Pornography & Sexual Violence

The issue of whether pornography is a proximate cause of violence against women in general and sex crimes in particular has become highly charged in recent years. Building on the contemporary feminist social critique, some feminists have developed the view that violence against women, in particular rape, constitutes the logical endpoint on a continuum of the culture's oppression of women. Pornography, which depicts a more or less specific strategy of such oppression, is on this view a mechanism of violence, and for that reason it should be suppressed. It is to this line of thought that Irving addresses his disagreement. He describes legislation sponsored by conservative Republican members in Congress that would enable the victims of sex crimes to bring a civil lawsuit against the publishers of pornographic material if these victims could prove a link between the material and the criminal deed. At the time of his writing (early 1992), Senate Bill 1521, a victims-compensation law, was pending on the subject, and the principal focus of the legis

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because it takes the form of boycott of publishers and not writers: It's the very idea of making or keeping publishing "acceptable" that gives me the shivers, because that's the same idea that lurks behind the pornography victims' compensation bill--making the publisher (not the perpetrator of the crime or the writer of the pornography) responsible for what's "acceptable." In the background of all of Irving's arguments is the issue of individual liberty and the view "that each of us has a right to decide what is obscene and what isn't." Irving is not arguing in favor of child or other pornography but against the idea that banning it is a credible remedy against what child pornography is said to cause. Quoting a passage from Hawthorne that describes the Puritan whipping post and the public humiliation of sinners and that suggests that the Puritan social morality had equivalence with Hawthorne's own time, Irving suggests that regulating social behavior (or any social phenomenon) by way of punishment does not eliminate the root causes of that behavior. Still less, it follows, does regulation of third-party behavior seem likely to inhibit the behavior or imagination of criminals. MacKinnon's position is frankly partial in that s
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Senate Bill, Indeed MacKinnon, John Irving, Constitution Indeed, Republican Congress, , Book Review, sex crimes, child pornography, Boston NP, Hugo Bedall, censorship pornography, social critique, feminist social critique, irving's argument, individual liberty, sexual violations, women's perspective, feminists allied, causes sex crimes, violence women,
Approximate Word count = 1611
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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