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  1. MacKinnon and Dworkin’s Paradigm Shift

MacKinnon and Dworkin’s Paradigm Shift

Of course, radical feminists already understood and condemned the fact that the dissemination and spread of pornography leads to declines in women’s status and aggravates sexism among men, and that mass pornography consumption lowers psychological barriers to the rape of women and girls, and so promotes the crime. In other words, they did understand pornography’s practical aspects as intertwined with many real-life practices and injuries. But, as Robin Morgan’s slogan reflected, pornography remained theory, not practice. The implicit assumption was that it could give rise to practices of various kinds but was not a practice in itself. In opposition to this standpoint, MacKinnon said:

Robin Morgan once said, ‘pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.’ This is true, but Andrea Dworkin’s revision is more true: ‘Pornography is the theory, pornography is the practice’ (1991, p. 21).1

In other words, pornography is not just a theory of women’s subordination, far from mere expression, even if a sexist manifestation of it, but also an ensemble of whole acts of discrimination and violence causing actual sexual harms and concrete human rights violations at every phase of its production, circulation, consumption, and even though its continuing existence.

To come to this new insight, it was crucially important to find victims of pornography’s production. Women formerly in pornography abused in its production who stepped forward publicly became its starting point. They knew of MacKinnon, who had devised an inequality approach towards workplace sexual harassment and had achieved success in its legal restriction, so they came to her and asked her to formulate a new legal approach that could give legal relief for their harms sustained in pornography. Therefore, a new movement based on the new approach incorporated victims from the outset; it was not the result of academic concept-making, nor was it a paternalistic movement of uninvolved activists. At an abolitionist event held in Tokyo in January 2002, MacKinnon talked about her engagement with this movement.

1 Morgan did, nonetheless, support MacKinnon and Dworkin’s anti-pornography ordinance and wrote a letter of endorsement to Minneapolis City Council. See Letter of Robin Morgan, December 5, 1983, in Catharine A. MacKinnon & Andrea Dworkin eds., In harm’s way: the pornography civil rights hearings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 221-223. In it she said, “[t]his is written in support of the proposed legislation before the Council which would include pornography as a practice discriminatory against and degrading/endangering to the civil rights of female citizens of your city” (p. 221). Thus, she explicitly called pornography a practice against women.

I know about prostitution and pornography because the survivors of both of them [pornography and prostitution] have told me about it, about their experience in it. They are the source of my knowledge of this problem. They came to me to tell me what did happen to them and asked me to do something about it. This work does not start with a theory. It does not start with something that is already in a book. For me, it started with real women’s lives, and with our work together on this issue for over twenty years. So, to the question, “Why do I deal with this issue?” the first simple answer is that women asked me to deal with this issue.2

As MacKinnon says, “The harm of pornography begins with the women in it” (2005, p. 301). Finding out this fact was crucial in the historical transition from the expression or theory approach to the practice or harms approach. It is not just that some concrete harms in practice derive from what is a form of expression or a set of ideas, but, oppositely, what is fundamentally violation in practice necessarily causes other harms, including ones of expression.

So, pornography is no longer a mere theory, even if one for rape, and no longer mere expression, even if sexist. Making a law tackling harms produced by it and giving its victims judicial remedies, therefore, no longer presents a problem in tension with constitutional values of freedom of speech. It departs from a legal agenda in the field of expression and enters a legal one in the field of concrete action.

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