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

The Struggle for Respect
literally means what it says, you might conclude that sexuality has
become the fascism of contemporary America and we are moving
into the last days of Weimar." 4 Anticipating my second story, she
called pornography a "Skokie-type injury" and condemned the
ACLU and MCLU as "pornographers' mouthpieces," while Dworkin
dismissed the First Amendment as "an instrument of the ruling
class."
MacKinnon and Dworkin drafted an innovative ordinance, whose
preamble declared that "pornography is central in creating and
maintaining the civil inequality of the sexes." It prohibited the
sexually explicit subordination of women, conferring rights to
damages and an injunction on both women coerced into producing
pornography and sexual assault victims who could show a causal
nexus with a specific publication. Controversy about the ordinance
was intense. Women poured ink over Playboy and Penthouse in the
student union, threw magazines on the floor of the Rialto (adult)
Bookstore, and disrupted the screening of a pornographic movie at
the Rialto Theatre. Dworkin ridiculed the zoning approach: "I think
you should say that you are going to permit the exploitation of live
women, the sado-masochistic use of live women, the binding and
torture of real women and then have the depictions of those women
used in those ways sold in this city . . . ." The star witness was Linda
Marchiano, who testified that she had been coerced into portraying
Linda Lovelace in "Deep Throat" and was raped on screen. Other
witnesses found the hearings cathartic, voicing abuses they had
never disclosed. The audience was partisan and vociferous, "booing
and hissing, moaning and crying." City councillor Barbara Carlson
described the campaign for the ordinance as "onslaught, onslaught,
onslaught! I mean literally, they were in everyone's office. A month
and a half!"
The MCLU vigorously opposed the ordinance, which its director
called a "constitutional mockery" and an "obscenity in itself." So
did the library board. Catherine MacKinnon sought to discredit gay
and lesbian criticism, asserting that "the gay male community
perceives a stake in male supremacy, that is in some ways even
greater than that of straight men." The city's Office of Civil Rights
was uncomfortable with its enforcement role. And the president of
the Minneapolis Urban League saw it as a "white folks issue," which
would divert energy from the struggle for racial equality.
When the liberal mayor vetoed the ordinance, which had passed
by one vote, Dworkin responded: "This city doesn't give a damn
about women." "There's only one question before the City Council: