XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography Read Online Free PDF

being society's "last outlaws, the last renegades." He had explained that being a stripper or a porn actress set you apart from respectable people. You became a social untouchable. Anyone who willingly accepted this stigma did so because they loved what they were doing. There was something inside of them that had to come out.
    The grain of truth in this was worth puzzling over. I would do almost anything to be a writer, which involves nothing so much as an ostentatious display of my mind and opinions. What if other women felt the same way about displaying themselves sexually? I always prefer to be published by magazines with wide circulations. Why wouldn't they want to be seen by as many people as possible? Was there that much difference in the two forms of exhibitionism?
    When Cookie drifted out the door with a clipboard in her hand, I followed. As a veteran of political meetings, I figured she had pulled hostess duty. That is, she was the pretty face delegated to greet people at the door and make sure they signed the mailing list.
    17
    I resolved to conduct my first interview with a "woman in the industry." Things began well enough. I asked Cookie if she had time for a few questions. She said yes and gave an insecure little girl laugh, which seemed to punctuate all of her sentences.
    I asked whether or not she signed contracts with the producers for whom she worked. She looked confused. I explained that there seemed to be no standard in the industry as to whether or when contracts were required. I was curious about what her experiences had been. Cookie laughed, then frowned then said she only worked on videos. It wasn't like she was making movies or anything.
    When several men came up to inquire about the upcoming meeting, Cookie seemed relieved to escape my scrutiny. One of the men had "Peterborough, Ontario" on his name badge. I identified myself as a fellow Canadian and we chatted about the adult video store he was planning to open up North as his retirement business. I asked if he would be affected by the 1992 Canadian Supreme Court ruling, called the Butler decision, which restricted the importation of pornography on the basis of the psychological damage it might do to women. He said he wasn't concerned since he didn't carry material that portrayed violence or exploited children. "And that's what people are really going after!" He went on to rail against violence on television and in mainstream movies.
    Sitting there, I began to glimpse a political line in the sand that industry people were drawing.
    On one side was sex, which was good. On the other side was violence, which was bad. Yet it was the rejection of violence (primarily against women) that was driving the antiporn crusade.
    An alleged cause-and-effect link between pornography and violence against women had been the theme of the barely aborted Pornography Victims' Compensation Act (S.1521) of 1992. This act would have devastated pornography in America. It would have permitted crime victims to sue the producer, distributor, exhibitor, and retailer of any book, magazine, movie, or music that victims claimed had triggered the crime. There was no limit to the damages a victim could claim.
    In other words, a woman who claimed her rapist had been inspired by a centerfold could sue Playboy for "causing" her assault. The organization Feminists for Free Expression (FFE), founded in 1992 to fight censorship was instrumental in defeating this Act. FFE pinpointed the intellectual sleight-of-hand that occurs whenever violent crimes are blamed on words or images, rather than on the criminals who commit them. As FEE commented: "Violence against women and children flourished for thousands of years before the printing press and motion picture.... Correlation studies, in this country, Europe, and Asia, find no rise in sexual violence with the availability of sexual material. No reputable research shows a causal link between òbscenity' . . . and violence." [1]
    The Peterborough