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From: feit@acsu.buffalo.edu (Elissa Feit)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Posting re. Andrea Dworkin
Message-ID: <45691@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Date: 16 Nov 90 02:37:50 GMT
References: <272090CA.26470@ics.uci.edu> <1741@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Sender: ambar@ora.com (Jean Marie Diaz)
Organization: State University of New York at Buffalo/Comp Sci
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In article <1741@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> falk@peregrine.Eng.Sun.COM (Ed Falk) writes:
>This is incomplete.  What is Andrea Dworkin's definition of
>"Pornography"?

(Since I'm responding so late, I think this may have been answered?)

Re: The Amendment to Minneapolis's Civil rights law:
(I quote from Dworkin's _Pornography_:)

"The law itself is civil, not criminal. It allows people who have been
hurt by pornography to sue for sex discrimination.  Under this law, it
is sex discrimination to coerce, intimidate, or fraudulently induce
anyone into pornography; it is sex discrimination to assault,
physically attack, or injure any person in a way that is directly
caused by a specific piece of pornography---the pornographers share
responsibility for the assault; in the Bellingham version (there were
2 versions of this law- e.f.) it is also sex discrimination to defame
any person through the unauthorized use in pornography of their name,
image, and/or recognizable personal likeness; and it is sex
discrimination to produce, sell, exhibit, or distribute
pornography---to traffic in the exploitation of women, to traffic in
material that provably causes aggression against and lower civil
status for women in society.

"The law's definition of pornography is concrete, not abstract.
Pornography is defined as the graphic, sexually explicit subordination
of women in pictures and/or words that also includes women presented
dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities; or women
presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being
raped; or women presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or
mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or women presented in
postures or positions of sexual submission, servility, or display; or
women's body parts---including but not limited to vaginas, breasts,
buttocks---exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or
women presented as whores by nature; or women presented being
penetrated by objects or animals; or women presented in scenarios of
degradation, injury, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding,
bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual. If
men, children, or transsexuals are used in any of the same ways, the
material also meets the definition of pornography" [pp xxxii --
xxxiii].