Tynan's Anger

This is something of a break in Tynan's Anger, I don't usually engage in explicit political arguments here, but this is something I feel very strongly about; it does relate to theater, film, music and new media tangentially, but only as it relates to society at large.

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It is easy to understand the divisiveness that comes with the treatment of pornography in modern society—traditionally, it has been attacked by the Christian pro-right, and those on the left, who support free speech, have opposed it. Lately I have been reading Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs, a mainstream treatise on the misappropriation of pornographic imagery as feminism; despite the examples in her book being extreme, blatantly obvious cases of misguided, lazy understanding of ethical principles, it has, like most books on the subject, been described as "highly controversial."

With that in mind, it doesn't surprise me that recent columns on the divisiveness over the use of rape imagery in Observe and Report, as well as Nicholas Kristof's column on the lack of sufficient testing in rape kits (or that the letter column had to have its comments section turned off). When an article shows just how prevalent a problem sexual assault and abuse is in our society, from Hollywood blockbusters to the lack of police support for one of the most frequently committed crimes in our society, it will face an enormous wrath of backlash because it threatens the "very fabric of our society." Arguing a more radical position in the mainstream press is next to impossible.

Nonetheless, in light of the recent verdict to ban hate crimes against homosexuals, there is one practical, achievable law that should be passed that should not be as controversial as it is bound to be: Reviving the Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance.

This is not an area where you can trust Wikipedia; considering that the website features 87% male contributors, and the pages of Jenna Jameson and Marilyn Chambers are 10 times more elaborate and developed than those for Betty Friedan or Ellen Willis (or for that matter, Socrates), you'll have to dig deeper. Suffice to say, here's basic history:

In the 1980s, various local legislators attempted to pass laws preventing that would allow women who were sexually abused, assaulted, or raped in pornographic films to seek civil legislation against pornography producers. The legislature was in part prompted by the the 1980 memoir Ordeal by Linda Boreman, star of the industry-defining film Deep Throat, published a memoir claiming several cases of being raped, physically assaulted, and violently pressured to film scenes against her will. Laws supporting legal recourse for victims of sex crimes in the porn industry were passed in various local governments, including nearly universal support whenever the issue was addressed by a public ordinance.

Nonetheless, the courts repeatedly turned down the law; in the first case, Minneapolis Mayor Donald Fraser vetoed the bill, claiming that the city did not have the budget for a lengthy, expensive Supreme Court case, but also because he disagreed with it on his own views (the next mayor of Minneapolis was Sharon Sayles Belton, the city's first female and African-American mayor). With obscenity still an issue of contention for free speech advocates in the federal court system, many feminists debated whether it would be more effective to argue legally for reform or whether to proceed through education and social action. The movement for the Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance largely died down in 1992 after the Canadian Supreme Court passed R. vs Butler, a bill that included many of the arguments of the Ordinance into its definition of obscenity—by turning rape in the porn industry in the free speech issue, and by incorporating it into a larger slippery slope argument, the issue of sex abuse in the porn industry became an issue no one on the left wanted to touch.

I thought of the Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance a lot when watching yesterday's coverage of the Hate Crime Legislation. Though it passed with flying colors, an effort that would have seem impossible 25 years ago, it seems ludicrous today to think that even 175 in the House would vote against it. The argument against used a similar free speech and slippery slope line of reasoning that plagued the APCRO 20 years ago. Jon Stewart noted, "you can still hate them, but you don't get to hit them," and even conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, reflecting on the diminishing power of the far-right Republicans, noted, "Who wants to join forces with someone who would use the word 'hoax' in regard to Shepard's murder 'that continues to be used as an excuse for passing these [hate crime] bills'?"

So public opinion has certainly changed on hate crimes, but it has not on the serious issue in terms of rape in pornography. Furthermore, with obscenity having not been a contentious legal issue for almost two decades, it seems that there should be nothing stopping those on the left from pushing the case. So why the lack of activism? It could be the education and public discourse issues that many feminists advocated in the 1980s. The Matthew Shephard case was a national story that dominated cable and evening news, was turned into an award winning play and an award-winning television film. The most public argument against rape in the porn industry, which for all we know happens nearly every day, comes on Maria Bamford's 30-minute Comedy Central Presents special, and backhandedly in Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic. Meanwhile, we are deluded with dozens of films that legitimatize and, in many, cases blatantly advocate the sex industry while ignoring this issue; many of which, it should be noted, are broadcast on HBO, the very same network that broadcast The Laramie Project.

Nonetheless, the argument is basically the same in both cases; in both hate crime law and anti-rape in pornography law, free speech would not be affected. Anti-gay rights advocates could still write incendiary columns, and pornography and its advocates could still be published freely. What would be disallowed, however, would be to commit violent acts of assault or rape against homosexuals or those who work in porn.

To that end, the term "Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance" is probably outdated, as it was conceived in a larger cultural framework that came at a time when radical feminism was not seen as a fringe movement and when civil rights. When framed as a law emphasizes providing legal opportunities for women who are raped as part of the sex industry, as opposed to a rebuke on the entire industry, it would seem ridiculous to most Americans to oppose such a law.

Of course, the prevalence of those who argue against prosecuting rape of any kind is often ignored. The opposition to all forms of sexual assault law, often using the label Men's Rights Activists, is growing strongly, and its presence is especially strong on the Internet. You can argue that mainstream media personalities like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh share most MRA views, and Limbaugh, of course, coined the now-mainstream term "feminazi." I imagine I will receive some nasty comments for this blog post, none of which I will censor or even respond to.

Because of the lack of information as well as the rise in MRA attack in blog comments, daily conversation, and mainstream press, arguing to regulate rape in porn is something few outside the feminist blogosphere would think to address publicly. Nonetheless, that silence is precisely the problem; my only regret is not being able to post this in a larger venue. From the MRA point of view, the recent Hate Crimes legislation is just as crucially related to feminism as it is from the feminist point of view. The Men's Rights Activist blog Men's News Daily argued that it is impossible to support gay rights without being a part of the "feminist power agenda." That, to me, should close the mainstream book on the real agenda behind MRA. That should be a good sign of the kind of person who argues against hate crimes or rape legislation.

Allow me to break down the possible arguments against regulating rape in porn (which seems ridiculous to write in a sentence, but it needs to be done). First off, for those who oppose pornography in any way shape or form, I understand that point of view, and I am not throwing out the issue outright. However, this is a clear, tangible goal that was a legitimate public social issue 20 years ago, and that, with more public awareness, has the potential to be achieved again due to changes in the legislation and public opinion of related cases.

Now for much the more numerous other side: that it would be impossible to produce porn for the fear of faulty civil rape allegations. The argument here would be that with the bloated nature of the civil courts,and considering given the lack of other opportunities and personality types of those who work in pornography, it would significantly raise the risk of false, completely baseless charges against certain people who would have their reputations tarnished forever. In fact, the faulty charges of the Kobe Bryant and Duke Lacrosse Team Cases factored heavily into the rise of the organized MRA movement, and resulted in spikes in the sales of Kobe and Duke Lacrosse merchandise (though it's not like the ideas behind MRA were created by those cases).

First off, I will say this: it's not like those in the porn industry have a particularly untainted reputation to begin with. The social stigma against those in the porn industry is already well established both on the left and the right. The social stigma of those who work in porn may only be rivaled by those who go into the sex industry and later regret the decision and speak out against it. Never mind the fact that Norma McCorvey, the "Jane Roe" in Roe v. Wade, was turned into a national icon by far-right pro-life activists when she later recanted her support for abortion rights.

Secondly, behind the MRA-style argument against APCRO is the assumption, in some cases implicit, in some cases explicit, that rape is an essential part of pornography. This is an argument that the majority of society would find despicable, but it is one likely to be stopped quickly because its an immensely controversial viewpoint with questionable validity; we can never really know how many cases of sex in pornography would be legally defined as rape, especially now, with the rise of amateur, non-professional pornography. Of course, we get significantly factually-challenged far-right opinions expressed in the mainstream press all the time as legitimate, but for a radical feminist position, it requires absolute, irrefutable accuracy to be mentioned without a wave of backlash.

Nonetheless, the general public support against actual instance of rape is overwhelming, even if the actual public discourse on rape is skewed, biased, and uninformed. Just as public opinion is enormously opposed to those who think violent attacks against those based on race, ethnicity, sex, or sexual orientation, those who would be against rape in principle in any form, including the porn industry, would be largely negative, perhaps even on the Internet, where opinion is skewed in particular on this issue.

For those who see it as a free speech issue; I hope I have addressed above why it is most definitely not a free speech issue. For a good summary of recent obscenity legislation, I would recommend checking out this summary from the University of Missouri-Kansas City website. Basically, it has become such an expensive and convoluted to prosecute an obscenity case against pornography when the First Amendment is involved, that most don't even try unless it involves child pornography. The argument here has nothing to do with obscenity, and recent rulings in hate crime law should only support that cause.

Lastly, here's a question I will admittedly argue from a patriarchal viewpoint; as a trigger warning, I would recommend those who reject that viewpoint to ignore this next section:

One more question remains: how does the current, unregulated form of the pornography industry affect the experience of watching porn? As a mainstream, socially-conscious liberal, would watching porn while knowing that no matter how enthusiastic a woman seemed on screen, there was a higher than you'd like to think chance she was being raped in this footage, would you be able to get off as effectively? If, on the other hand, there was a law that let the mainstream liberal presume the women in the video was, at the very least legally protected against being raped in a porn video, wouldn't you be able to put your conscience aside more easily when your brain is really not the organ in focus at the moment?

Or, on the other hand is the fact that a woman could be raped a turn-on, even implicitly? Would someone who would never watch self-described rape pornography still find something tantalizing in the idea that they could be watching woman being raped? This is not an "all sex is rape," "all porn is rape," or a "rape is the ultimate turn-on argument;" it's the notion that men who in theory oppose rape could be unconsciously supporting and possibly even glorifying it to themselves in practice.

And of course, there are the millions upon millions of men, perhaps even the majority, who make no objection to the fact that they see the possibility and actuality of rape in pornography exciting. That voice is too loud on the Internet to examine further.

Labels: Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance, Crime, feminism, male rights activists, msm, Pornography, rape allegations, sexism, Sexual abuse, Sexual assault

There's a brouhaha at the Seattle Pacific University student newspaper over a request to take an article from 1998 off their website. 33-year-old Ethiopian immigrant Shakespear Feyissa, now a lawyer, is pressuring the school and the paper, The Falcon, to remove an article which discussed a dropped sexual assault charge against him and his indefinite suspension from the school. At the time, Feyissa wanted his story to be heard. Years later, it became one of the top results on Google for his name.

I agree with the school paper on the matter of preserving its archives. You can't force the paper to take the article off the web, as they have the rights to everything they publish. There's no way I would have agreed to this when I was an editor at my college newspaper. But is adding robots.txt censorship? Does taking something off Google, but not the web, violate freedom of speech? I don't think it does, but I may change my tone on that in a few years. It raises some legal questions about how important Google is to accessing information in today's world, and whether a governing body (in this case, a school administration) is prohibited from forcing the press to take something off Google without taking it off the web.

Of course, now the point is moot. Because of the coverage of the controversy, the article is nowhere to be found on the Google results for "Shakespear Feyissa," But the stories on the controversy are all over the place. Not exactly the best SEO strategy if you're trying to remove a rape allegation from Google.

(via Romenesko)

Labels: censorship, google, new media, rape allegations, shakespear feyissa