To the editors:
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Charles Earp’s letter of March 26 failed to validate censorship. That Mr. Earp, “as a leftist . . . accept[s] the feminist arguments against pornography more readily than those of the puritanical right” is insignificant. His contention that “pornography is offensive to the majority of Americans” might be true, but it’s equally insignificant. But rest easy, fellow leftists. Mr. Earp claims his argument on behalf of censorship “has the virtue of removing literary pornography from the issue and focusing on photography of sexual acts.” It is important that we, the literate elite, save Bret Easton Ellis’s description of a man fucking a woman’s eye socket from the bonfire of demeaning pictures that depict “real genitals [making] real contact.”
Our goal should be to discard both patriarchal misogynist attitudes and sexual taboos. After all, men developed a two-dimensional sacred image of women–barefoot and pregnant–several thousand years before the advent of photography. Pornography induces masturbation, not date rape. Rape is about real violence, power, and humiliation. Without pornography, rapists will still rape, and people will still masturbate. And boys will still learn how to be misogynist at school, in the Scouts, at church, and everywhere else where they may be exposed to American/world culture. In a patriarchal society, women will be seen by most men as Virgin Mother/whore, whether they are photographed for Family Circle or Screw. After we eradicate everything that “most Americans find offensive,” we will still be stuck with the sexist, racist, homophobic viewpoints held by the majority of American men. That’s what I find offensive.
