The purpose of this research is to examine the connection between pornography and sexual violence as articulated by Catherine MacKinnon and John Irving. The plan of the research will be to set forth Irving's critique of the anti-pornography legislative crusade undertaken by MacKinnon and other feminists in recent years, and then to discuss how MacKinnon might respond to that critique, given the substance of her discourse on the subject.
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 legislation was child pornography. Irving's argument against this legislation, as well as some feminist arguments in favor of it, is not confined to the issue of child pornography. The battle lines are far more strongly drawn on the issue of sex crimes against women as a class. Legislation targeting third parties, i.e., making third parties liable for the actions of perpetrators of crimes, has been proposed at various times in recent years and in various levels of go...