Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [225]
The fight against “filth” has never abated, of course, although these have been lean years for upholders of the faith. In the most recent generation, religious and conservative opposition to pornography has gained what seems an unlikely ally. One wing of the feminist movement joined in the battle against pornography. The real problem of pornography, according to Catherine MacKinnon and others, is that it is part of a system of gender oppression: pornography displays, and produces, the sexual subordination of women. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin drafted a model ordinance that attacked pornography on this basis. The ordinance defined pornography as the “graphic sexually explicit subordination of women, whether in pictures or in words.” “Pornography,” to be subject to the ordinance, had to contain one or more of certain elements: for example, women “are presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation,” or who like to be raped, or are shown as sexual objects “tied up or cut up or mutilated,” or “penetrated by objects or animals,” or in “scenarios of degradation, injury, abasement, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual,” or presented “as sexual objects for domination, conquest, violation, exploitation, possession, or use, or through postures or positions of servility or submission or display.”132
Minneapolis adopted the ordinance, but its mayor vetoed it. The proponents had more luck in Indianapolis, but the ordinance was promptly challenged in the courts. In 1985, the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit found the Indianapolis ordinance unconstitutional. Judge Easterbrook, writing for the court, called the ordinance a form of “thought control.” It establishes, he said, an “approved” view of women, “of how they may react to sexual encounters, of how the sexes may relate to each other.” Those who “espouse the approved view may use sexual images”; others may not. This, said the judge, could not be constitutionally done.133
The battlers on behalf of the ordinance have not, of course, given up. But prospects for success, in this country, do not seem very bright. This is because the climate of opinion is essentially unfavorable. Whatever the merits of the feminist case against pornography, any significant move to repress “dirty” books, movies, and pictures just does not seem to be in the cards in the nineties. This is surely true of big cities—small towns and suburbs may be a different matter. It is not easy to disentangle the kind of pornography MacKinnon opposes from the freedom of sexual expression in general. Nor does it seem likely that the country as a whole will turn back to the way things were in the past. The era of the self, the antirepressive era, is not minded to go in for banning movies and books. Obscenity and pornography, it seems, are here to stay.
Drug Laws: The Great Exception
The counterrevolution we have described has taken its time in some fields, gone rapidly in others, zigged a bit and zagged a bit; but the general trend has been crystal clear. The great exception to the trend concems narcotics—drugs. In the nineteenth century, as we saw, drug laws hardly mattered. There were scattered bits of legislation here and there, aimed at “opium dens” and the like, but, in general, addiction was not a crime, nor was the plain, unvarnished sale or use of narcotics. This situation changed radically in the twentieth century.
The first rumblings were in the state legislatures. A New