(My last post about this for some time, respecting Doug's wishes.)
> If someone could show that "porn" did encourage violence against
> women, I'd be rather disturbed. But: 1) "porn" covers a very wide
> variety of material, so I doubt that there's any such thing as
> porn-in-general, much less that it has a measurable effect;
That, of course, is a tacky demurral; i.e., the hypothesis asked you to suppose that there *were* good empirical evidence showing that (let's say this time) violent erotic photographic and cinematic material influenced men to have violent attitudes and behavior toward women.
2) I'm
> pretty close to a free speech fundamentalist, so while I think
> violence against women, sexualized or not, should be punished, I
> don't think texts should be criminalized.
So you don't support restrictions on paid adverts as free speech? What about restrictions on political speech near polling places?
The bit about criminalization, however just shows that you aren't really very well acquainted with the proposal which I've been suggesting in this thread is a good starting point. MacKinnon and Dworkin's ordinance would have *criminalized* NOTHING. It was purely a civil ordinance.
I don't know of any feminist antiporn advocate who proposes criminalization. Dworkin seems to indicate that she would oppose a 'war on drugs'-style policy against porn. The Religious Right wants to criminalize porn, under obscenity law (which isn't feminist at all), but the feminist antiporn crowd does not. More importantly, the most serious policy proposal for regulating violent porn was a *civil* instrument, not criminal.
As Susie Bright suggested
> in her response to you,
Which is unfortunate since she's *not* on LBO, I can't have a conversation with her about her claims. I don't care for offlist, expert one-shots, personally. Just my 2 cents.
the Bible has encouraged people to
> extraordinary acts of violence, individual and collective, but I
> wouldn't want to ban it. Slasher movies are far more violent than
> almost all porn - should we ban those too?
Unlike porn, the point of neither the Bible nor slasher movies is to 1) sexually arouse (primarily) men, and 2) to provide a source of masturbatory and sexual fantasy material. Neither slasher movies nor the Bible are likely to lead to sexual fetishization, either; erotic material seems very likely to do so -- though I don't know of studies to suggest that, I think it makes rough prima facie sense.
It's a bad analogy.
However, I think, as Miles J. said, leftists *should* consider the degree to which slasher movies and other violent media constitute a form of public health hazard (though a type of hazard different than porn, in my view). Large corporations make tons of money from porn (*all* kinds) and violent media; I don't see why conversation about responding to that as leftists is so out of bounds.
Regarding porn, at the *very least*, as I understood Yoshie to suggest (her suggestion that antiporn feminists don't pay much attention to trafficking in poor women from the global South is wrong; Dworkin, for example, wrote about trafficking and poverty-driven sex work *many* years ago; every trafficking mailing list I know about includes a strong contingent of antiporn feminists), leftists ought to be concerned about the people *in* porn, who are highly exploited workers in an industry where profits are obscenely high, is reputedly controlled by organized crime, and from which large multinationals reap huge profit.
So, fine, forget the question of whether porn hurts women generally; the prevailing consensus here seems to be that porn does not hurt women and that anyone who thinks it might is crazy or a "censorious prude".
Surely the industry deeply exploits its workers. Ought leftists care about that?
Kendall Clark