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From: andrews@ubc-cs.UUCP (Jamie Andrews)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Slippery definitions
Message-ID: <85@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 4-Nov-85 20:35:41 EST
Article-I.D.: ubc-cs.85
Posted: Mon Nov  4 20:35:41 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 5-Nov-85 00:41:57 EST
Reply-To: andrews@ubc-cs.UUCP (Jamie Andrews)
Organization: UBC Department of Computer Science, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Lines: 44


     Thanks to the Sojourner article poster.  The article points up the
approach the Dworkinists take to talking about porn.
     Let's start with my definitions.  (non-legalese, hopefully non-slippery)

Harmful sex:  sexual acts in which one or more participants are unwilling,
  or under the age of consent, or in which one or more participants are
  physically injured.
Pornography:  material in the communications media that depicts or describes
  harmful sex acts, regardless of whether it was made by such acts; or
  material made by acts of harmful sex, whether or not it depicts or
  describes such acts.
What to do with pornography:  make it a criminal act to produce or distribute
  it.

     I ban things in this definition because I don't believe in absolute
freedom of speech (flames on that subject will be ignored), and this kind of
material has been shown (by Donnerstein and others) to be sufficiently
inducive to rape and aggression toward women.
     I don't ban some Dworkin-definition pornography in this definition
because I believe that some sexual material is erotica, and this kind of
material has been shown (by Donnerstein and others) to be not at all inducive
to rape and aggression toward women.
     Dworkin and Mackinnon (sp?), on the other hand, come from the political
viewpoint that all current sexual media material aimed at men is dangerous
enough to be outlawed -- whether or not this has been shown.  Hence, when they
talk about porn, they usually begin by describing material whose production or
content is highly objectionable to most; and then they slide into their
political connection between that extreme porn and the other forms of what
*they* call porn.  (I've heard both talk about it, in person.)
     Their definition is equally slippery, as some of the clauses discuss
extreme porn, and others (such as the one about "servility or display") are
very vague, refer to our ingrained Judeo-Christian attitudes about sex, and are
designed to take in the majority of the sexual material available today.
     I object to a lot of the available erotica on the grounds that it is
sexist.  I think it would be great if a good, non-sexist erotica magazine were
available.  (Has anyone seen _Yellow Silk_, the magazine advertised in _Ms._
magazine all the time?)  But "because it is sexist" is no more grounds for
taking action against this material than it is for taking action against, say,
_The Saturday Evening Post_ or _Women's Day_.  "Because it induces rape", is.

--Jamie.  (spokesman(jamie, X) <-> eq(X, jamie))
...!ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision!ubc-cs!andrews
"I believe in Santa Claus, and the DoD believes in Ada" -- D.Parnas