Authors: Catharine A. Mackinnon, Andrea (Eds.) Dworkin, Andrea Dworkin
ISBN-13: 9780674445796, ISBN-10: 0674445791
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Date Published: February 1998
Edition: 1st Edition
Catharine A. MacKinnon is Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.
Andrea Dworkin, internationally renowned as a radical feminist activist, is the author of many books, most recently the collection of essays Life and Death and the novel Mercy.
This book contains the oral testimony of victims of pornography, spoken on the record for the first time in history.
Speaking at hearings on a groundbreaking antipornography civil rights law, women offer eloquent witness to the devastation pornography has caused in their lives. Supported by social science experts and authorities on rape, battery, and prostitution, discounted and opposed by free speech advocates and absolutists, their riveting testimony articulates the centrality of pornography to sexual abuse and inequity today.
At issue in these hearings is a law conceived and drafted by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon that defines harm done through pornography as a legal injury of sex discrimination warranting civil redress. From the first set of hearings in Minneapolis in 1983 through those before the Massachusetts state legislature in 1992, the witnesses heard here expose the commonplace reality of denigration and sexual subordination due to pornography and refute the widespread notion that pornography is harmless expression that must be protected by the state.
Introduced with powerful essays by MacKinnon and Dworkin, these hearingsunabridged and with each word scrupulously verifiedconstitute a unique record of a conflict over the meaning of democracy itselfa major civil rights struggle for our time and a fundamental crisis in United States constitutional law: Can we sacrifice the lives of women and children to a pornographer's right to free "speech"? Can we allow the First Amendment to shield sexual exploitation and predatory sexual violence? These pages contain all the arguments for protecting pornographyand dramatically document its human cost.
Everyone who has ever taken sides in the debate about permissible limits to free speech in our society should read this book. It should be read by those who believe that freedom of speech should be absolute, as well as by those who yearn for more regulation of sexually explicit materials on the Internet, in books and magazines and on film...It is a fascinating collection of testimony on both sides of this issue. It is unlike other books on this debate since...it presents the facts as they stand and lets the reader decide.
Introductions
The Roar on the Other Side of Silence by Catharine A. MacKinnon
Suffering and Speech by Andrea Dworkin
The Hearings
The Minneapolis Hearings
Minneapolis: Exhibits
Minneapolis: Memo on Proposed Ordinance
Minneapolis: Press Conference
The Indianapolis Hearing
Indianapolis: Appendices
The Los Angeles Hearing
The Massachusetts Hearing
Massachusetts: Written Submissions
The Ordinances
Appendix: American Booksellers Ass'n. Inc. v. Hudnut
Index