XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography (12 page)

· Elizabeth (Elmina) Drake Slenker, an elderly Quaker lady who advocated abstinence was arrested for mailing allegedly obscene material. The purported obscenity had not been published in a periodical, but enclosed within a sealed envelope.

· Lois Waisbrooker, a feminist and editor of the journal
Foundation Principles,
advised a correspondent to divorce a wife he did not love. For this, she was arrested under the Comstock laws.

The list could scroll on and on.

Yet these people will not be found in books of feminist history. It is difficult to imagine honest motives for ignoring the immense and courageous contributions Ezra Heywood and Moses Harman made to the well being of women.

A Test of AntiPorn Feminist Honesty

If these ignored radicals were the only people persecuted by social purity laws, then antiporn feminists could argue they were unaware of an historical connection between sexual freedom and women's rights. But there is at least one woman persecuted by Anthony Comstock of whom no educated feminist can be ignorant: Margaret Sanger.

Sanger first came into conflict with the Comstock laws as a result of her column entitled "What Every Girl Should Know," which ran in the socialist periodical
The Call.
The offending column graphically described venereal disease. In early
1913,
Comstock banned it. In place of the column,
The Call
ran an empty box, with the headline "What Every Girl Should Know--Nothing; by order of the U.S. Post Office."

On October
16,1916;
Margaret Sanger opened America's first birth control clinic in a storefront tenement in Brooklyn. Handbills advertising the clinic were printed in English, Yiddish, and Italian. They urged women not to have abortions, but to prevent conception in the first place. On October
26,
Sanger was arrested by the vice squad for distributing contraceptive information.

Released that afternoon, she re-opened the clinic. This time the police strong-armed the landlord into evicting her and closed the place down.

As Sanger was driven away in a police vehicle, she looked out the back at the crowds of poor women still standing at the door of her clinic. They had come to her for help. Sanger wrote: "I heard ... a scream. It came from a woman wheeling a baby carriage, who had just come around the corner, preparing to visit the clinic. She saw the patrol wagon ... left the baby carriage, rushed through the crowd to the wagon and cried to me: `Come back and save me!' " [17]

Sanger was sentenced to thirty days in the workhouse. Because the authorities feared she would go on a hunger strike, she served the term in a less harsh and more obscure prison.

In a provocative move, the first issue of her periodical,
Woman Rebel
announced an intention to disperse contraceptive information. When the postal authorities declared this issue "obscene,"

Sanger avoided having it confiscated by mailing it in small batches all over the city. As subscriptions poured in, the post office declared five other issues unmailable.

Meanwhile, Sanger prepared a pamphlet entitled
Family Limitation,
which provided contraceptive information. Before it could be published, the federal government indicted her for the August issue of
Woman Rebel.
Facing a possible forty-five years in prison, Sanger fled to England.

Before doing so, she arranged to have copies of
Family Limitation
printed by a radical publisher, who virtually guaranteed himself a jail term. In early 1915
,
Comstock personally arrested her husband, William Sanger. He was sentenced to thirty days. Ironically, his trial created a backlash 47

of public support for birth control advocates. Fake subpoenas were sold to those who wished to sit in the extremely crowded courtroom. By the time Margaret Sanger returned to the U.S. in 1916
,
the political climate had changed. She was a cause celebre and the government prudently refrained from prosecuting her.

CONCLUSION

Sexual freedom-especially pornography, which is sexual free speech-is an integral part of the battle for
women's
freedom. The censoring of sexual words and images does not simply lead to the suppression of women's sexual rights. It is an attempt to control women themselves. For women's rights have traditionally been phrased in terms of their sexuality: marriage, abortion, and birth control. To surrender one iota of women's control over their own sexual expression is to deny that it is
their
sexuality in the first place.

Today, both pornography and women's sexuality are victims of sexual correctness.

Antiporn feminists need look no further back than to the February 1992 Supreme Court of Canada decision in
Butler v. Regina.
" [I8] The
Butler
decision mandated the seizure of pornography by customs on the grounds that such material threatened the safety of women. In praising the decision, which she considers a victory for women, Catharine MacKinnon speculated: "Maybe in Canada, people talk to each other, rather than buy and sell each other as ideas." [19] Customs has used the decision almost exclusively against lesbian, gay, and feminist material.

Unfortunately, to those driven by ideology, history means very little.

48

If feminism and pornography are naturally fellow travelers, how did they arrive at the ideological impasse that exists today?

THE RISE OF MODERN FEMINISM AND PORNOGRAPHY

World War II drew a generation of women out of the home and into the workforce, where many of them felt a heady independence for the first time in their lives. When the men returned from war, they reclaimed the jobs women had been performing. But women were now accustomed to wider freedom. In 1946
,
Congress voted for the first time on an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The measure was defeated. In 1950 and then again in 1953
,
the ERA could not get past Congress.

With the economic boom of the fifties, women seemed to turn away from equality toward the contented affluence of owning a home and raising a middle class suburban family. This was the decade of poodle skirts, Pepto-Bismol colored appliances, and hula hoops. Optimism ran rampant and Father Knew Best. Only a decade later, women demanded a redefinition of who they were and what their role in society was.

What happened in between? The sexual revolution.

In the 1960s
,
pornography flourished as one of a collection of new freedoms that became collectively known as "sexual liberation." Sex had been liberated by a new political awareness.

In a groundswell of protest against the Vietnam War, an entire generation questioned the rules and rewards of their parents' world. Young people "dropped-out," pursued alternate lifestyles, and wanted everything to be "meaningful." Drugs seemed to open doors of consciousness; sex lost its aura of guilt and obligation; government lost its automatic authority.

Women rode this crest of social protest into new and dizzy territory. In 1961, President John F.

Kennedy established the first Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. Betty Friedan's pioneering book
The Feminine Mystique
(1963) captured the angst of American housewives who were being imprisoned by their roles as wife and mother. The generation they cooked and cleaned for-their daughters and sons-refused to fall into the trap of tradition. Instead, they cohabited, experimented with communal marriages, came out of the closet, and gave birth out of wedlock. They demanded their own voice.

It wasn't long before women realized that not all voices were equal in this new utopia.

In 1965
,
women activists at a conference of Students for a Democratic Society raised the issue of women's rights. They were appalled by the derision they encountered from their male counterparts. These were men with whom they had protested the Vietnam War; now these same men wanted to relegate women to working the copy machine and warming their beds. In a backlash of anger, the modern feminist movement was born.

In 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded. The next year, the first radical feminist group, the New York Radical Women, was established. Although the radicals were in the minority, the loudness of their voices and the flashiness of their tactics drew the media's attention. The Miss America pageant at Atlantic City was sabotaged; bridal fairs in San Francisco and New York were disrupted; there was a mass sit-in at
Ladies Home journal
to protest the conventional image of women projected by that magazine. Politically, some women began to call out for a cultural revolution.

49

The public began to perceive the entire movement as militant and intolerant of the traditional roles of women.

Meanwhile, the more moderate and reform-minded feminists were chalking up an impressive list of political successes. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibited sexual discrimination in the private sector (1964). President Lyndon B. Johnson's Executive Order 11375 forbade sexual discrimination in the public sector (1967). The Equal Employment Opportunity Act empowered a commission to take legal action against employers who discriminated on the basis of sex (1972).

On the streets, huge numbers of women were galvanized and united by the abortion issue.

Marching down streets, their rallying cry became "a woman's body, a woman's right."

Meanwhile, pornography was also undergoing a transformation, especially in its legal status. In the fifties, the courts still generally used the Hicklin test to judge whether material was pornographic. This test came from
Regina v. Hicklin.
[1] By this standard, anything that tended to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" was considered obscene.

In 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Hicklin test restricted freedom of speech. It was replaced as a standard by the ruling on
Roth v. the United States.
[2] This ruling declared that something was pornographic if the "dominant theme ... appeals to the prurient interest" of the average person.

Pornography began to come out into the open. Then, in 1966 -perhaps as a reflection of society's growing tolerance-the standards loosened again. According to the ruling on
Memoirs v.

Massachusetts,
material was pornographic if: "(a) the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex; (b) the material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters; and (c) the material is utterly without redeeming social value." [3]

It is difficult to establish that anything is "utterly without redeeming social value." This qualification provided a legal loophole that pornographers quickly exploited. The late sixties saw a flowering of adult films and books. Many of them included a tagged-on social message or a discussion of hygiene, as a way to skirt prosecution.

As pornography flourished, it became part of the changing view of sexuality. Sex was no longer tied, with a nooselike knot, to procreation, marriage, or romance. Pornography presented a kaleidoscope of sexual possibilities: as pleasure, with a stranger, as self-exploration, as power, with groups or with another woman...

The old stereotypes of pornography began to fade away. The caricature of the type of person who enjoyed pornography e.g., dirty old men and nervous perverts-was superseded by the sight of millions of people subscribing to
Playboy.
Couples viewed pornography together; explicit sex manuals, such as
The Joy of Sex,
became best sellers, which were prominently stocked by mainstream bookstores.

This was the democratization of pornography, by which sexual information became available to everyone-not just to the wealthy or to those willing to live on the sexual fringe. Even politically aware periodicals like the Berkeley
Barb
took up the cause of open sexuality. Founded to promote freedom of speech, the ad section of the
Barb
soon became dominated by sexually oriented businesses like massage parlors, and by individuals who placed ads to contact others with similar sexual preferences. Ordinary people seemed to have an insatiable demand for information about sex.

50

Feminists benefited immeasurably from the opening up of sex. They held rape "speak-outs" and destroyed the myth that only "bad" women were raped. With the moral connection between sex and motherhood severed, feminists could argue effectively for abortion rights. Lesbians came out of the closet. Sexual pleasure became a right-not only for men, but for women as well. And if men did not provide it-well, Germaine Greer's famous photograph with a banana held conspicuously in one hand reminded men that sexual fulfillment was not a request; it was a demand.

But a strange backlash was already underway. Simone de Beauvoir's pivotal book,
The Second
Sex
(1953, reissued in 1961), claimed that lesbianism was the embodiment of sexual freedom.

Radical feminists tended to agree. They believed that nothing short of a total sexual revolution could free women. In 1970, the organization Radicalesbians was founded; three years later, the first national conference of feminist lesbians took place in Los Angeles, amid media flashbulbs.

More moderate feminists, who wanted to reform the system by gaining access to abortion, for example, became alarmed.

A schism was opening between moderate heterosexual feminists and their more radical lesbian sisters. Betty Friedan horrified that her work was being used by radicals to attack marriage and the family-warned against the "lavender menace" (lesbianism). Between 1969 and 1971, NOW-the largest feminist organization and a voice for reform, not revolution virtually purged its gay and lesbian members.

As radical feminists continued to create their own organizations, such as the Redstockings, lesbianism began to resemble a political choice, rather than a sexual one.