If women’s freedom is as incompatible with pornography’s construction of our freedom as our equality is incompatible with pornography’s construction of our equality, we get neither freedom nor equality under the liberal calculus. Equality for women is incompatible with a definition of men's freedom that is at our expense.Okay, that's fine, but I have a question: isn't some porn of the all-male variety? Aren't there some women who watch porn? Considering that I'm pretty sure the answers to those two questions are both "yes," though the percentages may well be small, does MacKinnon's logic allow us also to censor gay male porn? Or porn enjoyed by women? And if not, isn't there a problem here? In a sense, MacKinnon's argument depends on the idea that women are always the ones getting screwed (in the non-sexual sense) when someone or anyone is getting, well, screwed.
EDIT: Her article on the whole is defending a particular anti-pornography ordinance based on the view that pornography is damaging to women's equality. She also makes clear that she isn't interested in defending the ordinance against 'views which have never been law,' such as First Amendment absolutism. I should state that I think she is 100% correct that, if we're going to get into the censorship business at all in this area (which according to the Court, we are), we should be allowed to do it on feminist grounds (or quasi-feminist, to encompass the concerns I raise in the previous paragraph). Also she is of course 100% correct that, even under the Black & Douglas view, child pornography or other forms of directly exploitative production techniques can and should be criminalized.
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