Pornography: Men Possessing Women, by: Andrea ... - Feminish

and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. O thers in the same or differentcircumstances of torture and terror have spokenout to bear witness. O ften, they were not believed- Theywere sham ed, not honored. We smelled the humiliation,the degradation, on them; we turned away. At the sametime, their stories were too horrible, too impossible, toounpleasant; their stories indicted those who stood by anddid nothing— most o f us, most of the time. Respectfully,I suggest that the women who have experienced the sadismof pornography on their bodies— the women in the pornographyand the women on whom the pornography isused— are also survivors; they bear witness, now, for them ­selves, on behalf of others. “Survivors, ” wrote T errenceDes Pres, “are not individuals in the bourgeois sense. Theyare living rem nants o f the general struggle, and certainlythey know it. ”ls O f these women h urt by pornography, wemust say that they know it now. Before, each was alone,unspeakably alone, isolated in terro r and humiliated evenby the will to live— it was the will to live, after all, thatcarried each woman from rape to rape, from beating tobeating. Each had never heard another’s voice saying thewords of what had happened, telling the same story; becauseit is the same story, over and over— and none ofthose who escaped, survived, endured, are individuals inthe bourgeois sense. These women will not abandon themeaning o f their own experience. T hat m eaning is: pornographyis the orchestrated destruction o f wom en’s bodiesand souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitutionanim ate it; dehum anization and sadism characterize it; itis war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, andhum an worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survivedknows from the experience o f her own life that pornographyis captivity— the woman trapped in the picture usedon the woman trapped wherever he’s got her.1 3 . T e r r e n c e D e s P r e s , The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps ( N e wY o r k : P o c k e t B o o k s , 1 9 7 7 ) , p . 3 9 .