Pornography †Government Censorship Will Never Promote Equality :: Argumentative Persuasive Argument Essays

Pornography – Government Censorship Will Never Promote Equality Catharine Mackinnon seeks to be the Galileo of sexual inequality: the philosopher free of preconceptions who reveals a new structure, incorporating all known facts, radically different from anything previously understood. The structure Galileo overthrew was the Earth-centered universe. The structure Mackinnon must overthrow, in order to make the law do what she thinks it must, is the First Amendment- centered universe (though Mackinnon would probably say it was the pimp-centered universe; pimp is a favorite term of hers). If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail; Mackinnon is a lawyer, so the law looks like the best way, or the only way, to solve the problem of pornography. If you divorce Mackinnon's conclusions from her prescriptions, you would have a valuable feminist scholar, calling attention to contexts and subtexts in our society previously ignored. But, as an attorney and law professor, Mackinnon must, to accomplish her goals, place herself squarely in confrontation with free speech. This is doubly sad, because the idea she presents us with is so valuable. Mackinnon's central idea is that pornography is the oppression of women; it is not simply talk about or advocacy of oppression. Thus, she argues, contrary to most Constitutional scholars, that pornography is not speech, but action. In Mackinnon's opinion, pornography acts against women twice, when it is made, and when it is viewed. First, women are degraded, raped and (in her belief) even killed in the making of pornographic pictures and films. Then, the pictures and films further participate in the degradation, rape and murder of women by the users of pornography. To cite just one example from Mackinnon's Only Words, Linda Marchiano, then known as Linda Lovelace, was beaten and threatened at gunpoint by her husband during the filming of Deep Throat. The movie then caused men to force women to try acts which Marchiano had only been able to perform under hypnosis. According to Mackinnon, numerous women were hospitalized directly as a result of the film; some were raped by strangers, others were coerced or raped by boyfriends. (Mackinnon and her colleague, Andrea Dworkin, do not really distinguish between rape and psychological coercion; in fact, to Dworkin, all heterosexual sex seems tantamount to rape.) While Mackinnon's world view, thus summarized, may sound extreme, a thought experiment is all that is really necessary to see the validity of her ideas.