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

1. The Struggle for Respect
I am going to begin these lectures with three stories, which illustrate
the drama, variety, and complexity of the struggle for respect
through speech.
/. Pornography
By the end of the 1960s the champions of free expression and sexual
liberation had declared victory over a century of prudery and
Puritanism. 1 Notorious novels like Ulysses and Lady Chatterley's
Lover, banned just decades earlier, no longer raised many eyebrows.
Pornography proliferated in movies, books, and magazines
and eagerly exploited the new media of videos, cable television, and
telephones. This provoked a counterattack, not just from religion but
also from the contemporaneous second wave of feminism. Gloria
Steinem proclaimed: "A woman who has Playboy in the house is
like a Jew who has Mein Kampf on the table." 2 Diana Russell
condemned pornography as a backlash against feminism, "a male
fantasy-solution that inspires nonfantasy acts of punishment for
uppity females." 3 Susan Brownmiller maintained that "pornography,
like rape, is a male invention, designed to dehumanize women,
to reduce the female to an object of sexual access . . . ." 4 Judith Bat-
Ada hyperbolised these diatribes.
Sexual fascism means that ... a few powerful men control our
behavior, attitudes, fantasies, concepts of love and caring, integrity
... to whom and how we make our genitalia available. . . .
[the] triumvirate—Hugh Heffner, Bob Guccione, and Larry Flynt
[publishers of Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler) ... are every bit
as dangerous as Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito .... Just as the