Word: mackinnon
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According to various feminists, the Meese commission report was good for the women's movement (Law Professor Catharine MacKinnon), bad for the movement (A.C.L.U. Attorney Nan Hunter) or basically irrelevant to feminist interests (Movement Pioneer Betty Friedan). "Today could be a turning point in women's rights," MacKinnon told a news conference in a cramped storefront near the Times Square porno district that serves as the offices of Women Against Pornography. "Women actually succeeded in convincing a national governmental body of a truth that women have long known: pornography harms women and children." Hunter tapped a different strand of feminist...
Dworkin and MacKinnon have been pushing antiporn legislation framed as ways to protect the civil rights of women. One such bill passed the Minneapolis city council twice, but was vetoed each time by the mayor. A similar ordinance, passed in Indianapolis, was declared unconstitutional by a federal appeals court, a decision upheld in February by the Supreme Court. An uneasy alliance of Women Against Pornography and right-wing groups supported the legislation. Prominent feminists such as Friedan, Kate Millett and Rita Mae Brown opposed it, and the National Organization for Women avoided taking a position. The Meese Commission recommended hearings...
...Indianapolis case may spell the end of attempts to attack porn as sex discrimination, a tactic that in recent years had the unusual effect of allying some left-leaning feminists and conservative moralists. The idea was developed by Law Professor Catharine MacKinnon, a visiting scholar at Stanford, and Andrea Dworkin, a New York feminist writer (Pornography: Men Possessing Women). They contend that by enforcing a subordinate image of women, porn promotes violence against them and hinders their chances of achieving equal opportunity. In the past the court has permitted restrictions on free speech when a "compelling" government objective is involved...
...problem facing the Justices was that laws aimed at the content of pornography inevitably restrict expression, and the repellent and the worthwhile can be so closely braided that no amount of linguistic hairsplitting can untangle them. Drafted with the assistance of MacKinnon and Dworkin, the Indianapolis ordinance targeted materials that showed women in bondage or that treated pain and humiliation as sexual turn-ons. But more sweepingly, it forbade showing women "as sexual objects for domination, conquest, violation, exploitation, possession or use." A federal appeals court was concerned that the ordinance might encompass everything from the ! Iliad to Barbarella...
Last week's action outraged antiporn forces from left to right. Said MacKinnon: "Six men on the Supreme Court stood up for organized crime." Anti-ERA Campaigner Phyllis Schlafly inveighed, "It allows pornographers to clothe themselves in the First Amendment while they're undressing women." But most legal observers, including those in the Administration, were unsurprised. In light of the free-speech issues, Deputy Attorney General D. Lowell Jensen said, "the result was pretty well foretold...