Defending Pornography on Feminist Grounds: A Q&A With Nadine Strossen
When Nadine Strossen’s book Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights was first published in 1995, America was in the grips of a major cultural schism over erotic expression. Conservatives and an influential cadre of feminists had teamed up to promote porn censorship, with some success. The radfem contingent claimed the existence of legal porn was an affront to women—hindering their fight for equality and driving violence against them—and thus argued that free speech was incompatible with feminism. But feminists like Strossen didn’t accept this. A New York Law School professor who headed the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1991 to 2008, Strossen argued that opposing censorship was not only important as an abstract liberal principle but was in itself good for promoting women’s rights.
Nearly a quarter century later, Strossen’s arguments are still a vital antidote to much of what one hears from prominent feminists. And as the left-right anti-porn alliance continues to wield influence in statehouses and in Congress, a brand new reissue of Defending Pornography is a must-read for a new generation of free speech defenders and libertarian feminists.
I talked to Strossen last week about why she originally wrote the book and why it’s still relevant today. I’ll be publishing our chat in two parts in the Sex & Tech newsletter this week, so stay tuned for the second part on Wednesday. The following transcript of our conversation has been mildly edited for length and clarity.
What compelled you to first write Defending Pornography?
Strossen: I first wrote Defending Pornography way back in 1994 because there was then prevalent across the ideological spectrum a very destructive misconception that one had to choose between being a feminist and being a free speech advocate, and that if one really supported women’s rights, women’s safety, women’s dignity, women’s equality, then one had to support censorship—in particular of so-called “pornography” or sexually explicit, sexually suggestive expression. And it wasn’t nearly as well known as it should be that there were many of us who strongly opposed censoring pornography. (And by the way, I always say “pornography” with quotation marks around it.)
There were many of us who opposed censoring pornography, not only because of our commitment to core free speech principles, but also, independently, precisely because of our commitment to feminist goals and principles, and our understanding—based on widespread longstanding experience, in the United States and elsewhere—that no matter how well-intended, censorship of pornography would end up doing women’s rights far more harm than good.
Could you maybe elaborate on that a little bit, how it winds up doing more harm than good?
Since then, Liz, I’ve had the opportunity to write about other kinds of controversial expression, including—and again, with scare quotes—so-called “hate speech,” so-called “disinformation” or “misinformation,” so-called “extremist” speech. And I’ve come to see that all of these efforts to censor all of these controversial kinds of speech, including pornography, suffer from the same fundamental flaws. All of those flaws emanate from the irreducibly subjective and vague nature of the concept, which means that whoever the enforcing authority is—whether the government, whether individual citizens, as would’ve happened under the model anti-pornography law that was proposed by the so-called radical feminists—has essentially unfettered discretion to decide what within that inherently elusive and manipulable concept, in this case pornography, is inconsistent with their values. And that means that for the rest of us who disagree with a particular, individual, subjective concept of either sexual speech or hate speech or disinformation, that our freedom and our equality is undermined.
Now, since women and feminists and advocates of reproductive freedom and LGBTQ individuals and advocates of their rights—through many historic periods, and including in the United States—have been in the minority, at least in many communities, it is completely predictable that laws targeting pornography, obscenity, any other disfavored category of sexual expression consistently have disproportionately been enforced to suppress those perspectives, perspectives that are especially important for women’s rights and safety and dignity and health and equality and lives.
It’s always amazing to me how few people seem to realize that.Â
You know, for so many years, those of us in the feminist anti-censorship movement would predict that if the so-called radical feminist vision of illegal pornography were enacted—and their concept was characteristically vague and subjective, any sexual expression that is subordinating to women or demeaning or dehumanizing or degrading—that their advocacy would be among the expression that would be the first to be targeted.
And sure enough, that prediction immediately came to pass. Andrea Dworkin, a writer, and Catharine McKinnon, a law professor—their concept of illegal pornography was adopted by the Canadian Supreme Court [in 1992]. Immediately, Canadian Customs seized a number of books at the U.S.–Canada border that were deemed to be inconsistent with that concept. And among those books were books that were written by Andrea Dworkin herself. Because in the process
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