Why Phyllis Schlafly is right (but wrong) about pornography.

• Author: Koppelman, Andrew
• Position: Symposium: Law and Morality

Phyllis Schlafly is wrong about the regulation of pornography, but her views need to be taken more seriously than they typically are in the overwhelmingly liberal academy. She represents an important tradition in thinking about gender issues, and she has advanced her views vigorously and articulately.

Schlafly's preeminent concern is to preserve a pattern of gender-specific roles and relations that, she thinks, have helped protect women and children from desertion and abuse. She wants to suppress pornography because it helps to reinforce a vernacular masculine culture that is indifferent or even hostile to the needs of women and children. Schlafly's worries about this culture are legitimate. But the suppression of pornography, I will conclude, is the wrong solution to the problem.

1. SCHLAFLY ON PORNOGRAPHY

   Schlafly has argued that

   [p]ornography can be best defined as the degradation of woman. It exploits women individually and as a group in the most offensive, degrading, and cruel way. In the modern jargon, pornography is the most "sexist" activity of all. The women's liberationists prove their hypocrisy by their nonattitude toward pornography. They profess outrage at the role-concept fostered by school textbooks that include pictures of women in the home as wives and mothers, but they raise no protest about the role-concept fostered by obscene pictures of women as playthings for male lust and sadism in obscene and "bondage" books, magazines, and movies. (1) Schlafly wants to suppress pornography precisely because of the way in which it socializes men. "Pornography cannot be victimless because its very essence demands that a victim be subordinate. One cannot be an abuser unless there is an abused. Pornography portrays the past abuse, and pornography is a tool to facilitate future abuse." (2) The testimonies of women abused either in the making of pornography or by men who have consumed pornography--testimonies that Schlafly collected in an edited volume--"prove that pornography is addictive, and that those who become addicted crave more bizarre and more perverted pornography, and become more callous toward their victims." (3) The basic problem is the effect of pornography on the way that men think. "Pornography changes the perceptions and attitudes of men toward women, individually and collectively," she writes, "and desensitizes men so that what was once repulsive and unthinkable eventually becomes not only acceptable but desirable. What was once mere fantasy becomes reality. Thus conditioned and stimulated by pornography, the user seeks a victim." (4) Pornography, she argues, should be regarded as a "public nuisance." (5)

   The claims just quoted are wildly overstated. Schlafly suggests that pornography provokes sexual violence. The correlation between pornography and sexual violence, however, is strong only among a very small subset of already pathological men, comprising less than one percent of the male population. (6) In the aggregate, it appears that the availability of pornography actually reduces the frequency of sexual assault. (7) It is true that women have often been abused during the production of pornography, but abuses of this kind are ubiquitous in illegal markets, and they appear to have become relatively rare in the porn industry now that producers are permitted to operate openly in some parts of the country. (8) There is anecdotal evidence that some consumers of pornography become so transfixed by it as to lose all interest in relationships with actual people. (9) There is no good data, however, on the proportion of consumers for whom this is true, and no principled distinction can be made between this and other socially isolating behavior (such as too many hours spent watching television); "addiction," therefore, is not a helpful metaphor for the problem. (10)

   Despite these caveats about Schlafly's arguments, the deeper concern she identifies is worth investigating. Violence is hardly the only way in which men victimize women. A lot of American men behave very badly, and that behavior has something to do with the way in which they are socialized and the culture in which they are raised. The real and important concern raised by Schlafly is not about the effects of pornography, but about its meaning.

   Schlafly has a frightening and pessimistic story to tell about the relations between the sexes. Her story lies at the confluence of two major strands of thought about the social meaning of gender, which together form the basis of a critique of both sex equality and pornography. The story Schlafly tells is a caricature, but caricatures have some virtues. Schlafly's story makes salient important features of reality that we might not have seen quite as clearly without her help.

2. THE FOUNDATIONS OF SCHLAFLY'S ANTIFEMINISM

   1. Rousseau

      The roots of Schlafly's antifeminist philosophy lie, surprisingly, in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. (11) Rousseau is generally remembered as the patron saint of the French Revolution, but he is also the most sophisticated source of modern secular conservative thought about gender. Rousseau began, like other Enlightenment thinkers, by endorsing sex equality. (12) On reflection, however, he changed his mind. He became the wellspring of modern antifeminist thought. (13)

      Rousseau thought that most human desires provide no basis for enduring social ties. (14) Even sexual appetite can be satisfied by a momentary coming together and then parting. (15) The only desire that does provide a solid basis for social relationships is amour-propre, which can be translated loosely as pride or vanity. Unlike the bodily appetites that the savage felt, amour propre is "a relative sentiment, artificial and born in society, which inclines each individual to have a greater esteem for himself than for anyone else" and "inspires in men all the harm they do to one another." (16) This sentiment is quite distinct from the natural self-love of the savage, who does not compare himself with anyone and who is indifferent to the opinions of others. The natural man was dependent upon things, not upon men. (17) As society developed, people became aware that others were looking at them: "Each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a value." (18) This was the origin of all conflict.

      As soon as men had begun to appreciate one another, and the idea of consideration was formed in their minds, each one claimed a right to it, and it was no longer possible to be disrespectful toward anyone with impunity. From this came the first duties of civility, even among savages; and from this any voluntary wrong became an outrage, because along with the harm that resulted from the injury, the offended man saw in it contempt for his person which was often more unbearable than the harm itself. Thus, everyone punishing the contempt shown him by another in a manner proportionate to the importance he accorded himself, vengeances became terrible, and men bloodthirsty and cruel. (19) According to Rousseau, the problem that any society must address, then, is how to make it possible for men maddened by amour-propre, each of whom is seeking to be "the sole master of the universe," (20) to live together peacefully. An important part of the solution, Rousseau believed, lay in the family. It is "by means of the small fatherland which is the family that the heart attaches itself to the large one," and it is "the good son, the good husband, and the good father who make the good citizen." (21)

      The only social tie in which amour-propre can find harmless and enduring satisfaction is the tie between man and woman. Women can use their charms and wiles to pander to men's amour-propre and, by thus manipulating them, satisfy their own amour-propre as well. (22) Women bear the burden of creating and maintaining this arrangement because they need the family more than men do.

      Woman and man are made for each other, but their mutual dependence is not equal. Men depend on women because of their desires; women depend on men because of both their desires and their needs. We [men] would survive more easily without them than they would without us. (23) Women bear children, and would raise them with difficulty without the help of the father. Material necessity thus impels a woman to induce a man to love his children, for their sake as well as for her own. (24) Rousseau suggested powerful reasons why she can only do this by submitting to her husband's absolute authority. First, the husband must feel confident that the children are indeed his. (25) Second, because a man's natural sexual desires can be satisfied by any woman at all, his desire for any particular woman is sporadic and weak. (26) It is therefore necessary for a woman to inflame her man's desire by catering to his vanity, as Joel Schwartz explains:

      The male desires not his partner, but his partner's esteem (and his own self-esteem) as the stronger. He desires to be desired more than he truly desires. Because of its psychological basis, the sexual relationship must appear to the male to be a political relationship; one in which his physical strength gives him title to rule the female. Because his desire is weaker, the male must seem to be the stronger. Female modesty, the resistance to male sexual advances which is then overcome, gives the male the desired appearance of strength. (27) A wife therefore must pretend to be weaker than she is; she must cloister herself in her house; she must be seductive toward her husband and chaste toward all other men. (28) By allowing her husband the illusion of rule over her, she achieves real rule over him. "Woman, who is weak and who sees nothing outside the house, estimates and judges the forces she can put to work to make up for her weakness, and those forces are men's passions." (29) Because he thinks he is the boss, and she knows she is the boss, the amour-propre of both is...