Anti-Obscenity: A Comparison of the Legal and the Feminist Perspectives

Abstract

guaranteed to generate heated debate. Support for the censor has long been regarded as the province of the politically conservative, the strongly religious, and those persons deeply convinced of the sanctity of the family and the need to preserve conventional moral norms. Political liberals or progressives, moral relativists and individuals who either seek or tolerate challenges to conventional standards of sociosexual conduct have traditionally been arrayed against censorship. However, this easy, if simplistic, taxonomy of the dramatis personae in the obscenity debate has been overset by the genesis of a new political force. This political force, the Women's Movement, clearly disavows and frequently opposes those values and belief systems which have, historically, underwritten the drive to suppress pornography. Feminist support for sexual and reproductive freedom of choice, for experimentation with unconventional forms of family organization, and for gay rights exemplify, though they do not exhaust, the areas of disagreement between the Women's Movement and the traditional champions of censorship. Thus no comfortable political alliance is possible between them. At the same time, however, feminism, as a political philosophy and as a political movement, does embody substantial opposition to the exploitation by the media of women's bodies and female sexuality as well as marked distaste for much of what might be called, in common parlance, pornographic presentation of human sexual relations. This fact, in turn, strains the philosophical and political bonds between feminists and the liberal or progressive opponents of censorship who are, in many other respects, their natural allies. These statements should not be construed to imply that all feminists favor censorship. Indeed, the Women's Movement is deeply conflicted about the proper response to various examples of obscene or pornographic materials. Considerable controversy exists about what defines, either semantically or in terms of social theory, an obnoxious portrayal of human sexuality and/or an exploitative representation of the female body. Moreover, no single theory which might justify some form of censorship commands anything approaching unanimous assent, except, perhaps, the liberal consensus that individuals have an absolute right to boycott that which offends them. Yet an active, if sometimes only emotive, opposition to something which might be called obscenity is alive and thriving in the Women's Movement.