Defending Pornography on Feminist Grounds: A Q&A With Nadine Strossen

"There were many of us who opposed censoring pornography...precisely because of our commitment to feminist goals and principles," says the former ACLU chief.

When Nadine Strossen's book Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights was first published in 1995, America was in the grips of a major cultural schism over erotic expression. Conservatives and an influential cadre of feminists had teamed up to promote porn censorship, with some success. The radfem contingent claimed the existence of legal porn was an affront to women—hindering their fight for equality and driving violence against them—and thus argued that free speech was incompatible with feminism. But feminists like Strossen didn't accept this. A New York Law School professor who headed the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1991 to 2008, Strossen argued that opposing censorship was not only important as an abstract liberal principle but was in itself good for promoting women's rights.

Nearly a quarter century later, Strossen's arguments are still a vital antidote to much of what one hears from prominent feminists. And as the left-right anti-porn alliance continues to wield influence in statehouses and in Congress, a brand new reissue of Defending Pornography is a must-read for a new generation of free speech defenders and libertarian feminists.

I talked to Strossen last week about why she originally wrote the book and why it's still relevant today. I'll be publishing our chat in two parts in the Sex & Tech newsletter this week, so stay tuned for the second part on Wednesday. The following transcript of our conversation has been mildly edited for length and clarity.

What compelled you to first write Defending Pornography?

Strossen: I first wrote Defending Pornography way back in 1994 because there was then prevalent across the ideological spectrum a very destructive misconception that one had to choose between being a feminist and being a free speech advocate, and that if one really supported women's rights, women's safety, women's dignity, women's equality, then one had to support censorship—in particular of so-called "pornography" or sexually explicit, sexually suggestive expression. And it wasn't nearly as well known as it should be that there were many of us who strongly opposed censoring pornography. (And by the way, I always say "pornography" with quotation marks around it.)

There were many of us who opposed censoring pornography, not only because of our commitment to core free speech principles, but also, independently, precisely because of our commitment to feminist goals and principles, and our understanding—based on widespread longstanding experience, in the United States and elsewhere—that no matter how well-intended, censorship of pornography would end up doing women's rights far more harm than good.

(cover of Defending Pornography)

Could you maybe elaborate on that a little bit, how it winds up doing more harm than good?

Since then, Liz, I've had the opportunity to write about other kinds of controversial expression, including—and again, with scare quotes—so-called "hate speech," so-called "disinformation" or "misinformation," so-called "extremist" speech. And I've come to see that all of these efforts to censor all of these controversial kinds of speech, including pornography, suffer from the same fundamental flaws. All of those flaws emanate from the irreducibly subjective and vague nature of the concept, which means that whoever the enforcing authority is—whether the government, whether individual citizens, as would've happened under the model anti-pornography law that was proposed by the so-called radical feminists—has essentially unfettered discretion to decide what within that inherently elusive and manipulable concept, in this case pornography, is inconsistent with their values. And that means that for the rest of us who disagree with a particular, individual, subjective concept of either sexual speech or hate speech or disinformation, that our freedom and our equality is undermined.

Now, since women and feminists and advocates of reproductive freedom and LGBTQ individuals and advocates of their rights—through many historic periods, and including in the United States—have been in the minority, at least in many communities, it is completely predictable that laws targeting pornography, obscenity, any other disfavored category of sexual expression consistently have disproportionately been enforced to suppress those perspectives, perspectives that are especially important for women's rights and safety and dignity and health and equality and lives.

It's always amazing to me how few people seem to realize that. 

You know, for so many years, those of us in the feminist anti-censorship movement would predict that if the so-called radical feminist vision of illegal pornography were enacted—and their concept was characteristically vague and subjective, any sexual expression that is subordinating to women or demeaning or dehumanizing or degrading—that their advocacy would be among the expression that would be the first to be targeted.

And sure enough, that prediction immediately came to pass. Andrea Dworkin, a writer, and Catharine MacKinnon,* a law professor—their concept of illegal pornography was adopted by the Canadian Supreme Court [in 1992]. Immediately, Canadian Customs seized a number of books at the U.S.–Canada border that were deemed to be inconsistent with that concept. And among those books were books that were written by Andrea Dworkin herself. Because in the process of denouncing pornography as being degrading and dehumanizing, she of course goes to great lengths to describe it. And you could sort of have schadenfreude and "I told you so." But it was a sad proof of concept, if you will.

There was a very active women's anti-pornography group in many parts of the country, including New York, called Women Against Pornography. And as was characteristic of these groups, they would have big table displays on sidewalks where they would display examples of what they considered to be the most misogynistic, violent, horrific pornography. And one that I remember, which was quite famous or infamous, was a cover image from Hustler magazine which showed a woman being stuffed into a meat grinder. And among the places where they had these displays was Grand Central Station, a major commuting point in New York. And commuters were complaining about how upsetting and horrifying these images were, so the authorities at Grand Central Station booted out Women Against Pornography. And guess what they did? They went to the New York office of the ACLU and asked us to defend their right to display the pornography that they were advocating should be banned and criminalized.

(Hustler)

That's amazing. I love that story.

I mean, no sense of the irony here, right? I assume it doesn't have to be said, but—just to underscore—any expression can be used to convey completely different messages. They were using what they considered to be the most dangerous expression, presumably not to stimulate violence and discrimination against women but for exactly the opposite purpose, right? So they themselves were just proving the very over-simplistic cause-and-effect assumption that underlies the censorial impetus that, you know, you see an image that's degrading, and therefore you're going to adopt ideas that are degrading and it might even lead you to engage in degrading conduct. Could be exactly the opposite.

You were part of a group, with Joan Kennedy Taylor, called Feminists For Free Expression, correct? 

Yes, I was one of the co-founders of that group. I remember working on the founding documents most closely with Marcia Pally* and Marjorie Heins, who was a long-time lawyer with the ACLU Arts Censorship Project. Joan was one of the early leaders and activists in that movement as well.

Did people see it as an oxymoron at the time, that feminists were fighting for free expression? Because I know when I talk about this today, everyone's like, "No, feminists hate free expression."

The pendulum kept swinging back and forth, Liz. Certainly, in the '70s and the beginning of the second wave of the women's movement, and through most of the eighties in most of the country, feminists—along with all advocates of equal rights and human rights—were just assumed to be, and assumed ourselves to be, allies of free speech.

I literally remember the very first time I heard the so-called feminist pro-censorship, anti-pornography argument. I mean, it was so shocking to me that I literally, all these decades later, have a complete visual memory of when I heard that argument. I was attending a convention at that time. I lived in my childhood home city, which I returned to after law school, of Minneapolis. And I was leader of the Minnesota Women's Political Caucus, which was a nonpartisan organization seeking to increase women's participation in politics and politicians' concern for women's issues. And somebody talked about the argument that was then being pioneered by Dworkin and MacKinnon in a seminar at the University of Minnesota Law School. That's where they first aired this argument, and—I don't know if you know the history, but it was actually enacted into law by the Minnesota Minneapolis City Council [in 1983], vetoed by a remarkably courageous, wonderful mayor named Don Fraser,* whose wife, interestingly enough, was an internationally-renowned leading feminist, Arvonne Fraser.* But anyway, it was such a shocking argument.

But very quickly—thanks to, I have to say, very charismatic arguments by MacKinnon in particular—that movement really took off. And that's why there was an earlier counterorganization called FACT, the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce, that was spearheaded by Sylvia Law, a feminist professor who was also at NYU Law School, who was very involved with the ACLU, and Nan Hunter, who was, I believe either the first or second—she may have been the very first—director of the ACLU's then-new lesbian and gay rights project. And FACT actually filed a very influential brief in the first legal challenge to the first MacKinnon-Dworkin law that was actually enacted without a mayoral veto, that went into effect in Indianapolis [in 1984].

I don't know whether [U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana Judge Sarah Evans Barker] expressly cited the FACT brief, but she definitely incorporated its argument in her opinion, making the point that it was especially advocates of women's rights who depended on robust free speech and that this law, in her view, was antithetical to women's equality as well as to free speech. After that, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the lower court decision—well, first, the Seventh Circuit affirmed it, in an excellent opinion. The U.S. Supreme Court summarily affirmed it [in 1986].

We thought that the fight was over, as a legal matter. So FACT kind of disbanded. It reminds me a little bit of what happened with Roe vs. Wade, where the pro-choice movement thought, "We've succeeded, now we can fold our tents and go home," and the other side becomes more galvanized. And that's what happened here. The radical feminists became more organized in terms of influencing the cultural discussion, including on campus. They harnessed themselves to the parallel movement that was developing on campus to outlaw hate speech more generally, of which this concept of sexist pornography is a subset of hate speech—sexually explicit hate speech that discriminates against women. So those two movements were propelling each other in tandem.

And bizarrely—in terms of the completely different ideology—this movement was fueled by, and in turn helped to fuel, a movement coming from the right, as embodied most influentially by the Meese Pornography Commission, named after Ed Meese, the attorney general under Ronald Reagan. It issued a report in 1986 which embraced a cultural and religious and political conservative opposition to pornography, using the same stigmatizing term, denoting in their case, sexually explicit expression that undermines so-called "traditional family values" that endangered the so-called "traditional American family." And despite their completely antithetical views about the role of women and of women's rights and equality, they were completely happy to make common cause in advocating for restrictions on sexual expression.

So there was something that was called the Pornography Victims Compensation Act that had been proposed in Congress with bipartisan support, which would've been a federal version of the Dworkin-MacKinnon anti-pornography law. It basically would have allowed anybody who had been subject to sexual assault or sex discrimination to sue creators, purveyors, distributors of sexual expression as allegedly having caused the negative attitudes that led to the negative actions against women. And this was really poised to be sailing through Congress. The conservatives were supporting it because they hated pornography for their reasons, and the liberals were supporting it because the view was very prevalent that "feminists support this." So you're absolutely right, that position became equated with feminism. Feminists for Free Expression was founded specifically to counter that law and to defy this widespread assumption that feminists support censorship. And we sent a letter to Congress that we were told was very influential in terminating that legislation that never was enacted, fortunately.

You write in the new preface to the book about how calling them radical feminists—this group that really opposes porn and sex work and is very pro-censorship—is a misnomer. Can you explain why you say that?

It was ultimately a view that is very anti-sex, which I don't see as a radical view at all. And that is not just hyperbolic conclusion—I've got direct quotes, repeatedly, from MacKinnon and Dworkin where they talk about sex as being inherently degrading to women. They expressly equate women with children in the laws and in their writing, so that those of us who think that we enjoy sex, let alone those who think that we would enjoy looking at or even, heaven forbid, performing for or creating pornography… One of our other leaders in Feminists for Free Expression was Candida Royalle, and I was so happy to see that recently her papers have surfaced and she's being written about, but she and Veronica Vera and Nina Hartley, other former pornography performers and creators of pornography, including what they considered to be especially empowering and liberating and joyful for women, were part of this movement as well. But the MacKinnon-Dworkin line was that those of us who think that we support this freedom and even enjoy exercising it are victims of false consciousness, and we have to be protected against ourselves just the way children are. And I mean MacKinnon literally equated women with children in being inherently incapable of meaningful consent in the realm of the sexual, including sexual expression. That, to me, is the opposite of a progressive, radical view.

Stay turned for part two of this interview in Wednesday's newsletter.

More Sex & Tech

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• The return of Anthony Comstock: The 151-year-old Comstock law "banned…everything ranging from contraception to pornography. It remains one of the most glaring attacks on free speech principles in our federal code." Now it's back in the battle over abortion pills, as Jonathan Turley explores here.

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*CORRECTION: Due to transcription error, an earlier version of this article misspelled the names of Marcia Pally, Catharine MacKinnon, and Don and Arvonne Fraser.