CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY ADU LTS ONLY THE POLITICS OF PORN Send $1 to cover postage & handIing £ 0 NQHT BY CARLIN CHRISMAN A Trip to the Porn Store When I was 16, I peered cautiously at Adult Bookstores and Peek-A-Ramas as my bus rolled down Third Avenue, and vowed that 1 would go in to see what it was all about the day I turned 18. Several years later 1 had still not entered one. I decided, though, that I couldn’t very well talk about feminist and neighborhood groups’ reactions to porn shops without taking a look at the shops themselves. I found a friend willing to go porn shop hopping, and we jokingly dubbed ourselves the Southeast Portland Investigative Team. We imagined sneering at the proprietors and leaving our card — “ S.P.I.T. was here.” Maybe we were just trying to muster bravado. Our first stop was The .Adult Center Book Store on Hawthorne. A heavy wooden door, then a curtain, and we entered a small, square room with magazines lining three sides with a counter on a raised platform occupying the fourth. The young, longhaired clerk ignored us. We quickly surveyed the shop and noted the various sections: white dolly porn, racial porn, brutality porn, gay porn, etc. We moved closer and began to scribble down the titles. We were most interested in the brutality porn, with titles like, “ Bound Beauty Aching for Sexual Release,” “ Big T—He Raises Red Welts on White Ass,” “ Hot Fox Bondage.” The pictures were all variations on the same theme — women as victims, bound and gagged, wearing contraptions around their genitals, suffering but enjoying it. It’s a common theme, and any woman who goes to movies, watches television, reads magazine ads, will recognize the male fantasy — that women enjoy violence against them. Here in the local neighborhood porn shop, the message is the same; it’s just that the merchandise is more blatant. The racial section (“ Black Clits, Tits and Ass” or simply “ Black and Yellow” ) was also full of the bondage theme. For several minutes, we studied a magazine called “ Cherry Blossoms — The Very Best in Oriental Bondage.” We couldn’t figure out what the tool was being used to pull at a Japanese woman’s nipple, but the picture made us very sad. We walked into the shop’s other room, the darkened one with little booths labeled with short summaries of the movies contained within: “ Big- Titted Blonde” and “ White Man, Black Girls.” Though we were very careful not to look into the booths, we could feel eyes upon us as we walked down the aisle. Ducking into a booth labeled “ Two Transsexuals Get It On With Hitchhiker,” we saw a nonsensical piece featuring people with both penises and breasts. Back in the main room, the clerk told us he didn’t know what the monthly profits of the shop were. He did explain that we wouldn’t find any sex with animals or children in this or any Oregon shop, though it was legal in California. “ All the models are over 18 and everything is simulated,” he assured us. For comparison, we hit one more shop. It was similar to the first one, although the two shopkeepers made us show our ID. They weren’t as friendly, either. “ These ladies are old enough to be in the store, strange as that may seem,” said the younger one. “ My, my,” the old man said, leering at us and showing his missing teeth. “ The older they get, the younger they look.” A bit disconcerted, we scanned the shop. Much the same kind of merchandise, but here we found books with a political twist like “ Neo-Nazi Tormenter! Prison Camp Books Whores in Nazi Uniform,” and “ Mussolini Sadist.” Under the shopkeepers’ watchful eyes, we looked over the lesbian porn, remarking that it was, of course, a male image of lesbianism — two women with makeup and high heels getting it on with a dildo. The gay male pornography seemed much less violent than the heterosexual porn. Wendy Kaminer: “We cannot ask the government to take up our struggle for us. The power it would assume in order to do so would be far more dangerous to us all than the ‘power’ of pornography.” Feminists and Fundamentalists T.he pornography industry is facing renewed opposition these days from extremely diverse interest groups. For feminists, it is simply one more example of the social legitimization of anti-woman attitudes, and has become a focal point for drawing public attention to violence against women. Neighborhood groups consider it bad news because it deteriorates property values and brings vice into the community. And fundamentalist Christians see it as a sign of the moral decay of our society, along with the gay rights and pro-choice movements. But those seeking an easy buck find it a profitable industry, whose annual earnings now exceed those of the record and movie industries combined. Feminists recognized pornography as an element in the pattern of violence against women. Its connection with rape, wife-beating, incest, and other expressions of unequal power in relations between men and women is expressed in the feminist slogan, “ pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.” It is seen as physical assaults they encounter every day. Its existence is a constant reminder of oppression. At the same time, the pornography issue fills many feminists with ambivalence. As Ellen Willis points out in The Village Voice, “ It is men’s hostility toward women — combined with their power to express that hostility and for the most part get away with it — that causes sexual violence. Pornography that gives sadistic fantasies concrete shape — and in today’s atmosphere, social legitimacy — may well encourage suggestible men to act them out. But if Hustler were to vanish from the shelves tomorrow, I doubt that rape or wifebeating statistics would decline.” Deierdre English, in the April issue of Mother Jones, “ The Politics of Porn ,” is critical of the efforts of groups like Women Against Pornography in New York and its sisterbranches in other cities for their hope that “ by changing pornography they can reform the sexual nature of men.” What is needed, she suggests, is to withstand the forces — mysogyny (woman hating) on the one hand and moralism on the other — that seek to dominate erotica. She proposes women pornographers — “ or eroticists, if that sounds better, to confront mysogyny with new, nonsexist images. English and other feminists assert that pornography or erotica serves a useful purpose for many women by rejecting sexual repression and hypocrisy. Ellen Willis says, “ If feminists define pornography, per se, as the enemy, the result will be to make a lot of women ashamed of their sexual feelings and afraid to be honest about them. And the last thing women need is more sexual shame, guilt and hypocrisy, this time served up as feminism.” Part of the confusion about what to do with pornography has to do with the attempt by many to distinguish between “ good” erotica and “ bad” pornography. However, says Willis, “ these attempts inevitably come down to, ‘What turns me on is erotic; what turns you on is pornographic.” ’ The current legal definition of obscenity, rendered by the Supreme Court in Miller v. California in 1973, is material “ that the average person, applying community standards, would find . . . as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,” material that “ depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct and material that, “ taken as a whole, lacks serious artistic, political, or scientific value.” Neighborhood groups fighting porn shops in their area may take heart at the thought of community mores being a basis for deciding what is unacceptable pornography, but feminists cringe at the thought that this may lead to a witch hunt of their publications. Ms., for instance, as toned down and respectable as it may seem to many feminists, has been the victim of attempts in a number of states to restrict distribution or ban the magazine outright. The danger of
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