speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

The Excesses of State Regulation
It's for the woman whose husband comes home with a video, ties
her to the bed, makes her watch, and then forces her to do what
they did in the video. It's a civil rights law. It's not censorship. It
just makes pornographers responsible for the injuries they cause.
Leanne Katz, executive director of the National Coalition against
Censorship, disagreed: "It negates all that we know about the . . .
ambiguity of the human animal, and all that we love about the
complexity of visual images and the written word." 54 Some antiporn
campaigners buttress fears of rape with solicitude for pornographic
actors, repeating atrocity stories about women actually
killed in snuff films. There is no evidence, however, that the
pornographic film industry is any riskier than mainstream studios
making horror movies, westerns, war stories, action films, or murder
mysteries. 55 Furthermore, society glamorises many more dangerous
occupations, such as ballet dancer, athlete, and police or fire
officer. 56 Nor does pornography necessarily degrade: some actors
are exhibitionists who enjoy performing sex in public to excite
others. 57
Taking consequentialism seriously would require us to trace the
harmful effects back to the totality of causes, rather than contenting
ourselves with those that appear more susceptible to regulation but
may be less powerful. Because legal proscriptions can entail serious
penalties they must be framed narrowly, focusing on the aberrant
extreme: hard core pornography, neo-Nazi hate speech. Indeed, the
entire regulatory apparatus of the modern state is predicated on the
dubious strategy of seeking to compensate through intensity of
punishment for the impossibility of correcting more than a tiny
fraction of all deviance. But if the evils of pornography are objectification
and violence, surely the beauty industry is a far greater villain.
On a randomly chosen day the Los Angeles Times contained nine
advertisements for weight loss, filling more than three pages with
photos of women in sexually provocative poses and captions like:
"Lose Up to 3 Dress Sizes in 10 Weeks," "Body of the '90's," "Now
I can wear the clothes my skinny sister wears." 58 A study of white
high school girls found only 22 per cent satisfied with their physical
appearance—not surprising, given that fashion models are 16-23
per cent thinner than the average woman. College students are avid
readers of women's magazines, of which Cosmopolitan has been the
most popular for 14 of the last 15 years. Almost half said the
magazines made them less confident, more than two-thirds felt
worse about their looks, and three-fifths said the magazines hurt
94