Online Pornography as a Threat of Violence

In 1994, a male University of Michigan student posted a sexually explicit short story to
alt.sex.stories, a widely-read USENET newsgroup. (While USENET hosts are technically
neither a subset nor a superset of the Internet, it, like the Internet, is a decentralized computer
network, and the vast majority of its traffic passes over the Internet.) It is unclear whether
anything would have happened to Jake Baker, who posted the story, had he not used the
name and physical description of a female student who attended a class with him and either
lived in the same dorm or nearby. The government tried to prosecute him on the basis that he
had made a threat of violence against her, but eventually failed to achieve any remedy in the
courts. An activist named Catharine MacKinnon contributed an amicus curiae brief to the
proceedings, and has since stated that the government neglected to raise all the relevant
issues in the case. She has also campaigned for laws to stop pornography.
MacKinnon claims, in general, that pornography is violence. In this particular case, she
argued to the court that the Baker pornography was the threat of violence. To back up her
argument about his intentions, she used excerpts from his E-mail correspondence with a likeminded young man in Canada. E-mail is normally personal communication, and so it is harder
to classify as a "threat" in the traditional sense of something communicated to the target, but
her own argument is that the story itself was a threat and an instance of violence. (The
appeals court dismissed the case on technical grounds mostly relating to the specificity of the
threat.) It is clear that this story and others that Mr. Baker had been composing were reports
of intended violence. It is a good concrete example of MacKinnon's general thesis: that
pornography by its nature is violent, and that violence and harm are efficient, practical
measures for defining pornography under the laws of a liberal society.
One possible objection to MacKinnon's argument is that it only condemns violent
pornography, and that not all pornography is violent nor degrading to women. For instance, in
a TV interview, after a quote had been played from Ted Bundy, MacKinnon's associate
Andrea Dworkin stated categorically that all pornography causes harm(1). In fact, Mr. Bundy
had only said, "My experience with [violent pornography] is that, once you become addicted to
it -- and I look at this as a kind of addiction -- you reach that jumping-off point where you might
begin to wonder if maybe actually doing it would give you that which is beyond merely
watching it."(2) He hadn't spoken, at least in this quote, about pornography in general. As
another example, when I took a high-school health class, the teacher told us, "Rape is
violence. All rapists do it because they want to control women, and not to satisfy physical
needs." I wondered, "Would this statement be false if we could find even one man who had
forced a woman to have sex with him only because of a biological need, and not with any
desire for social or emotional control?"
MacKinnon uses an effective indirect argument to combat this sort of objection about
pornography. She begins by stating why it might be different from other forms of speech which
should still be protected: "Pornography contains ideas, like any other social practice. But the
way it works is not as a thought or through its ideas as such ... Its place in abuse requires
understanding it more in active than in passive terms, as constructing and performative rather
than as merely referential or connotative." (Only Words 21). After making her argument
without dealing with this particular objection, she goes on to say, "The most elite denial of

harm is the one that holds that pornography is 'representation', when a representation is a
nonreality." (28) She contends, "In terms of what the men are doing sexually, an audience
watching a gang rape in a movie is no different from an audience watching a gang rape that is
reenacting a gang rape from a movie, or an audience watching any gang rape." (28) Thus, the
act is offensive to everyone involved, whether or not they are separated by time, space, or a
phone line. We may need other evidence to show universality of violence, but the violence of
rape implies that any pornography depicting rape is, by its nature, violent.
Another different objection might be that "There are women who watch strip-shows, read
Playgirl, or enjoy taking a male role in Internet sex, and so forth; these women do these things
by their own choice." MacKinnon dismisses most of these arguments by pointing out the
social construction of gender and reality. For her, the important thing is that women are sill
objectified and humiliated. If anything, it does no good to point out that men are also being
objectified, because there are still people (the consumer, the pornographer) who are taking
advantage of others.
It is regrettable that no legal remedy was ever applied to Mr. Baker. It is clear that, for him, the
incidents he described were compellingly real, even though they hadn't happened yet in an
objective construction of reality: "I've been masturbating like the devil recently. Just thinking
about it anymore doesn't do the trick..."(3) MacKinnon anticipated this when she wrote, "The
most common denial is that pornography is 'fantasy'. Meaning it is unreal, or only an internal
reality. For whom? ... The consumer masturbates to it, replays it in his head and onto the
bodies of women he encounters or has sex with." (Only Words 26) The consumer of
pornography may forget what caused him to feel that way, but many men report that it is a
difficult process; the images and feelings will never be totally gone.
Even though the court case died, we can learn about our society by studying it. Ted Bundy
blamed his actions on pornography, thus showing its real-world impact. In the case of Mr.
Bungle, the members of an electronic, partly "fantasy" community were savagely attacked and
defiled by someone who was probably just following scripts that had been taken from
pornography, either directly or through the medium of society as a whole. Unlike this case,
there are numerous instances where men actually use pornography as a means of control
over women, or gain control over women by involving them in the production of pornography.
Such social cost is high. The fact that U. S. citizens spend between eight and ten billion
dollars on pornography each year(4) should be the final straw compelling us to be more
careful individually and take appropriate measures collectively to stop this deadly plague.
Notes:
1. 48 Hours, 18 Nov 1992
2. Ibid.
3. Legal brief by MacKinnon. www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/Porn/Baker/sc.html, 26 Jul 2001
4. Thomas S. Monson. Liahona, Nov 2001, p.4. Salt Lake City: La Iglesia de Jesucristo de los
Santos de los ltimos Das.