Pornography

Aug 04, 2010 Editorial

There is a very disconcerting phenomenon that has developed along with our burgeoning TV industry: pornographic movies with the most explicit, graphically depicted acts of sexual couplings are routinely beamed into our homes. While most of them are broadcast late at night, a few have cropped up during the day and yet have somehow evaded comment, much less stricture, from the media watchdog – the Advisory Committee on Broadcasting (ACB). Apart from the usual religious indignation occasioned by pornography, there are several other issues posed.
What most do not concede is that, as the feminist writer Catherine Mackinnon claims, pornography acts against women twice, when it is made, and when it is viewed. First, women are degraded, raped and (in her belief) even killed in the making of pornographic pictures and films. Then, the pictures and films further participate in the degradation, rape and murder of women by the users of pornography.
The rebuttal against the complete prohibition of pornography has typically pointed out the dangers to the Constitutionally protected right to free speech. Mackinnon, however, points out that “freedom of speech” allows the stronger, more dominant speaker to silence the weaker one, and believes that women have been silenced by the speech of men.
Though a favourite liberal feminist argument against Mackinnon is that she portrays women as shrinking violets in need of protection, most would concede that speech can in fact silence speech and even attack one’s sense of self-worth. This is the speech of the schoolyard and the street, the howling taunt, the racial epithet, and the sexual bombardment that women receive. The latter, the sexual harassment that every woman must face in the world every day, is of the same quality and the same effect as the former. The racial taunt says, “You are an animal, not a human being,” and the sexual taunt says, “You have no identity, no personality— you are a collection of appealing body parts.”
The Right to Free Speech is founded on the proposition, set forth by J.S. Mill in “On Liberty”, that good speech ultimately drives out bad. Free speech, like our court system, is based on a faith that truth wins. If in either case, victory goes to he who shouts the loudest, the system breaks down. Mackinnon – a professor of law, believes that men, who have more power and more aggression, will always shout loudest, that their speech is backed by the threat of violence, and that the pornographic speech of men, supposedly protected by the Constitution, is itself violence.
Mill, though, not only believed in free speech; he believed that no action should be prohibited that harmed only oneself; that the government should only intervene to bar acts that harmed others. His goal was the full development of the individual in any direction; he knew that in a Millian world, some would grow into stunted monstrosities while others might become mighty oaks, and that was fine.
In our world, however, and largely because of sexual speech and sexual violence, women still do not have the opportunity to grow into whatever they will. Consider the stifling effects of the fact that women cannot go out alone at night, or travel many places even in daytime without the company and the mediation of a man.
While Mackinnon makes a powerful case with which we are very sympathetic, in our estimation, the only hope lies with free speech. Without free speech, there cannot be equality. With free speech, equality is not guaranteed, but we have the opportunity to pursue it. It gives us the tools we need to begin the work. We can combat the ill effects of pornography, by raising our voices, rather than by demanding censorship, which will backfire upon us. Free speech can promote equality, but censorship never will. But free speech, like all rights, is not an absolute right.
And this means that the Government, through its agency, the ACB, should not allow the complete free-for-all that prevails today: but should facilitate public discussion on the issue so that “Guyanese standards” on pornography can be established.

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