Antipornography activism has been basic to the contemporary women's movement from its beginnings in the 1960s, with protests against dehumanizing and objectifying women, judging and exploiting women as sexual commodities, and promoting rape. As activists learned more about violence against women, they learned more about the coercion of women into pornography and the use of pornography in sexual abuse. The focus has always been on harm to women, not on the regulation of morals. Strategies have included marches and demonstrations; slide shows, writing, and education; civil disobedience and vandalism; and civil rights legislation.
Foreshadowing later decades of activism and analysis, in 1963 in Show magazine, Gloria Steinem published "A Bunny's Story," a two-part journalistic exposé of the shabby economic exploitation of waitresses in Hugh Hefner's Playboy clubs. In the early 1970s many activists participated in raucous demonstrations outside the clubs. In an in-house memo (subsequently quoted in Glamour in 1971) Hefner wrote: "These chicks are our natural enemy. It is time to do battle with them."
The first national action of the U.S. women's movement was a 1968 demonstration in Atlantic City opposing the Miss America Pageant. Two hundred women protested the use of women's bodies for entertainment and noted in a flier (reprinted in Sisterhood Is Powerful) that "Miss America and Playboy's centerfold are sisters over the skin."
Grassroots organizing against beauty pageants continued, including a 1975 protest in Dallas at which feminist agitator Nikki Craft threw pieces of meat onto the stage. A decade of actions, starting in 1980, against California's qualifying pageant for the Miss America crown, included demonstrations using performance art and participants committing acts of civil disobedience.
In 1970 feminists occupied the offices of Grove Press to protest its publication of pornography as sexual liberation and the economic exploitation of its female employees. In the same year feminists seized the left-wing underground rag Rat, because it published pornography, this time as revolution.
In the early 1970s groups called Women Against Violence Against Women formed independently in many cities to protest pornography on billboards and record-album covers as well as in advertising and fashion photography that featured the brutalizing of women.
In 1974 Robin Morgan articulated the principle (reprinted in Going Too Far) that "pornography is the theory, and rape the practice." That same year Susan Brownmiller, in Against Our Will, identified pornography as the "undiluted essence of antifemale propaganda" and exposed its use to promote mass rape as a military tactic in the 1971 Bangladesh war, and argued that domestic pornography promoted rape as well. Also in 1974 this author published Woman Hating, which showed that pornography sexualized the same sex-role stereotypes found in children's fairy tales.
In November 1978 Women Against Violence in Media and Pornography in San Francisco organized the first feminist conference on pornography and also a Take Back the Night march. Over three thousand women shut down the sex-industry district.
In 1979 Brownmiller founded Women Against Pornography (WAP), which opened an office in Times Square. WAP took women on tours of pornography stores and live sex shows in Times Square and developed the first slide show to take to college campuses. An October 1979 WAP-sponsored march on Times Square included over five thousand supporters.
Mass demonstrations began in 1976 with pickets and marches against Snuff, a film purporting to show the evisceration of a woman. After 1978, Take Back the Night marches, which linked pornography with date rape, incest, and battery, became annual events, first in cities, then on campuses.
In 1980 two books advanced the struggle: Take Back the Night, an anthology, persuasively defining pornography as a form of violence; and Ordeal, by the former Linda Lovelace, who told of her coercion into prostitution and pornography. In 1981 this author published Pornography: Men Possessing Women, which analyzed the dynamics of dehumanization, force, and domination.
Acts of vandalism ranged from spray painting cinemas, to destroying Hustler magazines in 1981-82 in Southern California, to overturning and despoiling all the stock in adult bookstores at various locations in Ohio, Minnesota, and Massachusetts.
Civil disobedience included unfurling banners in front of theaters showing pornography films, screaming in the audience whenever a woman was hurt on film, pouring blood over pornography in stores, staging sit-ins, and tearing up copies of Penthouse in cities throughout the Midwest.
In 1983 this author cowrote with Catharine A. MacKinnon a civil rights bill—vetoed by the Minneapolis mayor, passed then stopped in other cities—that recognized pornography as a form of sex discrimination. Under this law, individual plaintiffs could bring civil suits (thus no police enforcement or prior restraint is involved) against pornographers and traffickers for the harms consistently and systematically associated with pornography: the civil inequality that results from the bigotry and aggression created by pornography; coercion into pornography; forcing pornography on a person (for instance, using pornography to make a work environment hostile to women); or attack or physical injury caused by pornography. Legislative hearings allowed women hurt in and by pornography to testify about the role of pornography in rape, incest, battery, prostitution, and sexual harassment. The struggle to pass this law and have it upheld continues, as do conferences, marches, writing, and demonstrations.
Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1993); Catharine A. MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); John Stoltenberg, What Makes Pornography "Sexy"? (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1994).
Andrea Dworkin
See also
Censorship;
Pornography;
Take Back the Night.
