Title: Defending Pornography

Author/Artist: Nadine Strossen

Publisher: Abacus

Media: Book

Reviewer: Pan

One of the dangers of being immersed in a sub-culture - any sub-culture - is that it is easy to lose touch with the concerns and the views of the rest of the population. Pornography provides a prime example of this in the case of the perv scene: because we are used to dealing with sexually explicit materials it is easy to imagine that everyone else is as relaxed as we are. Of course we understand that people do get offended, that people do want to censor adult media, but somehow we imagine that these people are either repressed pervs or else power mad and unthinking morons. The intellectual argument about pornography has been won, hasn't it?

Well, although we might have won the argument the fact is that we are still living with the worst censorship of any developed industrial nation. And after all these years of solid Tory rule we have suffered the destruction of militant trades unionism and rights of protest, the Criminal Justice Act, the Spanner case, the banning of satellite porn channels and stringent curbs on video. Yep, we've won the argument but it means nothing to the world at large.

Reading Nadine Strossen's Defending Pornography is a chastening experience, not least because it promises that more is to come. She shows how Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon have joined forces with the traditional religious Right to roll forward the frontiers of censorship and ignorance. Thanks to the sterling work of these fanatically anti-sex feminists we find that the pro-censorship lobby have been armed with a new lexicon with which to impose their anti-pornography, anti-sex and anti-feminist agenda.

Thanks to Dworkin and MacKinnon no longer do the religious bigots tell us they are trying to promote 'family values' (as though we don't have any families), or that they are trying to save us from the forces of sin. Instead they'll try to ban pornography because it objectifies and degrades women, or they'll ban sex education because sexually explicit representations of the body are themselves pornographic. With this new modernist cant the combined forces of the traditional conservatives and the new femi-Nazis are marching in tandem to attack pornography as the ultimate enemy.

It's hard to believe that with so many problems in the world, with so much real sexism and inequality, people like Dworkin can insist that the fight against porn is at the core of the womens movement. Strossen, quoting chapter and verse points out how they have come to define porn as the true arbiter of political correctness: pro-porn makes you an exploiter of women and children, in their view a pro-porn feminist is a contradiction in terms; anti-porn (and better still anti-sex) and if you are female you're a 'sister'.

Where this book excels is in showing up Dworkin and her allies for what they are. Even more importantly she shows what has happened in the places where Catherine MacKinnon has actually helped draft legislation. According to these laws pornography itself is violence against women and so women are able to sue the publishers for damages. It's hard to believe that people can take this stuff seriously, but it's fact and Nadine Strossen goes over these sad facts in fine detail.

It should be no surprise that where these laws have been implemented, (and the primary example is in Canada), the first victims have been lesbian and gay publishers and book shops. Although the MacDworkinites have drafted the laws and supplied the feminist rhetoric, the people in power, their allies, are still the religious right and the conservative establishment. With more power to their censorship arsenal they've turned their guns on the people that they have traditionally used them on: gays, lesbians, sexual deviants. You would think that following this experience Dworkin and MacKinnon would change their minds, but we know that closed minds can't change.

Defending Pornography is a depressing book in may ways, but one that deserves close attention because in the end this argument isn't about pornography at all - it's about that thing we've never quite got the hang of...freedom.