This book contains the oral testimony of victims of pornography,
spoken on the record for the first time in history.
Speaking at hearings on a groundbreaking antipornography civil
rights law, women offer eloquent witness to the devastation
pornography has caused in their lives. Supported by social science
experts and authorities on rape, battery, and prostitution,
discounted and opposed by free speech advocates and absolutists,
their riveting testimony articulates the centrality of pornography
to sexual abuse and inequity today.
At issue in these hearings is a law conceived and drafted by
Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon that defines harm done
through pornography as a legal injury of sex discrimination
warranting civil redress. From the first set of hearings in
Minneapolis in 1983 through those before the Massachusetts state
legislature in 1992, the witnesses heard here expose the
commonplace reality of denigration and sexual subordination due to
pornography and refute the widespread notion that pornography is
harmless expression that must be protected by the state.
Introduced with powerful essays by MacKinnon and Dworkin, these
hearings--unabridged and with each word scrupulously
verified--constitute a unique record of a conflict over the meaning
of democracy itself--a major civil rights struggle for our time and
a fundamental crisis in United States constitutional law: Can we
sacrifice the lives of women and children to a pornographer's right
to free "speech"? Can we allow the First Amendment to shield sexual
exploitation and predatory sexual violence? These pages contain all
the arguments for protecting pornography--and dramatically document
its human cost.
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