This is a thorough Liberal feminist defense of pornography. We do not recommend the book, unless the reader is not familiar with the debate between free speech defenders and those wishing to ban or cut back pornography. For MIM readers, the debate should be old hat, but in case it is not, this book is quite detailed, factual and up-to-date.

MIM distributes and studies intensively Catharine MacKinnon's great book Feminism Unmodified. Strossen flays MacKinnon and her comrade-in-arms Dworkin throughout the whole book as the principal enemies. If readers ever had any doubt that MIM was right about MacKinnon's reformist and counterproductive individual practice, then it will be necessary to read this book to see why what MIM said about MacKinnon has come to pass. MIM's predictions about MacKinnon's individual practice are not so much rooted in a science just of gender but from general political experience in the communist movement.

To summarize MIM's opinion of MacKinnon, we believe she has made relatively great contributions to feminist theory, while contradicting herself in her reformist legal and academic practice. She also does not work with a party, so the pornographic grenade-throwing that she and Dworkin do has worse than limited impact. It actually sets back her cause, because inflaming religious and sexual passions without methodical political and educational work only makes things worse in a country where the basic structure and people are not progressive for the wimmin's movement or anything else.

In the case of Strossen, MacKinnon has unleashed Liberalism of the variety that says the problem of pornographic views of sex is only a problem of interpretation.

MIM has referred to MacKinnon as our Hegel for gender theory. In Feminism Unmodified, she establishes gender oppression as being structural. She is the first to say in so many words that feminists should be asking "whether women have a chance, structurally speaking and as a normal matter, even to consider whether they want to have sex or not."(as quoted in a review of her work.) We call MacKinnon our Hegel because she has defined the patriarchy -- the system within which oppressed people's sexuality is appropriated by gender oppressors without consent -- for us as Hegel defined the dialectical motion of all things for Marx.

But just as Hegel failed to follow dialectics into materialism, MacKinnon turns from defining rape and sexual harassment as structural facts of patriarchy to attempting to legislate some types of rape and sexual harassment as being better than others. MacKinnon defines patriarchy as a system, which is what MIM treasures in her work. Thanks to her, we have an objective understanding of sexual oppression. But in defense of her own legal career, she argues for a subjective standard by which some forms of sexual appropriation are criminalized and others are not.

MIM recognizes MacKinnon's and Dworkin's political problems, because we have the same ones in the narrowly focused supposed Marxist movement concerning class struggle. There too we have people who can spout some Marxism but then turn to reform or individualist solutions. Hence, MIM stresses that we have to put MacKinnon's iron ore into the furnace of Leninism and Maoism before we can distill its revolutionary content. As Lenin excoriated the "economists" of his day claiming Marxism, we must likewise destroy the lifestyle movement garbage surrounding MacKinnon's work.

Gender aristocracy

The labor aristocracy is a group of people of worker origins that becomes petty-bourgeoisie according to Lenin. In the imperialist countries, reformist struggles create this petty-bourgeoisie. Likewise, MIM holds that there is a gender aristocracy dominating the imperialist countries. Almost all adult wimmin are gender aristocracy in the imperialist countries, which is to say sexually privileged, lower-rung gender oppressors.

Without the "labor aristocracy" and "gender aristocracy" details about the social structure, Marxists are reduced to arguing that conservatism decade after decade is "false consciousness." MacKinnon goes about arguing that wimmin in the United $tates exhibit false consciousness which is why they oppose her line. In general, other reformists counter MacKinnon's reformism by saying that certain phenomena are "genuine" and not "false consciousness;" therefore, most of the criticisms of MacKinnon address her but do not touch MIM's line.

Nadine Strossen has no difficulty finding numerous wimmin who say they enjoy sex, enjoy watching pornography (over 40% of adult video rentals being wimmin in couples or alone p. 144), enjoy being prostitutes and enjoy making money as exotic dancers much beyond other jobs available. Echoing the very common position of straight men that says feminists and lesbians "just need one good fu**," Strossen goes on the offensive and documents that some wimmin have supported MacKinnon, because they lived sheltered lives. For example, Lisa Palac is now editor of "Future Sex" magazine and she recounts that she was a MacKinnonite until she actually encountered some pornography (pp. 143-4) and underwent transformative sexual experiences. A womyn writer in Satanist circles named Nakived frequently writes to MIM on similar subjects regarding sexually inexperienced or brain damaged wimmin. (See the MIM web site on MacKinnon and communist feminism) MIM would say that since Palac was never gender oppressed, she always had the potential of moving from being a gender bureaucrat for MacKinnon to being another kind of gender bureaucrat.

MacKinnon would say Palac now exhibits "false consciousness." In contrast, MIM holds that adult wimmin in the imperialist countries hold sufficient privilege to experience gender oppressor pleasure, male pleasure; hence, MacKinnon would have more luck with her approach if she worked with real gender oppressed people, people in prison, children or the adult wimmin of the Third World.

We doubt that all the U.$. wimmin that Strossen found talking about heterosexual or lesbian rape fantasies and various other fantasies are deluded fools or liars. The argument of "false consciousness" should never be overused or it results in idealism, an excuse for our own poor scientific efforts.

We do not believe that there is such a shortage of jobs in the imperialist countries that we should disbelieve the majority of sex workers who say they chose their line of work and oppose all laws to criminalize them. Yes, and Strossen talks about the one example of a snuff film in which the womyn supposedly killed making it reappeared later to prove she hadn't been. (p. 191) Likewise, MacKinnon's beloved Linda Marchiano "Deep Throat" case was a case of a husband forcing her wife into the sex industry, not the sex industry's use of force.(pp. 182-) Despite what sheltered people might think, most of the imperialist country porn industry is not literally created through physical force, and that is not to mention casual non-profit porn pervading society the way it is right now. MIM does not want to be associated with the barrage of lies that become necessary to defend weak reformist causes like MacKinnon's. We urge our readers to read MacKinnon and implement the feminist revolutionary solution through work with a proletarian party, not with MacKinnon and Dworkin. Of course, we also urge MacKinnon and Dworkin to become more radical and less posturing toward the lecture and porno circuit.

The reason even scholars and feminist activists lie is that they feel they are in a weak position where the truth does not mobilize a strong force. When activists find themselves in this position, they should check themselves. Are they lying to the enemy or the people? MacKinnon sees no revolutionary vehicle to accomplish her goals; hence, she is willing to be part of lies to the people on the most important issues concerning wimmin's liberation.

Perhaps the most key lie told in the imperialist countries is an exaggeration of oppression where there is none. Such lies discredit the wimmin's movement everywhere. There is plenty of oppression in the world, but when MacKinnon says Western pornography is the "slave trade"(p. 85) in wimmin, she deserves to be shackled and permanently auctioned off so that she knows what slavery really is. Teenagers or foreigners kidnapped and used as prostitutes or literal sex slaves are protected by existing laws that need enforcement. Pornography has nothing to do with it.

In addition to lies, there is also cover-up of entire issues affecting millions. Dworkin single-handedly prevailed in getting a book to excise a reference to a false rape charge. Yet, Strossen's book does well in pointing out the intersections of rape with other gender issues, not just nation and class. While Dworkin covered up the pre-Roe truth that abortion was illegal except in some cases where a womyn claimed she was raped, Strossen points out that that to this day, attacks on Medicaid funding for abortions leave poor wimmin few choices but to claim rape to attain funding for an abortion.(p. 211)

Priorities

MacKinnon sees no revolutionary vehicle, partly because she does not concern herself with the causes of most of the world's violence. Instead she focuses on the sexual conditions of the imperialist country gender aristocracy.

When Nadine Strossen attacks MacKinnon for favoring "we should trade in our free speech rights to promote women's safety and equality rights,"(p. 248) MIM pleads that we are guilty too. We would trade in free speech rights of primary interest to the middle-classes and intellectuals in exchange for an end to more serious oppressions involving violence. Like most ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) type libertarians or political Liberals, Strossen is boring to read in the political sense, because she takes for granted her own freedom from starvation, homelessness and easily preventable disease. She is more concerned with things the middle-classes aspire to like free speech. We would say Strossen does not have her priorities straight and does not even have the best answer for promoting free speech--a stateless, communist society being held back by those who deny the oppression of class, nation and gender today.

There is one case where Strossen is correct about her priorities. She lambastes MacKinnon and MIM by implication for setting up the atmosphere in which the Christian Right instigated a crackdown on sex education. Again, MIM pleads innocence, because we do not involve ourselves with MacKinnon's harebrained reformist schemes: "In Oklahoma City, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) represented a doctor who was prosecuted for displaying a safe-sex poster on the windows of his AIDS clinic, which was located in an area frequented by gay men."(p. 20) Let us be clear that we agree with Strossen's priorities here, to the point where once the revolutionary party comes to power, there will be executions of religious nuts who attempt to block sex education, because sex education can be a life and death matter, especially in this day of diseases like AIDS. No child or teenager shall die a death of ignorance because of stupid, bigoted or religious views of some adults. If someone like MacKinnon arises in the socialist government structure and orders something counterproductive to sex education, she too will be executed under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

To some extent, because of the proletariat's need to prioritize life-and-death matters, MIM can form an alliance with the gender aristocracy, because a large portion of the gender aristocracy comes to its male pleasured state by passing through childhood with sex education. One pro-sex Liberal gender bureaucrat says, "In many years of teaching and talking sex, I have never had a man come up and say, 'I don't know where my penis is, and I've never had an orgasm.' . . . It's feminists who've put the Clitoris on the map."(p. 167) Hence, as girls become wimmin and pass from one sexual stage to another more privileged stage, many will place a value on sex education. Without it, apparently some wimmin would truly remain as gender oppressed children based on some holdovers in the superstructure from days when wimmin were more economically dependent on men. Of note in this regard, the book "Our Bodies, Ourselves" faced some banning trouble in Helena, Montana and in the case of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Boston Women's Health Book Collective that publishes it opposed a MacKinnonite law proposed in 1985.(p. 204)

Why reformism does not work

Strossen does not offer the Marxist reason for it, but she explains that the reforms MacKinnon seeks to implement cannot be implemented by the patriarchal imperialist government. In other words, legal theorists like MacKinnon may say and intend one thing and even get their ideas passed by legislatures, but those laws have no chance of being implemented as intended. Of course, this is no surprise to revolutionaries who realize that the state has to be smashed and replaced.

Hence, we should draw revolutionary conclusions from Strossen's critique of MacKinnon for giving the patriarchal state too much credit in practice on pornography and sexual harassment issues. 1) Pioneering feminists and birth control advocates were prosecuted under anti-obscenity laws. (pp. 31, 226-7) 2) The National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) has been steered toward non-controversial art that is pornography free, because work that does not provoke benefits conservatism, not because the NEA is effecting wimmin's liberation. (pp. 101-102) Thus, the NEA is not "neutral;" it is biased towards conservatism. 3) The only people actually sanctioned for racism under the University of Michigan's unconstitutional code of speech aimed at preventing harassment were Black or speaking for Blacks. (p. 223) Similarly, the only actual hearing held on any hate speech had a Black defendant. (all as the MIM Ann Arbor chapter predicted despite Black comprador-wannabes favoring the code before the code was temporarily imposed.) 4) Nude sculptures in Menlo Park, California came down and the city attorney said that the new policy was to "display only 'pleasant, non-controversial art.'"(p. 136) A female city worker had claimed she felt "violated" and hence the attorney warded off a sexual harassment suit by closing down the art exhibit. 5) Most egregious of all is the February, 1992 Supreme Court of Canada's "Butler" decision. This has resulted in attacks on gay, lesbian and feminist bookstores. Books have been banned and confiscated. Regular novels have been seized at the border. MacKinnon and Dworkin had sung the praises of the "Butler" attack on pornography.(p. 229-) The original pseudo-feminists in Canada for the Butler ruling have since admitted "'since . . . Butler. . . Canada Customs, some police forces. . . and some government funders have exploited obscenity law to harass bookstores, artists, and AIDS organizations, sex trade workers, and safe sex educators."(p. 241)

The misery of MacKinnon's reforms has not gone entirely unnoticed. Law professor Jeanne Schroeder hits MacKinnon for not being radical enough: "'What at first blush appears to be a postmodern sociological theory. . . is actually a modern liberal theory of the individual grafted onto a premodern Christian concept of the body. MacKinnon's . .. . analysis devolves into a conservative paean to the potency of masculinity as traditionally conceived.'"(p. 117) That last bit about the potency of masculinity is true of all the many wimmin-as-weaklings and helpless victim theories. Strossen also points out that weakling wimmin in the pro-life movement take advantage of the victim view. One pro-life leader said she was "forced" to have an abortion because of "pressure" from an "abortionist."(p. 196) This again demeans the oppression of Third World wimmin who really do face forced sterilization.

Unfortunately, Strossen quotes a variety of opinions, but her own opinion is Liberal tolerance of supposedly biological drives. Indeed, she believes in the "fuck-yourself-to-freedom" line that MIM satired in MT2/3. "Sex itself has enormous power to break down individual and social boundaries." (p. 176) She points out all the pornography that shows "'servants fucking mistresses, old men fucking young girls, guardians fucking wards. Class, age, custom-- all are deliciously sacrificed, dissolved by sex.'" (Ibid.) Hence, Strossen is aware of the revolutionary critique of patriarchy and quotes facts that would back it, but she herself does not hold the revolutionary feminist position. Rather she has more faith in lifestyle changes as creating social change.

Ultraleftism and right opportunism

Often times activists of watery Liberal views sense that their movement is getting nowhere and they buckle down for simplistic ultraleft views based on the same underlying assumptions of the impossibility of revolution. Rather than study the structure of society and attack that structure, the ultraleftist like the right individualist opportunist attacks individual behaviors with militant-sounding lifestyle guidelines. An example is an attack on the lesbian magazine "On Our Backs" by other lesbian activists and pseudo- feminist bookstores. Dawn Wan (of Asian descent) decorated herself in flames at a party for lesbians. When the magazine put her on her cover, the rest attacked the pornographic image and said the message was to burn Asian wimmin.(pp. 149-)

The purer-than-thou image of ultraleftists comes apart when we learn that their approach is always selective and unenforceable more generally. The University of Michigan through the work of Catharine MacKinnon succeeded in censoring an exhibit it invited on sex workers at an academic conference on sex workers.(p. 214) Strossen does not call it censorship, but she failed to note that the University of Michigan is a public school--a government-run school. Thus, something that is a multi-billion dollar industry was censored in academic representation, as an individual instance, not through radical structural change. It left everything untouched but made some people feel like they did something--by banning something they asked for! In contrast, MIM exposes individual instances of oppression in order to connect them to larger issues and approaches. We do not claim it is possible that our prison struggles or immigration or even our anti- militarist struggles can succeed in and of themselves, and certainly not as a series of lifestyle choices.

In contrast to some of the things MacKinnon unleashes that are both rightist and ultraleftist, Strossen is way too far to the right for MIM. She tolerates the rape fantasy movie "Swept Away" that came out in 1975 (pp. 151-3) and MIM reviewed elsewhere. As a typical libertarian, she sees nothing in art that could possibly cause evil, or at best, she believes there might be some evil that can be rebutted through free speech; even though speech is not free and not everyone can direct a Hollywood movie like "Swept Away."

On the other hand, we can see that the ultraleftists are in the same discourse as people like Strossen-- seeking to change actions one at a time instead of by changing underlying structures that influence all the millions or billions of behaviors at once. Abolishing production for profit and unemployment will do more for the struggle against pornography and sexual harassment respectively than all the ink spilled by Liberal feminists and ultraleftists combined. There won't be much professional pornography left if there is no profit and bosses will have no power to coerce workers into sex if workers are always guaranteed jobs. Instead of scrutinizing each worker-boss interaction, MIM seeks to change the balance of power across-the-board. Likewise, setting up sex education and public child-rearing for children untrammeled by religious freaks or sick parents will enable children to defend themselves.

MIM also does not care for Strossen's attacks on MacKinnon's and Dworkin's motives. Yes, clearly Dworkin in particular is a demagogue searching for the limelight, a pornographic fiction writer herself. Yes, MacKinnon admitted to reviewing more pornography than anybody in her Princeton lecture hall in one speech in 1992.(pp. 155-6) That does not mean she is wrong. In fact, Strossen starts the game of saying that some attack pornography because they have seen too little of it (sheltered), but others attack it because they are too interested in it (MacKinnon). Apparently the just-right exposure to pornography (whatever that is) results in libertarian views. ("Do as they say, not as they do," pp. 155-6) That is how the Christian individualist thinks, not how a scientist thinks. MacKinnon and Dworkin are two drops in the bucket. They have both said they don't mind being censored themselves for the right cause. Dworkin's own books have been stopped at the Canadian border for being pornographic, but apparently she approves of that.(p. 205) In the days of the U.S. Civil War, all adults had grown up seeing Blacks as slaves. The victory of the North did not suddenly change that. It was too late for the adults. Radicals and revolutionaries understand that point. The system has to change and then the individuals can. MacKinnon said, "'If pornography is part of your sexuality, then you have no right to your sexuality.'"(p. 161) Although that sounds terribly Liberal because of its use of second-persyn pronouns, it does not mean MacKinnon does not believe all people's sexualities are conditioned by pornography. From MIM's revolutionary anti-Liberal perspective, it means no one has the right not to change.

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