nt. This is one of the reasons freedom of speech was included in the Bill of Rights, to assure that it would be protected from the desire of the majority to be free from hearing certain messages. Many First Amendment arguments involve issues such as pornography or commercial advertising, and these discussions usually begin with the idea that the Founding Fathers certainly meant for the first Amendment to apply to political speech even if other sorts of speech might be questionable. Yet, we allow political speech as well to be restricted, with limitations on what can be said, where it can be said, and the form the message can take. Political speech is most clearly what was meant by the Founding Fathers, whatever else they might have meant to include, and yet we allow restrictions on political speech while denying that there can be restrictions on other forms of communication, including obscenity and pornography.
The argument over pornography has become bound with issues of gender, questions of equality in society, feminist concerns about violence against women and about women's equality, and other matters not instantly perceived as related to the question of whether pornography should be allowed in a free society. Catherine Mackinnon expresses the view that pornography should be regulated and that there are clear reasons for this. Her definition of pornography is, of course, important. This is especially true given the fact that the legislatures and courts at the state and federal levels have long had difficulty in arriving at such a definition, one that would be accepted and that would make it possible to differentiate between different types of expression and to identify that which society would see as in need of control.
Pornography can be seen as a manifestation of the phallocentric culture prevailing today. Mackinnon sees pornography as in essence a political statement of male dominance and as inherently discriminato...