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Dworkin/MacKinnon: Meese/Dobson: the domestic violence nexus, August 18, 2001
This review is from: In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (Hardcover)
This book is a product of the Meese Commission established by President Reagan to repudiate the findings of the Nixon-appointed Commission investigating pornography which, after wide consultation, found no evidence that exposure to pornography leads to criminal conduct. The Meese Commission avoided coming to this "wrong" conclusion by not calling for or consulting studies (in the peer-reviewed academic sense) and instead relying on anecdotal claims largely supplied by MacKinnon and Dworkin.
This book is a product of that commission in two senses. First, is through the Meese Commission that Dworkin and MacKinnon rose to fame as the feminists acceptable to the religious right (though as their agenda became clearer they became decreasingly acceptable to other feminists). Second, this book is a replica of the kind of evidence given to the Meese Commission, except that Edwin Meese himself has had to be removed from the picture. That slight revision is necessary because Dworkin/MacKinnon ally Meese resigned as Attorney-General on 16 May 1988, embroiled in a sea of scandals (Iran/Contra, the Inslaw affair, etc), that made him perhaps less credible as an authority on morality. Thus the same case had to be presented again, in a Meese-less setting.
The evidence and arguments are the same in the ironically named _Civil Rights Hearings_ as for Meese, and suffer the same faults. The real agenda is both women's amply documented objection to heterosexuality itself (Dworkin once wrote that heterosexual contact might be acceptable _so long as the man's penis is not erect_, which is of course a gracious concession.) However as anti-heterosexuality is one form of bigotry that will NOT play well with the religious right, it was necessary to hide this agenda behind other issues.
Exploitation of workers in the porn industry is one such issue. But anyone who has worked in industries where unskilled woman predominate, for example factories and fruit-picking, and who has read and heard about pay and conditions in the porn industry, knows that porn is a less exploitative employer than most. It's no surprise that so many women, and men, choose to work in it. Despite Dworkin/MacKinnon's best rhetoric, porn doesn't seem even in the top 1,000,000, as bad employers go. So if Dworkin/MacKinnon were motivated by concern for exploited women workers, logically they'd be working with women meat workers, night-time office and factory cleaners, etc: dangerous jobs that pay peanuts. But if they did believe that porn actors are unusually exploited, and that mistaken perception were really the basis of their concern, then logically they would be supporting the union-like organisations run by and for porn workers, that (like increasing numbers of porn companies) are mainly run by women. But actually they show no sisterhood for women in porn: the "right-wing women", the sexual traitors that MacKinnon/Dworkin would like to force out of work and into other jobs, more unpleasant and less well-paid, are clearly held in hatred and contempt by both writers.
(Any record in any medium involving children or non-consenting adults is a different kind of case. In those cases the photograph or film is the record of a crime against the child or other person. The footage can and should be used to find and prosecute those responsible, along with those in the distribution and consumption chain who help the perpetrators profit from their crime. But to pretend, as McKinnon/Dworkin do in trying to score a point, that a torture movie shot in Chechnya, or footage of a child being abused, is morally the same as fantasy footage involving willing and quite well paid actors, is an obscene trivialisation of real human suffering. MacKinnon/Dworkin's rhetorical methods do sometimes lead them unto evil.)
Another issue, and a valid one, is misogynist sub-texts in porn. But if misogyny were truly their concern and not dislike of sexual content, then MacKinnon/Dworkin would be more concerned by far more misogynist genres: crime thriller, horror, teen gross-out comedy, and, of course, the media products of their own allies on the religious right. And they would be supporting women who produce pro-women porn. But instead their choice of target is consistent with people who dislike sex, not misogyny.
But there is another sub-text left over from the Meese Commission that launched this book. One of the commissioners was Dr James Dobon, author of _Dare to Discipline_, a manual advocating that parents have the "courage" to hit their children, not only with hands but with sticks, strips of leather and other instruments. Dobson even gives suggestions on how to hit babies still in diapers. It's not relevant to debate Dobson here, only to note that few feminists would support an advocate of domestic violence, which includes violence against children. Many feminists believe that men who hit children are much more likely to hit women as well, and in any case some babies are girls! But in _In Harm's Way_, as elsewhere, MacKinnon/Dworkin not only fail to attack this colleague of theirs; instead they do their best to bolster his, and his Commission's, credibility.
A feminism that refuses to distinguish between torture and fantasy, and that thinks a photograph or film showing a penis and a vagina in close proximity is so evil that it justifies cuddling up to advocates of domestic violence, is feminism that has gone on a strange, mad, journey and turned into something else. The utopia that MacKinnon/Dworkin argue for resembles no place on earth so much as Afghanistan under the Taliban, where all erotic images of women, among much else, have been ruthlessly suppressed. Oh yes: and corporal punishment within families has state and religious encouragement. But the women trapped in that ghastly place show no signs of feeling, as MacKinnon/Dworkin might say, "empowered". This is a mad and hypocritical, anti-feminist, book.
Cheers!
Laon
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