Here’s my freedom of speech, now I’ve heard yours

We’ve all heard this before. We criticize pornography, explaining what it is, what it does, what it depicts, what it means, how it hurts. And before we know it, we have to deal with Larry Flynt Clone #120258202 wailing ‘But it’s my freeeeeeedom of speeeeeech! Freedom to offend!’ etc.

Translation: ‘Since we have freedom of speech, and I’ve got money and power behind me, shut the fuck up, I don’t like what you’re saying’.

Say for a minute we take the laughable idea that pornography somehow constitutes ’speech’ seriously. Free speech applies equally to me and to Larry Flynt. If LF can ’speak’ through pornography, so can I speak when I tell him exactly what his speech is and does. And ’stop trying to silence meeeee’ does not answer my objections on any level. Nor does it invalidate what I have to say. If you speak freely, be prepared to be called on it by others who are permitted to speak just as much as you. Don’t say things you can’t defend intellectually. The answer to bad speech is better speech, as we know.

So when the pornographer speaks, we can talk back. But is pornography itself ’speech’?

Pornography is real. That woman in the picture, having all sorts of indignities inflicted on her? That’s real. That’s happening. She’s not a senseless mannequin, she’s a human being. She is not speaking, she is not expressing her sexuality (as the pro-porn cheerleaders claim), she is following a script written for her by a man. She is appearing in the role of what-the-pornographic-mind-wants-her-to-be. Her sounds of pleasure are acting, put on, in order to keep up the charade that women enjoy degradation, pain and humiliation at the hands of men.

I can hear the objection to what I am saying already: ‘She chose to do this. It’s her choice’. If only it were that simple.

Choices exist in a context. One chooses the best option available in any one context, at any one time. Very few women go into pornography or prostitution because that is what the genuinely want to do, or because this is the one choice of many others which they regard as being the best for them. Katherine Viner, in the Guardian, notes that:

[W]omen are being killed (since 1990, more than 70 prostitutes are known to have been murdered in the UK); they are being beaten and raped (60% of prostitutes say this has happened to them in the last year); and they are exploited because of their drug addictions (95% are dependent on heroin or crack). Former prostitutes report severe levels of trauma.

Paul Holmes, the former head of the Metropolitan police vice unit at Charing Cross, said: “In my 32 years working in vice, I can count on one hand the number of working girls who were not coerced or abused.” The men who visit prostitutes are deluding themselves if they think what they’re doing is just an another harmless commercial transaction, like shopping for gadgets.

Pornography is prostitution in front of a camera, and women in the industry are often hideously abused, being coerced into painful and unpleasant practices. Pornography now must be more vicious, more violent, more painful more contemptuous of women than ever. It is an obsession, and the nature of obsession means that it won’t get any better. These acts are happening to real women, the vast majority of whom would not be in the industry had they not suffered from sexual abuse and rape.

As usual, I can’t say it better than Andrea Dworkin:

Pornography is an essential issue because pornography says that women want to be hurt, forced, and abused; pornography says women want to be raped, battered, kidnapped, maimed; pornography says women want to be humiliated, shamed, defamed; pornography says that women say No but mean Yes–Yes to violence, Yes to pain.

Also: pornography says that women are things; pornography says that being used as things fulfills the erotic nature of women; pornography says that women are the things men use.

Also: in pornography women are used as things; in pornography force is used against women; in pornography women are used.

Also: pornography says that women are sluts, cunts; pornography says that pornographers define women; pornography says that men define women; pornography says that women are what men want women to be.

Also: pornography shows women as body parts, as genitals, as vaginal slits, as nipples, as buttocks, as lips, as open wounds, as pieces.

Also: pornography uses real women.

Also: pornography is an industry that buys and sells women.

Also: pornography sets the standard for female sexuality, for female sexual values, for girls growing up, for boys growing up, and increasingly for advertising, films, video, visual arts, fine art and literature, music with words.

Women are abused in the name of pleasure. Women are terrorised in the name of capitalism. Women are raped in the name of ‘free speech’. The sex industry uses and spits out the most vulnerable people: women, children. Jenna Jameson, the most famous porn star of them all, was the victim of gang rape and of a husband who acts more like a pimp. Linda Marchiano (Lovelace), was raped, beaten and tortured by her ‘husband’, and compelled to make the film Deep Throat, which is still shown on TV today.

Tell me again how this is free speech, and tell me again how this is harmless.