted to use the same techniques she’d mastered during that struggle—direct action, boycotts, and moral suasion—to get the music industry to see the error of its ways. Several WAVAW members had taken spirited action in June when a billboard for
Black and Blue
by the Rolling Stones appeared on Sunset Boulevard. Depicting a grinning woman bound in a restraining harness, it bore the line “I’m ‘Black and Blue’ from The Rolling Stones—and I love it!”
WAVAW spray-painted “This is a crime against women!” across the billboard and summoned the press to protest “the perpetuation of the myth that women like to be brutalized.” Days later the West Coast manager of Atlantic Records ordered the billboard whitewashed and offered his
personal apology on behalf of Mick and the Stones.

After I met with her in L.A., Julia London came to New York to present her slide show of soft-porn album covers for a group of feminist writers and activists I assembled in my apartment. She inspired us to continue meeting, but we felt that record albums were too narrow a focus. We wanted to tackle the mainstreaming of violent hard-core porn. A number of impressive people floated into the New York group—Adrienne Rich, Grace Paley, Gloria Steinem, Shere Hite, Lois
Gould, Barbara Deming, Karla Jay, Andrea Dworkin, Letty Pogrebin, Robin Morgan. Pondering what to name ourselves, the Women’s Anti-Defamation League or
Women for the Abolition of Pornography, we dreamed up plans for speak-outs and teach-ins, but no one had the energy to start organizing. I think in our arrogance we hoped we could skip that crucial step. Instead, we tried to compose a paid advertisement for the
Times
, to be signed by hundreds, that distinguished our feminist opposition to porn from the traditional conservative view. Conservatives believed that porn’s danger lay in its exposure to innocent young girls. We believed that its exposure to and effects on young boys and men were the problem.

Our meetings to refine our thoughts, and to quibble over language, went on interminably through the spring and summer of 1977. Andrea, Adrienne, and Gloria worked up a draft: “What, after all, does our work against rape and wife-beating amount to when one of their pictures is worth a thousand words.…” Lois Gould, Barbara Mehrhof, and I preferred something calmer: “We would draw the line wherever violence or hostility toward women is equated with sexual pleasure, we would draw the line wherever children are sexually exploited. We do not oppose sex education, erotic literature, or erotic art.…” Barbara Deming put in: “The First Amendment was never designed to defend sexual terrorism …” Adrienne Rich supplied an urgent coda: “We affirm each woman’s right to control her own body—the freedom of sexual preference, the freedom to choose or reject motherhood.…” Bella Abzug’s office sent us a copy of her antipornography statement. Leah Fritz got nervous that our group was all white. I kept a thick file of everyone’s copy and caveats, and then the group petered out from exhaustion.

While we were still meeting and amending, the antipornography front shifted to Berkeley, where Diana Russell, Kathleen Barry, and Laura Lederer started WAVPAM, an acronym for Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media. Russell and Barry were respected authors and activists known for their work against rape and prostitution. Lederer at twenty-six, a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Michigan, represented the bright hopes of a younger generation. “
We did not spend our time discussing how do we define pornography,” Russell recalls. “We became activists very quickly.”

So quickly, Lederer recalls, that they
rashly accepted free office space from COYOTE, a mismatch of intentions that nearly scuttled the antiporn activists before they got off the ground. COYOTE, an acronym for Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, was a prostitutes’ rights group run by Margo St. James, a colorful and media-savvy figure on the San Francisco scene.

WAVPAM chose International Women’s Day, March 8, 1977, to confront the Mitchell brothers, San Francisco’s leading porn entrepreneurs, at their live sex theater on Kearny Street. About two months later, on May Day, the group mobilized four hundred Bay Area women for an afternoon march down Broadway, the city’s major porn thoroughfare. Demonstrators chanted, “Women Say No to Violence Against Women,” “Pornography Is Anti-Woman Propaganda,” “Pornography Is a Lie about Women,” while they plastered
THIS IS A CRIME AGAINST WOMEN
stickers on sex shops along the route.

For one hundred dollars a week, which often went unpaid, Laura Lederer became WAVPAM’s fulltime coordinator and editor of
Newspage
, its monthly bulletin of antiporn essays and actions. “I knew it wasn’t enough to keep passing the hat at meetings,” she recalls. “We had to raise money.
Dianne Feinstein was mayor then, and she was speaking out about the Kearny Street blight, how it was bad for San Francisco’s image, so I went to see her. She gave me five hundred dollars out of her own pocket and said, ‘Keep going!’ ” Marya Grambs from the battered women’s movement suggested that Lederer write a funding proposal. Two wealthy Bay Area feminists read the first draft and contributed five thousand dollars.

In June 1978,
Hustler
ran its notorious cover of a naked woman being fed into a meat grinder, a newsstand shocker even for the blasé. The cover, which bore the line “We will no longer treat women like pieces of meat,” was the inspiration of Larry Flynt and his new hire, Paul Krassner of
The Realist
, a libertarian leftist whose specialty in print was gross excess. Called upon to defend the meat grinder cover, Krassner fell back on the classic “Feminists have no sense of humor.”

The
Hustler
cover brought a flood of new recruits into the movement. Seizing the moment, WAVPAM initiated plans for a national “Feminist Perspectives on Pornography” conference. Diana Russell,
the Mills College professor and rape researcher, advanced the group two thousand dollars from her personal savings. Twenty-two-year-old Lynn Campbell, a boycott organizer for the United Farm Workers, was brought in to work full-time with Lederer on
the conference planning.

The first national feminist antipornography conference, at Galileo High School in downtown San Francisco, was called for the weekend of November 4–5, 1978. When hoped-for foundation grants didn’t come through, the organizers
plunged nine thousand dollars in debt to launch their event on a professional footing. Guests speakers received round-trip tickets and a one-hundred-dollar honorarium; out of respect for their talents, comparable payments went to a group of local artists and the singer Holly Near.

Activists Marg Hall and Martha Gever flew in from Rochester to conduct a workshop on a form of direct action they obliquely called “browsing.” While pretending to peruse the porno racks in convenience stores, they’d drip glue on the magazine pages and insert messages such as “Pornography Hurts Women.” Crystal Arp and Lori Bradford of the Colorado Bluebird Five in Boulder came to speak on “How to Get Attention Without Getting Arrested (We Hope).” I was part of a contingent of New York writers that included Florence Rush, Andrea Dworkin, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde. Adrienne, invited to read poetry with Susan Griffin at the Friday night session, was one of the few movement celebrities to sense the group’s financial straits and decline a fee.

Kathy Barry’s
opening address conjured a beautiful vision of a world without porn and called for imaginative new strategies to wage a battle against the ideology of sexual violence. To those who cautioned that any action against pornography infringed on the right of free speech, she retorted, “We must recognize this patriarchal tactic to keep us on the defensive, in our homes, and silent. There are no easy roads to liberation.”

Saturday evening culminated in a candlelit “Take Back the Night” march (the first of its kind) through the porn district, kicked off by an exhortation by Andrea Dworkin. I’d seen Andrea in my living room, but this was the first time I’d seen Andrea in action. On the spot I
dubbed her Rolling Thunder. Perspiring in her trademark denim coveralls, she employed the rhetorical cadences that would make her both a cult idol and an object of ridicule a few years later. Dworkin’s dramatized martyrdom and revival-tent theatrics never sat well with me, but I retained my respect for her courage long after I absented myself from the pornography wars. Her call to action accomplished, three thousand demonstrators took to the streets, snaking past Broadway’s neon peeps, “adult” book stores, and garish massage parlors while Holly Near sang from an amplified truck and local artists weaved through the line bobbing surreal effigies of madonnas and whores. The visual effect was very San Francisco. As I watched some onlookers gaily waving from the sidewalk, I sensed they mistook us for a lost tribe of Halloween revelers.

I stayed for the Sunday postmortem. By then we knew that the city’s newspapers had blanked out the nation’s first feminist antipornography conference and march, except for a feature on Margo St. James of COYOTE, who told reporters that
she
had organized “Take Back the Night” to show that feminists weren’t opposed to the selling of sex, just the packaging of it. Taking advantage of the local media’s political naïveté, the wily publicity hound had flummoxed WAVPAM and four months of work.

That afternoon I approached Laura Lederer and Lynn Campbell, the twenty-something organizers, and offered them a proposition that was rash, spontaneous, and eminently pragmatic. The weekend’s disappointing outreach had convinced me that New York, the home of both Times Square
and
the national media, was the only place to launch a national feminist antipornography campaign. Laura and Lynn had the energy and vision; my battle-fatigued colleagues had the practical know-how and media savvy. If the two women cared to uproot their lives and organize in New York, we might be able to get somewhere.

The two women came east to take their political soundings. Laura decided she would be more effective if she stayed put and edited an anthology based on the San Francisco conference. (
Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography
appeared in 1980, with an afterword by Adrienne Rich.) Lynn was eager to relocate and start organizing. We set
our sights on a huge East Coast conference, to be held in the fall, and a plan to follow up the conference at a later date with a march on Times Square.

Lynn Campbell arrived in New York in April 1979. A group of us met her at the airport with flowers. Adrienne Rich, Frances Whyatt, the poet and novelist, and I each put in one thousand dollars to open a bank account for her living expenses. Maggie Smith, the hip owner of Tin Pan Alley, a bar and restaurant on West Forty-ninth Street, had lined up a cheap apartment. Everyone was captivated by our slight, angelic blond cheerleader, so earnest that she had dropped out of Stanford to organize for the Farm Workers, so ascetic that her idea of a dinner treat was a small container of coffee yogurt. Lynn’s time on earth was very short. Two weeks after her arrival, she learned that she had a malignant melanoma. Still she decided to stay with the job she’d been summoned for.

The group that became Women Against Pornography was livelier and more disparate than any I’d ever worked with in the movement. Maggie Smith’s bar, with “I Will Survive” blaring on the jukebox, was a pit stop for the neighborhood prostitutes she was trying to keep off junk. Amina Abdur Rahman, education director for the New York Urban League, had been with Malcolm X in the Audubon Ballroom on the night he was murdered. Dianne Levitt was the student organizer of an anti-Playboy protest at Barnard, Dorchen Leidholdt had founded New York WAVAW, Frances Patai was a former actress and model, Marilyn Kaskel was a TV production assistant, Angela Bonovoglio did freelance magazine writing, Jessica James was starring off Broadway, Janet Lawson was a jazz singer, Alexandra Matusinka’s family ran a nearby plumbing supply store, Sheila Roher was a playwright, Ann Jones was writing
Women Who Kill
, Anne Bowen had played guitar with the Deadly Nightshade, and Myra Terry was an interior decorator and a NOW chapter president in New Jersey.

A month or so into our work, two veteran feminists joined Lynn Campbell as full-time staff organizers. I told Dolores Alexander, NOW’s first executive director and co-owner of Mother Courage restaurant, she could have a job for one hundred dollars a week, what we were paying Lynn, if she could raise her own money. Dolores was
so successful in getting donations from some of the smaller progressive foundations and her personal friends that we were able to bring in Barbara Mehrhof, a founding member of Redstockings and
THE FEMINISTS
. Barbara offered ideological continuity that extended back to the early days of New York Radical Women.