Subject: TESTIMONY: PORNOGRAPHY
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TESTIMONY
FINAL REPORT OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL'S COMMISSION ON PORNOGRAPHY
[There has been criticism of this report that is was stacked and
it was a right-wing report because it was an investigation
carried our under a conservative administration. However, these
complaints are unfounded. Even Penthouse Magazine pointed out
that the Commission was deeply divided, except for its unanimous
conclusions, which without a doubt established a causal
relationship between pornography and harm it causes. And members
of the Commission itself while composed of four conservatives,
four were also liberals, and the remaining four were politically
"middle of the roaders." See official biographies in the report.]
There was testimony given of victims, in their own words,
including victim's mothers, friends, or therapists. The following
is an excerpt of Andrea Dworkin's testimony on behalf of victims
whose voices were not heard:
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
My name is Andrea Dworkin. I am a citizen of the United States,
and in this country where I live, every year millions of
pictures are being made of women with our legs spread. We are
called beaver, we are called pussy, our genitals are tied up, they
are pasted, makeup is put on them to make them pop out of a page
at a male viewer. Millions and millions of pictures are made of us
in postures of submission and sexual access so that our vaginas
are exposed for penetration, our anuses are exposed for
penetration, our throats are used as if they are genitals for
penetration. In this country where I live as a citizen real rapes
are on film and are being sold in the marketplace. And the major
motif of pornography as a form of entertainment is that women are
raped and violated and humiliated until we discover that we like
it and at that point we ask for more.
In this country where I live as a citizen women are penetrated by
animals and objects for public entgertainment, women are
urinated on and defecated on, women and girls are used
interchangeably so that grown women are made up to look like
five-or six-year-old children surrounded by toys, presented in
mainstream pornographic publications for anal penetration. There
are magazines in which adult women are presented with their
public areas shaved so that they resemble children.
In this country where I live, there is a trafficking in
pornography that exploits mentally and physically disabled women,
women who are maimed; there is amputee pornography, a trade in
women who have been maimed in that way, as if that is a sexual
fetish for men. In this country where I live, there is a trade in
racism as a form of sexual pleasure, so that the plantation is
presented as a form of sexual gratification for the black women
slave who asks please to be abused, please to be raped, please to
be hurt. Black skin is presented as if it is a female genital,
and all the violence and the abuse and the humiliation that is in
general directed against female genitals is directed against the
black skin of women in pornography.
Asian women in this country where I live are tied from trees and
hung from ceilings and hung from doorways as a form of public
entertainment. There is a concentration camp pornography in this
country where I live, where the concentration camp and the
atrocities that occured there are presented as existing for the
sexual pleasure of the victim, of the woman, who orgasms to the
real abuses that occured, not very long ago in history.
In the coutry where I live as a citizen, there is a pornography
of the humiliation of women where every single way of humiliating
a human being is taken to be a form of sexual pleasure for the
viewer and for the victim; where women are covered in filth,
including feces, including mud, including paint, including
blood, including seman; where women are tortured for the sexual
pleasure of those who watch and those who do the torture, where
women are murdered for the sexual pleasure of murdering women,
and this material exists because it is fun, because it is
entertainment, because it is a form of pleasure, and there are
those who say it is a form of freedom.
Certainly if it freedom for those who do it. Certainly it is
freedom for those who use it as entertainment, but we are also
asked to believe that it is freedom for those to whom it is done.
Then this entertainment is taken, and it is used on other women,
women who aren't in the pornography, to force those women into
prostitution, to make them imitate the acts in the pornography.
The women in the pornography, sixty-five to seventy percent of
them we believe are victims of incest or child sexual abuse. They
are poor women; they are not women who have opportunities in this
society. They are frequently runaways who are picked up by pimps
and exploited. They are frequently raped, the rapes are filmed,
they are kept in prostitutioon by blackmail. The pornography is
used on prostitutes by johns who are expected to replicate the
sexual acts in the pornography, no matter how damaging it is.
Pornogrpahy is used in rape--to plan it, to execute it, to
choreograph it, to engender the excitement ot commit the act.
Pornography is used in gang rape against women. We see an
increase since the release of "Deep Throat" in throat rape--where
women show up in emergency rooms because men believe they can
penetrate, deep-thrust, to the bottom of a woman's throat. We see
increasing use of all elements of pornography in battery, which is
the most commonly committed violent crime in this country,
including the rape of women by animals, including maiming,
including heavy bondage, including outright torture.
We have seen in the last eight years, an increase in the use of
cameras in rapes. And those rapes are filmed and then they are
put on the marketplace and they are protected speech---they are
real rapes. We see pornography in the harassment of women on
jobs, especially in nontraditional jobs, in the harrassment of
women in education, to create terror and compliance in the home,
which as you know is the most dangerous place for women in this
society, where more violence is committed against women than
anywhere else. We see pornography used to create harrassment of
women and children in neighborhoods that are saturated with
pornography where people come from other parts of the city and
then prey on the populations of people who live in those
neighborhoods, and that increases physical attack and verbal
assault.
We see pornography having introduced a profit motive into rape.
We see the filmed rapes are protected speech. We see the
centrality of pornography in serial murders. There are snuff
films. We see boys imitating pornography.
We see the average age of rapists going down. We are beginning to
see gang rapes in elementary schools committed by elementary
school age boys imitating pornography. We see sexual assault
after death where frequently the pornography is the motive for
the murder because the man believes that he will get a particular
kind of sexual pleasure having sex with a woman after she is
dead.
We see a major trade in women, we see the torture of women as a
form of entertainment, and we see women also suffering the injury
of objectification---that is to say we are dehumanized. We are
treated as if we are subhuman, and that is a precondition for
violence against us.
I live in a country where if you film any act of humilitation or
torture, and if the victim is a woman, the film is both
entertainment and it is protected speech. Now that tells me
something about what it means to be a woman citizen in this
country, and the meaning of being second-class.
When your rape is entertainment, your worthlessness is absolute.
You have reached the nadir of social worthlessness. The civil
impact of pornography on women is staggering. It keeps us
socially silent. It keeps us afraid in neighborehoods; and it
creates a vast hopelessness for women, a vast despair. One lives
inside a nightmare of sexual abuse that is both actual and
potential, and you have the great joy of knowing that your
nightmare is someone else's freedom and someone elses's fun.
[...]
I am also asking you to acknowledge the international reality of
this---this is a human rights issue---for a very personal reason,
which is that my grandparents came here, Jews fleeing from
Russia. Jews fleeing from Hungary. Those who did not come to
this country were all killed, either in pogroms or by the
Nazis. They came here for me. I live here, and I live in a
country where women are tortured as a form of public
entertainment and for profit, and that torture is upheld as a
state-proteced right. Now, that is unbearable.
I am asking you to help the exploited, not the exploiters. You
have a tremendous opportunity here. I am asking you as
individuals to have the courage, because I think it's what you
will need, to actually be willing yourselves to go and cut that
woman down and untie her hands and take the gag out of her mouth
and to do something, for her freedom.
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