Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights

Rating:
Summary: A must read for debaters
Review: Despite the acrimony of some (obviously biased) reviewers, this is an outstanding book. Strossen has become a regular source for high school and collegiate debaters for precisely the type of solid analysis you'll find here. The legal argumentation is great and its nice to hear from an actual lawyer, not merely a social scientist who thinks s/he understands the field.

The rest of the book is also well-written, good structure and organization, decent index, entertaining style, excellent logic. It is obviously, designed to argue in favor of free speech, but her critics' responses that she ignores data do not impede the force of her argument. In fact, a lot of the data they rely on is less than ideally gathered, as Strossen points out. If it wasn't a powerful attack, Strossen's opponents wouldn't be as viciously opposed to this book as they are.

If, like me, you need evidence for debate rounds or are preparing a thesis on free speech, this book is essential, if only because it has generated so much debate. Don't be mislead by the mediocre rating or the views of an unsuccessful porn star, this book is a "must read".

Rating:
Summary: "Porn" defended by the best: i.e. lawyer and woman
Review: Finally, there is a feminist viewpiont that I would align withmy own. For a time being, I thought that the entire would had turnedinto a radical freakshow. Strossen has taken a stunning, common-sense approach to such a difficult topic. I have insisted that all of my friends, (both male and female), read this book!

Rating:
Summary: Anti-freedom of speech book, poor panicky work
Review: If I could give it zero stars, I would.

This is the book equivalent of the poor, panicky, slippery slope argument that says, "first they ban the advertising of cigarettes to minors, what's next? the banning of the right to BREATHE???" I.e. the argument that takes too little data and extrapolates too far with it to come up with implausable, panicked, pseudo-data. It's a book based on fear (and playing upon the irrational fears of others), rather than on reality or truth. It ignores factual data and instead runs with fear and panicked opinion.

This fear-based book also ignores the fact that since porn is a billion dollar business, based on a percentage of repeat customers (rather than on the entirety of the U.S. population, which is what they would have you believe, rather than prove it with rental/purchase data), and because it revolves around business and money, these frightened slaves of porn will have nothing to worry about (in the way of "losing" access to it), because as long as porn turns a dime (turns a dime for the producers, not the stars, in this completely unregulated industry without ethical economic practices), it will be here, just like gas powered cars and automatic weapons.

It's funny how the side that supports so called freedom of speech likes to remove the freedom of speech to hate porn, protest it, and educate others about it's harms. It's just like the book, "Animal Farm," where there are two sets of laws, one for those who fall in line with this pro-porn standing, and a different, restricted law for those who disagree and exercise their right to do something about it.

They should just be honest and say, "freedom of speech for US, not YOU."

Rating:
Summary: Tiresome...
Review: Ms Strossen's book makes for boring reading. Her sole argument, as one might expect, is this: individual freedom at all cost no matter how much it might hurt a given community or someone's dignity. Now, I cannot see how this has any meaning to real life.

Rating:
Summary: No simple answers to complex issues...
Review: Nadine Strossen exposes the erroneous and simple minded logic in trying to correlate 'pornography' with harm to women. Instead, she shows the correlation between RESTRICTING free sexual expression (yes, even in imagery) and the subjugation of women. While acknowledging women do face serious burdens in our society - some of which include violence against them - she exposes the logical fallacy in simply attributing it to the amorphous 'pornography'. The real issue is a complex, troubling societal problem that incorporates many distinct factors. But the answer does not lie in censorship.

If you want to change the way men perceive women, debate the issue! Open people's eyes! Discover the complex causes of inequalities women continue to face. Don't simply attribute them to one factor. Don't censor! Truth will be on your side. This is the essence of a free society. When the censors roll in, so does the air of totalitarianism.

Its interesting - if you take the view pornography simply CAUSES men to ask violently towards women, can't men who rape simply say: "The pornography made me do it!" Of course this is simply childish and Strossen exposes that all over the book.

Personally I do not like most things labeled 'pornography'. However, its not the government's job to tell me what I should and should not like. What feminists have always striven for is for women to make their own choices and not curtsy to the patriarchy of the State.

Finally, we must all remember we are sexual beings by nature. To censor and repress our nature is to every person's detriment. For anyone who does not accept simple answers for complex issues, and values our liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights - this is the book for you.

Rating:
Summary: No simple answers to complex issues...
Review: Nadine Strossen exposes the erroneous and simple minded logic in trying to correlate 'pornography' with harm to women. Instead, she shows the correlation between RESTRICTING free sexual expression (yes, even in imagery) and the subjugation of women. While acknowledging women do face serious burdens in our society - some of which include violence against them - she exposes the logical fallacy in simply attributing it to the amorphous 'pornography'. The real issue is a complex, troubling societal problem that incorporates many distinct factors. But the answer does not lie in censorship.

If you want to change the way men perceive women, debate the issue! Open people's eyes! Discover the complex causes of inequalities women continue to face. Don't simply attribute them to one factor. Don't censor! Truth will be on your side. This is the essence of a free society. When the censors roll in, so does the air of totalitarianism.

Its interesting - if you take the view pornography simply CAUSES men to ask violently towards women, can't men who rape simply say: "The pornography made me do it!" Of course this is simply childish and Strossen exposes that all over the book.

Personally I do not like most things labeled 'pornography'. However, its not the government's job to tell me what I should and should not like. What feminists have always striven for is for women to make their own choices and not curtsy to the patriarchy of the State.

Finally, we must all remember we are sexual beings by nature. To censor and repress our nature is to every person's detriment. For anyone who does not accept simple answers for complex issues, and values our liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights - this is the book for you.

Rating:
Summary: an excellent overview of an important subject
Review: Nadine Strossen provides a chilling account on how sexual expression is under attack by a bizarre alliance of radical feminists and right-wing lunatics. She devastates the Mackinnon-Dworkin procensorship position, pointing out its glaring legal and common-sense errors. She shows how censorship harms women more than pornography, and how attacks on pornography quickly mushroom into attacks on all forms of sexual expression. Anyone who values his or her freedom needs to read this book. It is aimed at a general audience and does not contain too much technical legal analysis.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Let the Title Fool You.
Review: This is a well-written, insightful and thought-provoking book on women's rights. Strossen (a New York Law School professor and feminist) points out that women do not really have to choose between freedom and security as the pro-censorship feminists would have us all believe. She refutes the position of Dworkin and MacKinnon that all sexual expression is degrading to women because all sex is rape.

Strossen shows that there is nothing intrinsically misogynistic about sex or sexual expression; that "pornography" is a McCarthyist label for anything one finds offensive; that the best tool against speech that offends is more speech, not less; and that the ultimate danger (and often the goal) of anti-sex censorship is to reinforce the traditional gender role of women as weak and helpless possessions of men rather than to change it.

Claims that Strossen ignores the exploitation of women in this book miss the point. She is not writing that exploitation does not exist, just that it is not a product of the sexually-explicit expression itself (nor would banning "pornography" eliminate it). Would one ban the clothing industry and walk around naked because children suffer in sweatshops? Or does one recognize that the exploiters are the problem, not the clothes?

Strossen has been accused of being a pawn of "pimps" in her role as the president of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ironic story of those same anti-sex, pro-censorship feminists running to the ACLU to (successfully) defend their right to publicly display and distribute "pornography" is quite an eye-opener -- so to speak.

Rating:
Summary: Anti-freedom of speech book, poor panicky work
Review: With some concern about ten years ago I began hearing about a group of feminists who were campaigning against pornography. Catherine MacKinnon, one of the leaders, wrote, "Pornography, in the feminist view, is a form of forced sex... an institution of gender inequality... [P]ornography, with the rape and prostitution in which it participates, institutionalizes the sexuality of male supremacy." MacKinnon teamed up with another feminist, Andrea Dworkin, who has spouted a remarkable range of anti-sex rants: "Intercourse with men as we know them is increasingly impossible... It means remaining the victim... It means acting out the female role, incorporating the masochism, self-hatred, and passivity which are central to it." The MacDworkinites, as they are called, might be considered by some just a branch of feminists that are even more radical than their sisters, but the problem is that they are eager to chip away at the First Amendment.

That brings them into conflict with the American Civil Liberties Union, and in 1995 Nadine Strossen, President of the ACLU, wrote a fine argument against the MacDworkinites, which has now been issued with some updates, _Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights_ (New York University Press). It is a thrilling invocation of the principles of liberty given by the First Amendment, and a reasoned but passionate argument against those feminists who would for some notion of a greater good restrict free speech to make social gains.

The MacDworkinites have made some enormous leaps of definition and logic that to them justify suppression of certain forms of speech. They define pornography as sexually explicit description that subordinates or degrades women, and they insist that as such it causes discrimination and violence against women. The ACLU has successfully battled against the definition of pornography pushed by the pro-censorship feminists in various states and communities, but it has, of course, not taken legal action in Canada, which in 1992 adopted the definition and made illegal sexually explicit expression that might be deemed dehumanizing or degrading to women. The Canadian law has no provision for work that has serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value (as our obscenity laws do now), and it allows for suppression of an entire work even if only parts of it meet the new obscenity definition. MacKinnon and Dworkin saw this as a stunning victory for women. What happened in Canada is that the feminists who worked for the new law have been stunned to find it used against them. Women's bookstores, in particular, were raided if they carried sexual material. Homosexual material was found by definition to be degrading and was seized. And, in a delicious irony, two books entitled _Pornography: Men Possessing Women_ and _Woman Hating_ were seized by Canadian Customs at the American border, because they contained illegal descriptions of pain and bondage. The descriptions, however, were there for the purpose of persuading society against misogyny, and the books were written by Dworkin herself.

Much of _Defending Pornography_ deals with the legal reasons that MacDworkinist regulations undermine women's rights and human rights, and the chilling effect that such regulations would have on free expression, but it does touch on pornography in a more general view. If there should be no laws restricting freedom of the press (or other media), what is so particularly special about sexual content that justifies laws restricting freedom of the press? Why, if a work has sexual content, must we insist that it have artistic, scientific, or political content as well, when we do not do so for anything else? If men and women (and women are increasingly users of erotic material) find pornography entertaining (and even the Meese commission found it could be educational), how does it benefit society to restrict such material? And are such benefits worth the losses that censorship, censorship exemplified by the MacDworkinist restrictions, would necessarily make? _Defending Pornography_ makes plain the losses that have already occurred and serves as a call to arms against prudes or well-intentioned advocates that would cut back First Amendment rights.