Populism
passed a civil rights law enabling female victims
of pornography to bring civil rights actions
against the pornographers. However, the law was
vetoed by the mayor and never implemented. A
similar situation arose in Indianapolis, where
pornographers claimed they were being denied
their constitutional right to free speech (under
the First Amendment). Th us, in the courts, free
speech took precedence over women’s equality
and safety from physical abuse.
In a UK New Scientist article, ‘Flesh and blood’
(5 May 1990), on the eff ects on men of pornogra-
phy, Mike Baxter writes, ‘Th e weight of evidence
is accumulating that intensive exposure to soft-
core pornography desensitizes men’s attitudes
to rape, increases sexual callousness and shifts
their preferences towards hard-core pornogra-
phy. Similarly, the evidence is now strong that
exposure to violent pornography increases men’s
acceptance of rape myths and of violence against
women ... Many sex off enders claim they used
pornography to stimulate themselves before
committing their crimes.’
Th e arrival and expansion of the internet,
with its relative freedom from control and
overview, has off ered global opportunities for
pornography, along with the pornography of race
hatred. Any system that combines the privacy
of output and input with potentially universal
access will be abused. It has been argued that for
women exercising their right to explore the Net,
there is as much danger from online predators as
there is on the streets at night.
In Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our
Sexuality (Beacon, 2010), US sociology profes-
sor Gail Dines sees porn as having entered the
mainstream of contemporary culture, aff ecting
‘the way women and girls think about their
bodies, their sexuality and their relationships’.
She argues that rather than sexually liberating
or empowering us [as the highly profi table porn
industry presents itself as doing], porn off ers us
a plasticized, formulaic, generic version of sex
that is boring, lacking in creativity and discon-
nected from emotion and intimacy’.
Dines believes that ‘in today’s image-based
culture, there is no respite’ from the power of
porn ‘when it is relentless in its visibility’. She
fears that women today ‘are still held captive
by images that ultimately tell lies about women’,
the biggest of these being that conformity to a
‘hypersexualized image will give women real
power in the world ... not in our ability to shape
the institutions that determine our life chances
but in having a hot body that men desire and
women envy’. In much of today’s popular culture,Populism According to some theorists, one of
the distinguishing features of a Mass Society is
its populist nature. Legitimacy is given to those
persons, ideas or actions that are thought to
best express the popular will or meet the most
widely shared expectations. One result, such
theorists claim, is that a premium is placed upon
the capacity of those in leadership positions,
to both create and placate popular opinion.
Th e mass media tend to be seen as the agents
through which such leaders control and exploit
the masses.
Pornography Word originates from the Greek,
‘writing of harlots’. Two sorts of pornography
are usually diff erentiated: erotica, concentrating
on physical aspects of heterosexual activity; and
exotica, focusing on abnormal or deviationist
sexual activity. Attitudes to pornography refl ect
a society’s permissiveness, its current ‘tolerance
threshold’, and also cast a light on prevailing
social values.
Tolerance of pornography only makes sense if
there is no felt risk; if pornography is thought to
be linked with the abuse of women and children
and the degradation of human relationships and
family life, pornography will be fought against
whether the link is proved or not. In any case,
pornography itself often makes the link between
sexuality and violence: hard porn is, by general
defi nition, a discourse in dominance expressed
through violence which, at the very least, poses
examples of possible behaviour.
Of interest and concern is the indisputable
fact that in many countries pornography is big
business. Civic concern about the possible link
between porn and violence was registered by the
Minneapolis City Council in 1983. Exhaustive
public hearings took place to provide a basis of
information for a decision whether or not to add
pornography as a ‘discrimination against women’
to existing civil rights legislation. Th e transcript
of the Minneapolis hearings was published in
1988 and has ongoing relevance.
Quoting evidence from academic and clinical
research on the eff ect of pornography on ordi-
nary men, the report stated that, exposed to
pornography, men become desensitized; they
see themselves as more likely to commit rape,
less likely to respond sympathetically to women
who are victims of rape, or more likely to be
lenient in their response to men who commit
rape. According to the Minneapolis transcript,
pornography which portrays women enjoying
rape or violence or humiliation is the most
damaging kind.
As a result of the hearings the City Council