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Giving Women The Benefit Of Equality: A Response To Wirenius, Tracy Higgins
Giving Women The Benefit Of Equality: A Response To Wirenius, Tracy Higgins
Fordham Urban Law Journal
This essay offers a feminist response to Mr. Wirenius’s provocative critique of Professor MacKinnon. Whether supporting or opposing pornography regulation, feminist legal scholars tend to approach the issue from neither of the traditional positions – First Amendment absolutist or moral censor. Rather, a feminist approach to pornography is informed by an understanding of the profound harm that pornography can and does inflict upon women. Consequently, even for feminists who many oppose pornographic regulation, the choice is not an obvious one, as it seems to be for Mr. Wirenius, between the good of civil libertarianism and the evil of totalitarianism. An …
Giving The Devil The Benefit Of Law: Pornographers, The Feminist Attack On Free Speech, And The First Amendment, John F. Wirenius
Giving The Devil The Benefit Of Law: Pornographers, The Feminist Attack On Free Speech, And The First Amendment, John F. Wirenius
Fordham Urban Law Journal
The battle lines over the censorship of “pornographic” materials have been shifted by a faction of the women’s movement following the publication of Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women. With Dworkin, Catharine A. MacKinnon, a vocal and influential female advocate, co-authored a prototypical ordinance to protect against the degradation of individuals, mainly women, in pornography. To these advocates, pornography causes direct harm to individuals coerced into sexual activity and indirect harm by inculcating society with the chauvinistic norms of the pornographic world. While Wirenius agrees with MacKinnon and Dworkin about the importance of pornography in First Amendment jurisprudence, he disagrees …