A Q&A With Nadine Strossen

When Nadine Strossen’s guide Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights was first revealed in 1995, America was within the grips of a significant cultural schism over erotic expression. Conservatives and an influential cadre of feminists had teamed as much as promote porn censorship, with some success. The radfem contingent claimed the existence of authorized porn was an affront to girls—hindering their battle for equality and driving violence in opposition to them—and thus argued that free speech was incompatible with feminism. However feminists like Strossen did not settle for this. A New York Legislation College professor who headed the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1991 to 2008, Strossen argued that opposing censorship was not solely essential as an summary liberal precept however was in itself good for selling girls’s rights.

Almost 1 / 4 century later, Strossen’s arguments are nonetheless a significant antidote to a lot of what one hears from outstanding feminists. And because the left-right anti-porn alliance continues to wield affect in statehouses and in Congress, a model new reissue of Defending Pornography is a must-read for a brand new technology of free speech defenders and libertarian feminists.

I talked to Strossen final week about why she initially wrote the guide and why it is nonetheless related at this time. I will be publishing our chat in two elements within the Intercourse & Tech publication this week, so keep tuned for the second half on Wednesday. The next transcript of our dialog has been mildly edited for size and readability.

What compelled you to first write Defending Pornography?

Strossen: I first wrote Defending Pornography approach again in 1994 as a result of there was then prevalent throughout the ideological spectrum a really harmful false impression that one had to decide on between being a feminist and being a free speech advocate, and that if one actually supported girls’s rights, girls’s security, girls’s dignity, girls’s equality, then one needed to help censorship—specifically of so-called “pornography” or sexually specific, sexually suggestive expression. And it wasn’t almost as well-known correctly that there have been many people who strongly opposed censoring pornography. (And by the best way, I at all times say “pornography” with citation marks round it.)

There have been many people who opposed censoring pornography, not solely due to our dedication to core free speech rules, but in addition, independently, exactly due to our dedication to feminist objectives and rules, and our understanding—primarily based on widespread longstanding expertise, in the USA and elsewhere—that regardless of how well-intended, censorship of pornography would find yourself doing girls’s rights much more hurt than good.

May you perhaps elaborate on that a little bit bit, the way it winds up doing extra hurt than good?

Since then, Liz, I’ve had the chance to write down about different kinds of controversial expression, together with—and once more, with scare quotes—so-called “hate speech,” so-called “disinformation” or “misinformation,” so-called “extremist” speech. And I’ve come to see that each one of those efforts to censor all of those controversial sorts of speech, together with pornography, endure from the identical basic flaws. All of these flaws emanate from the irreducibly subjective and obscure nature of the idea, which signifies that whoever the implementing authority is—whether or not the federal government, whether or not particular person residents, as would’ve occurred beneath the mannequin anti-pornography regulation that was proposed by the so-called radical feminists—has basically unfettered discretion to determine what inside that inherently elusive and manipulable idea, on this case pornography, is inconsistent with their values. And that signifies that for the remainder of us who disagree with a specific, particular person, subjective idea of both sexual speech or hate speech or disinformation, that our freedom and our equality is undermined.

Now, since girls and feminists and advocates of reproductive freedom and LGBTQ people and advocates of their rights—by way of many historic intervals, and together with in the USA—have been within the minority, a minimum of in lots of communities, it’s utterly predictable that legal guidelines concentrating on pornography, obscenity, another disfavored class of sexual expression persistently have disproportionately been enforced to suppress these views, views which might be particularly essential for girls’s rights and security and dignity and well being and equality and lives.

It is at all times superb to me how few individuals appear to understand that. 

You realize, for thus a few years, these of us within the feminist anti-censorship motion would predict that if the so-called radical feminist imaginative and prescient of unlawful pornography had been enacted—and their idea was characteristically obscure and subjective, any sexual expression that’s subordinating to girls or demeaning or dehumanizing or degrading—that their advocacy can be among the many expression that may be the primary to be focused.

And certain sufficient, that prediction instantly got here to go. Andrea Dworkin, a author, and Catharine McKinnon, a regulation professor—their idea of unlawful pornography was adopted by the Canadian Supreme Court docket [in 1992]. Instantly, Canadian Customs seized plenty of books on the U.S.–Canada border that had been deemed to be inconsistent with that idea. And amongst these books had been books that had been written by Andrea Dworkin herself. As a result of within the means of denouncing pornography as being degrading and dehumanizing, she after all goes to nice lengths to explain it. And you might type of have schadenfreude and “I informed you so.” But it surely was a tragic proof of idea, if you’ll.

There was a really lively girls’s anti-pornography group in lots of elements of the nation, together with New York, referred to as Girls Towards Pornography. And as was attribute of those teams, they’d have huge desk shows on sidewalks the place they’d show examples of what they thought-about to be probably the most misogynistic, violent, horrific pornography. And one which I keep in mind, which was fairly well-known or notorious, was a canopy picture from Hustler journal which confirmed a girl being stuffed right into a meat grinder. And among the many locations the place that they had these shows was Grand Central Station, a significant commuting level in New York. And commuters had been complaining about how upsetting and horrifying these pictures had been, so the authorities at Grand Central Station booted out Girls Towards Pornography. And guess what they did? They went to the New York workplace of the ACLU and requested us to defend their proper to show the pornography that they had been advocating ought to be banned and criminalized.

That is superb. I really like that story.

I imply, no sense of the irony right here, proper? I assume it does not should be mentioned, however—simply to underscore—any expression can be utilized to convey utterly totally different messages. They had been utilizing what they thought-about to be probably the most harmful expression, presumably to not stimulate violence and discrimination in opposition to girls however for precisely the alternative objective, proper? So that they themselves had been simply proving the very over-simplistic cause-and-effect assumption that underlies the censorial impetus that, , you see a picture that is degrading, and subsequently you are going to undertake concepts which might be degrading and it would even lead you to have interaction in degrading conduct. Could possibly be precisely the alternative.

You had been a part of a gaggle, with Joan Kennedy Taylor, referred to as Feminists For Free Expression, appropriate? 

Sure, I used to be one of many co-founders of that group. I keep in mind engaged on the founding paperwork most intently with Marsha Pally and Marjorie Heins, who was a long-time lawyer with the ACLU Arts Censorship Mission. Joan was one of many early leaders and activists in that motion as effectively.

Did individuals see it as an oxymoron on the time, that feminists had been combating at no cost expression? As a result of I do know after I speak about this at this time, everybody’s like, “No, feminists hate free expression.”

The pendulum stored swinging backwards and forwards, Liz. Actually, within the ’70s and the start of the second wave of the ladies’s motion, and thru many of the eighties in many of the nation, feminists—together with all advocates of equal rights and human rights—had been simply assumed to be, and assumed ourselves to be, allies of free speech.

I actually keep in mind the very first time I heard the so-called feminist pro-censorship, anti-pornography argument. I imply, it was so surprising to me that I actually, all these a long time later, have a whole visible reminiscence of after I heard that argument. I used to be attending a conference at the moment. I lived in my childhood dwelling metropolis, which I returned to after regulation college, of Minneapolis. And I used to be chief of the Minnesota Girls’s Political Caucus, which was a nonpartisan group looking for to extend girls’s participation in politics and politicians’ concern for girls’s points. And someone talked in regards to the argument that was then being pioneered by Dworkin and McKinnon in a seminar on the College of Minnesota Legislation College. That is the place they first aired this argument, and—I do not know if the historical past, nevertheless it was truly enacted into regulation by the Minnesota Minneapolis Metropolis Council [in 1983], vetoed by a remarkably brave, great mayor named Don Frazier, whose spouse, curiously sufficient, was an internationally-renowned main feminist, Arvonne Frazier. However anyway, it was such a surprising argument.

However in a short time—because of, I’ve to say, very charismatic arguments by McKinnon specifically—that motion actually took off. And that is why there was an earlier counterorganization referred to as FACT, the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce, that was spearheaded by Sylvia Legislation, a feminist professor who was additionally at NYU Legislation College, who was very concerned with the ACLU, and Nan Hunter, who was, I consider both the primary or second—she could have been the very first—director of the ACLU’s then-new lesbian and homosexual rights challenge. And FACT truly filed a really influential temporary within the first authorized problem to the primary McKinnon-Dworkin regulation that was truly enacted with out a mayoral veto, that went into impact in Indianapolis [in 1984].

I do not know whether or not [U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana Judge Sarah Evans Barker] expressly cited the FACT temporary, however she positively included its argument in her opinion, making the purpose that it was particularly advocates of girls’s rights who trusted strong free speech and that this regulation, in her view, was antithetical to girls’s equality in addition to to free speech. After that, the U.S. Supreme Court docket affirmed the decrease court docket resolution—effectively, first, the Seventh Circuit affirmed it, in a wonderful opinion. The U.S. Supreme Court docket summarily affirmed it [in 1986].

We thought that the battle was over, as a authorized matter. So FACT sort of disbanded. It jogs my memory a little bit little bit of what occurred with Roe vs. Wade, the place the pro-choice motion thought, “We have succeeded, now we will fold our tents and go dwelling,” and the opposite facet turns into extra galvanized. And that is what occurred right here. The unconventional feminists grew to become extra organized by way of influencing the cultural dialogue, together with on campus. They harnessed themselves to the parallel motion that was growing on campus to outlaw hate speech extra usually, of which this idea of sexist pornography is a subset of hate speech—sexually specific hate speech that discriminates in opposition to girls. So these two actions had been propelling one another in tandem.

And bizarrely—by way of the utterly totally different ideology—this motion was fueled by, and in flip helped to gasoline, a motion coming from the proper, as embodied most influentially by the Meese Pornography Fee, named after Ed Meese, the lawyer common beneath Ronald Reagan. It issued a report in 1986 which embraced a cultural and spiritual and political conservative opposition to pornography, utilizing the identical stigmatizing time period, denoting of their case, sexually specific expression that undermines so-called “conventional household values” that endangered the so-called “conventional American household.” And regardless of their utterly antithetical views in regards to the function of girls and of girls’s rights and equality, they had been utterly joyful to make widespread trigger in advocating for restrictions on sexual expression.

So there was one thing that was referred to as the Pornography Victims Compensation Act that had been proposed in Congress with bipartisan help, which might’ve been a federal model of the Dworkin-McKinnon anti-pornography regulation. It mainly would have allowed anyone who had been topic to sexual assault or intercourse discrimination to sue creators, purveyors, distributors of sexual expression as allegedly having induced the detrimental attitudes that led to the detrimental actions in opposition to girls. And this was actually poised to be crusing by way of Congress. The conservatives had been supporting it as a result of they hated pornography for his or her causes, and the liberals had been supporting it as a result of the view was very prevalent that “feminists help this.” So that you’re completely proper, that place grew to become equated with feminism. Feminists for Free Expression was based particularly to counter that regulation and to defy this widespread assumption that feminists help censorship. And we despatched a letter to Congress that we had been informed was very influential in terminating that laws that by no means was enacted, thankfully.

You write within the new preface to the guide about how calling them radical feminists—this group that basically opposes porn and intercourse work and could be very pro-censorship—is a misnomer. Are you able to clarify why you say that?

It was finally a view that could be very anti-sex, which I do not see as a radical view in any respect. And that’s not simply hyperbolic conclusion—I’ve received direct quotes, repeatedly, from MacKinnon and Dworkin the place they speak about intercourse as being inherently degrading to girls. They expressly equate girls with youngsters within the legal guidelines and of their writing, in order that these of us who assume that we get pleasure from intercourse, not to mention those that assume that we might get pleasure from taking a look at and even, heaven forbid, performing for or creating pornography… One among our different leaders in Feminists for Free Expression was Candida Royalle, and I used to be so joyful to see that not too long ago her papers have surfaced and she or he’s being written about, however she and Veronica Vera and Nina Hartley, different former pornography performers and creators of pornography, together with what they thought-about to be particularly empowering and liberating and joyful for girls, had been a part of this motion as effectively. However the MacKinnon-Dworkin line was that these of us who assume that we help this freedom and even get pleasure from exercising it are victims of false consciousness, and we now have to be protected in opposition to ourselves simply the best way youngsters are. And I imply MacKinnon actually equated girls with youngsters in being inherently incapable of significant consent within the realm of the sexual, together with sexual expression. That, to me, is the alternative of a progressive, radical view.

Keep turned for half two of this interview in Wednesday’s publication.

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• The return of Anthony Comstock: The 151-year-old Comstock regulation “banned…every little thing starting from contraception to pornography. It stays some of the evident assaults on free speech rules in our federal code.” Now it is again within the battle over abortion drugs, as Jonathan Turley explores here.

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