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  1. From the MacKinnon-Dworkin Ordinance to “Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group’s” Classification

From the MacKinnon-Dworkin Ordinance to “Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group’s” Classification

MacKinnon and Dworkin jointly drafted an anti-pornography civil rights ordi- nance in 1983. Crucially, its drafting responded to the narratives and experiences of victims of pornography. The ordinance, in turn, classified these narratives and expe- riences into five categories of pornography’s harms, which were proposed as causes of action under the law. The first category was coercion into pornography. This is a harm in which a person is forced to perform or become an object of pornography against her will by means of force or assault, threat or intimidation, fraud or decep- tion, or even psychological pressure. The MacKinnon-Dworkin Ordinance incorpo- rates the explicit provision that even when “the person signed a contract,” this fact doesn’t “negate a finding of coercion” (MacKinnon & Dworkin, 1988, p. 42). As we will see below, this first type of harm, in the twenty-first century, became the main focus of the problem in Japan and eventually prompted policymaking action.

The second category was forcing pornography on a person, which is harm involving a person being forcibly exposed to pornography at home or work. Today, when such a harm occurs within a household, it is also seen as a form of domestic violence, and when it occurs within a workplace, it is recognized as a form of sexual harass- ment. So, this type of harm is indivisibly intertwined with other forms of violence against women.

The third category of pornography’s harms is sexual assault due to pornography. This category assumes that a man (usually) who repeatedly and continually watches certain forms of pornography (especially of a violent kind) and whose psychological inhibition to sexual assault is lowered enacts sexual assault (including rape, but not exclusively) against other persons (mostly women or children). In fact, by repeated

2 Her quoted words here are taken from an English-language recording of the event on file with the first author.

and continual watching of violent pornography, many perpetrators of serial-rape or sexual murders learn to make dominance and violence against women a behavior of sexual pleasure, pick out specific targets or prey, and pick up methods of assault and abuse.

The fourth category is the trafficking of pornography, which is a harm that arises through pornography’s dissemination and distribution. It is a category of harm that, in addition to the other four categories identifies compounding harms of pornography in terms of its impact upon women’s population-level status, in addition to the harms suffered by individuals victimized by it. The trafficking of pornography inflicts harm upon the female population by lowering their position relative to men and exacerbat- ing the despised status of its individual members.

The fifth category of pornography’s harms is what MacKinnon and Dworkin call defamation through pornography. Pornography’s technological level is sometimes low and elementary, but sometimes remarkably high: from sticking a photograph of a tar- geted woman’s face and a photograph of a pornography actress’s naked body together with glue to using image processing software to make a fake image or motion picture appear authentic. This kind of harm includes using someone’s real name in a porno- graphic context or a sexual and defamatory magazine article. Celebrities and anti-por- nography feminists are most often targeted for this kind of attack.

MacKinnon and Dworkin thus clarified different kinds of pornography’s harms and collaborated with victims to establish a comprehensive civil remedy for them. This remedy was realized as ordinances in some cities in the US, but these were all eventually struck down in the courts as unconstitutional. However, these efforts to advance new conceptualizations of the harms of pornography and elucidate them were eternally significant.

Japan’s feminist anti-pornography groups, the Anti-Pornography and Prostitution Research Group (APP) and People Against Pornography and Sexual Violence (PAPS), actively learned from their achievements, and researched various harms of pornogra- phy to establish a classification system for harms in Japan. APP expanded upon the Ordinance’s five categories of harm to nominate additional forms of harm for the pur- pose of considering tailored, specific laws and policies to address each category. The expanded APP categories are: harms in production; harms in circulation; harms in con- sumption; social harms; and harms in existence, as summarized in Table 1.

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