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look older, that’s all she saw now, and it infuriated her that children, not even teenagers, were in Vogue and Cosmo. Another woman told a funny story of watching an innocuous program on robins with her young son and suddenly realizing how gender polarization was being inculcated on children’s TV.
    One of my pet peeves was a TV commercial for some brand of pantyhose, where a man’s voice talked about how fascinating, exciting, unpredictable, etc., Tracy or Stacy was, giving you the impression that she was to be admired for her strength, charm and personality, while at the same time he was lifting her up and throwing her over his shoulder so you got a good view of her long, stockinged legs.
    “Ros Coward, an English critic, writes in her book, Female Desire , that ‘the female body is the place where this society writes its sexual messages,’ ” said Mona. “Whether we want to or not we’re all looking at women, all the time.”
    A couple of women, probably lesbians, chortled selfconsciously, and Mona smiled, but went on seriously, “Coward makes the point that looking isn’t a neutral activity in Western culture. It’s an activity which men have constructed in order to express domination and subordination. The way women’s bodies are portrayed over and over in the mass media is sexualized, not just in a way that shows the possibility of violence against them, but almost more insidiously, in a way that shows their lack of economic and social status relative to men.”
    Someone spoke up, “But studies show that porn causes rape and sexual abuse. Sexist imagery might be unpleasant, but it doesn’t hurt anybody.”
    “I don’t agree,” said Mona. “The constant bombardment of images that show women as subordinate does more real damage to our sense of ourselves as women than hardcore pornography, which is actually seen by a relatively small part of the population.”
    “It doesn’t matter what women look at,” someone else said firmly. “It’s what men look at that’s important. And if they look at women being raped and enjoying it in pornography, that’s what they’ll act out.”
    “I think it is important what messages women take in,” Mona argued. “And I see the reduction of the complexity of looking to the causal anti-porn theory that ‘porn leads to violence and so it equals violence against women’ as simplistic and ultimately harmful.”
    Mona stopped and looked at the clock, “We’ve run over, I’m sorry.”
    But someone had one more question: “So would you advocate censorship of any material?”
    “Censorship of the kind Dworkin and MacKinnon advocate arbitrarily divides imagery into ‘bad’ and ‘not so bad’ material. Their call for censorship doesn’t deal with important questions of how imagery is produced and for what reason. It doesn’t come close to analyzing how the female body is used in this culture. All they’re saying is that certain kinds of portrayals of sex and violence shouldn’t be allowed.”
    I left the room enlightened, but still somewhat disturbed. Why did everybody have to talk about rape all the time?
    It was lunch time and I went looking for Hadley. Outside one of the rooms in the corridor there was a knot of women, half in, half out of the door, and the noise of raised voices inside. I stopped to ask what was going on.
    “It’s Miko’s workshop,” someone said. “It started out with Miko talking about the historical repression of sexuality and the danger of the puritanical wing of the feminist movement trying to stop women from exploring what their sexuality really was. Then she showed two short videos—the first one something from your typical peepshow, with two lesbians making love sort of as a preliminary to the man coming in and giving them what they really wanted. Then Miko showed one of her own videos, which was a lot of revolting-looking close-ups of women’s genitals and their hairy legs. And she asked what the difference was.
    “Some