By Professor Catharine MacKinnon

Here and now, there is something virtually never included in the lexicon of group defamation. People are being callously dehumanized, horribly brutalized, and sometimes killed. Verbal, visual, and physical atrocities are committed, demeaning an entire group because of a condition of birth, targeting them for physical atrocities which are being done.

This case is distinctive in a number of ways, including the fact that a lot of money is being made from the defamatory materials, and that the connections between the material and specific physical abuses are far better documented than in any other instance.

Yet the atrocity is not acknowledged but is widely denied.

Its ideas are neither widely identified as false nor generally condemned. On the contrary, the materials are rather widely celebrated, alternately defended as freedom itself and as the price "we" must pay for freedom. Not only is this permitted to happen, it is defended by many as a measure of principle. I refer to the "cunts" of the leaflet: to pornography and the situation of women.

Part of the problem in this case is the lack of recognition, militant at times, that there is such a thing as the condition of women of which this body of materials could be a part. In reality, the status and treatment of women has certain regularities across time and space, making gender a group experience of inequality on the basis of sex.

Traditionally, women have been disenfranchised, excluded from public life and denied an effective voice in public rules, denied even the use of their own names. Women are still commonly relegated to the least compensated and most degraded occupations. Their forced dependency is exploited and venerated as woman's role; their work is devalued because they are doing it, as women are devalued through devaluing the work they do. Women remain reproductively colonized, subjected to systematic physical and sexual insecurity and violation, and blamed for it.

Women are commonly raped, battered, sexually harassed, sexually abused as children, forced into motherhood and prostitution, depersonalized, denigrated and objectified -- and told this is just and equal by the left, and inevitable and natural by the right. Women's abilities and contributions continue to be suppressed, their achievements denied and marginalized and, when valued, appropriated, and their children stolen. Women are used, abused, bought, sold, and silenced.

Little of this has changed to the present; some of it has gotten better, and some of it has gotten worse. The level of victimization of women varies within and across cultures; in the contemporary United States, for example, women of color are hardest hit. But no woman is exempt from this condition from the moment of her birth to the moment of her death, in the eyes of the law, or in the memory of her children.

This condition is imposed by force. Some force comes in the more covert forms of socialization, pressure, and inculcation to passivity and femininity, some in the more overt forms of poverty and sexual violence. In the United States, the average woman does not yet have an income that is two-thirds that of the average man. Forty-four percent of American women report rape or attempted rape at least once in their lives. Thirty-eight percent report having been sexually abused as children . Between a quarter and a third are battered in their homes. Eighty-five percent have been, or will be, sexually harassed in the workplace, thirty-five percent of them physically.

Most prostitutes are female.

Although these facts are uncontested and incontestible, neither are they really acknowledged or faced. Mostly this reality is elided because neither women nor men like thinking about it, and because men like living it, or at least benefit from it. So its victims go under without a trace. Life and letters are unchanged. Law and politics go on as usual. Virtually nothing is done about any of it, by anyone, anywhere.

Pornography has a central role in actualizing this system of subordination in the contemporary West, beginning with the conditions of its production. Women in pornography are bound, battered, tortured, harassed, raped, and sometimes killed; or, in the glossy men's entertainment magazines, "merely" humiliated, molested, objectified, and used. In all pornography, women are prostituted. This is done because it means sexual pleasure to pornography's consumers and profits to its providers, largely organized crime.

But to those who are exploited, it means being bound, battered, tortured, harassed, raped, and sometimes killed, or merely humiliated, molested, objectified, and used. It is done because someone who has more power than they do, someone who matters, someone with rights, a full human being and a full citizen, gets pleasure from seeing it, or doing it, or seeing it as a form of doing it. In order to produce what the consumer wants to see, it must first be done to someone, usually a woman, a woman with few real choices. Because he wants to see it done, it is done to her.

To understand how pornography works, one must know what is there. In the hundreds and hundreds of magazines, pictures, films, videocassettes, and so-called books now available across America in outlets from adult stores to corner groceries, women's legs are splayed in postures of sexual submission, display, and access.

We are named after men's insults to parts of our bodies and mated with animals. We are hung like meat. Children are presented as adult women; adult women are presented as children, fusing the vulnerability of a child with the sluttish eagerness to be fucked said to be natural to the female of every age. Racial hatred is sexualized; racial stereotypes are made into sexual fetishes. Asian women are presented so passive they cannot be said to be alive, bound so they are not recognizably human, hanging from trees and light fixtures and clothes hooks in closets.

Black women are presented as animalistic bitches, bruised and bleeding, struggling against their bonds. Jewish women orgasm in reenactments of actual death camp tortures. In so-called lesbian pornography, women do what men imagine women do when men are not around, so men can watch. Pregnant women, nursing mothers, amputees, other disabled or ill women, and retarded girls, their conditions fetishized, are used for sexual excitement. In the pornography of sadism and masochism, better termed assault and battery, women are bound, burned, whipped, pierced, flayed, and tortured.

In some pornography called "snuff," women or children are tortured to death, murdered to make a sex film. The material features incest, forced sex, sexual mutilation, humiliation, beatings, bondage, and sexual torture, in which the dominance and exploitation are directed primarily against women.

Hearings held by the Minneapolis City Council when our pornography ordinance was introduced there documented the harms of pornography's making and use in proceedings a member of the city's Civil Rights Commission likened to the Nuremberg Trials. The studies of researchers and clinicians documented the same reality women documented from life: pornography increases attitudes and behaviors of aggression and other discrimination by men against women.

Women told how pornography was used to break their self-esteem, train them into sexual submission, season them to forced sex, intimidate them out of job opportunities, blackmail them into prostitution and keep them there, terrorize and humiliate them into sexual compliance, and silence their dissent. They told of being used to make pornography under coercion, of the force that gave them no choice about viewing the pornography or performing the sex. They told how pornography stimulates and condones rape, battery, sexual harassment, sexual abuse of children, and forced prostitution.

Those not expressly coerced into pornography were there for the same reasons prostitutes are in prostitution: poverty, sexual abuse as children, homelessness, hopelessness, drug addiction, and desperation.

Those who say women are in pornography by choice should explain why it is women who have the fewest choices who are in it most.

Copyright 2004 Catharine MacKinnon