Statement: Anti-porn is the theory, repression is the practice
Introduction
In October 1986, Julienne Dickey of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (CPBF) wrote to the King’s Cross Women’s Centre, where the English Collective of Prostitutes is based, asking if the Centre would write an article for the book Feminism and Censorship – The Current Debate “regarding opposition to censorship of pornography, related to the position of women working in the sex industry.” The ECP agreed, and we submitted our first draft in April 1987. In June 1987 we received another letter saying that our article was “well argued, and makes many important points. However I think it is weakened by a number of unsubstantiated and rather sweeping statements.” It went through a list of examples and asked “If they can be substantiated, then fine – otherwise modify them by being more specific about which women, whereand when.” After submitting a re-drafted article we received another list of “untenable and unjustifiable assertions” and were told that “If you choose not to make some of these changes, the article will of course still be included.” Rather than ignore the editor’s objections, we decided to use them to make the article more precise and more obviously accurate. In response to our third re-draft, in December 1987 we received a letter rejecting the article because it attacks “feminism in and some feminists in particular”.
A prostitute women’s organisation was accused of attacking feminism, but the anti-porn lobby is never accused of anti-feminism for attacking prostitute women. This hidden double standard is one more example of how censorship, this time within the women’s movement and by an organisation which is supposed to be against censorship, is being used to silence less powerful sisters. We have always said that censorship is not only dangerous in the hands of governments but in the hands of any sector of people which has power over other sectors.
Why were we censored? There was no porn in the article. We assume it was because we articulated assumptions of the anti-porn lobby which it has been camouflaging maybe even to itself, and which even the supposed middle ground that CPBF represents doesn’t want others to hear. In any case, CPBF must justify their actions. The article is almost exactly the same as what they censored with arguments neither added nor subtracted.
The article is followed by an update on some events taken place since it was written – and censored.
17 November 1989
ANTI-PORN IS THE THEORY, REPRESSION IS THE PRACTICE
The campaign against pornography has been one of the most visible faces of feminism for more than a decade now. Few have wanted to know whether the ‘clean up’ they were promoting strengthened women’s hand or the State’s. Thus they have attracted supporters and allies among politicians from the New Right, which governs (among others) the US and the UK, from the old moralizing Left, and even from the trendy Left. Although this anti-porn lobby is not homogeneous, it is rare for any part of it to dissociate itself from the most powerful pro-censorship law-and-order identity.
Pornography is a need in a society where the sexes are segregated and repressed; where we are forced to sell our sexuality – along with all our other possibilities – in exchange for money to survive on. This is not only true of women in the sex industry who put a price tag on what they are trading, but of all women who are forced to trade on their appearance and sex appeal to get or keep a man or a job or any other social or financial asset. Men may also trade on their sexuality, in show business, in politics, or privately, in exchange for the many and varied advantages and services women can offer.
Censoring pornography changes none of this – except perhaps for the worse. We wrote:
To attack pornography is not going to stop the devaluation of women. Nor are child abuse, rape and other violence against women and children the result of mysterious attitudes of unknown origin [sparked off by video nasties] which can be cured by [censorship or] sex education. These attitudes reflect and are part of the economic and social relations between the sexes.
[Those of us who are mothers] know that boys form ‘male’ attitudes much earlier than adolescence. They see that their mothers and other women and girls have less social power than their fathers and other men. And since everyone else takes women’s services for granted, they learn at an early age to expect every woman they meet to look after them, feed them, comfort them, and respond to their every need and desire. There isn’t a long distance to travel from boys expecting physical and emotional services to men expecting sexual services. (Letter to The Guardian, 9 Feb 87)
With rare exceptions, feminists have concentrated on attacking attitudes, not power relations. In this way they avoid a confrontation with the economic, political and physical violence against women perpetrated by the State. The first international quantification of that violence emerged in 1980 when the United Nations said that women do 2/3 of the world’s work for 10% of the income – the ILO says 5% – and 1% of the assets. This basic violence – our exploitation – from which all other violence by both institutions and individuals flows, is usually studiously ignored by the anti-porn/pro-censorship lobby. Feminists who concentrate on condemning sexist images of women in the name of condemning women’s exploitation, and the politicians who back them, watch while our economic and social power is pushed down the political agenda to make room for their priorities. Not money, not housing, not even non-sexist, non-racist, non-violent policing, but an end to ‘dirty pictures’ becomes the key to our welfare. The generally accepted view of Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW), Porn is Violence Against Women (PIVAW) and every other anti-porn group is that pornography is the “central and binding issue for feminism”.(1)
Not unconnected, divisions within the movement of race, class, nationality, income, age, disability and occupation have been purposefully censored by these advocates of censorship. And therefore, the struggles and priorities of Black and other working class women who are at the bottom of the economic and social hierarchy get watered down or misplaced on their way to most feminists’ agenda. A rape survey conducted in Leeds chose streets which “had a mixed population of white single and married people” because “. . . it was important to focus on the problem of the dominant cultural group in order to avoid our results being used in a racist way.”(2) To avoid racism by excluding Black women is a strategy that a politician like Enrich Powell might wholeheartedly support.
Some feminists tell us what men have always told us: to set aside the divisions between us and submit to their priorities. “We must reunite throughout the nation [sic] on this one basic issue [pornography] . . . Disagreements on other issues can be dealt with when fewer of us are being murdered, beaten, tortured and raped.”(3)
Like any other movement for change, the women’s movement has to choose whether or not to focus on breaking down these divisions by challenging “all the economic power relations in the working class from the bottom up, beginning with those of us who have the least power . . . Black women who are the poorest of the poor . . .”(4) To ignore women why are Black, immigrant, Third World, prostitute, single mothers, housewives, lesbian, who have disabilities, or who are any combination of these, is to build on the most powerful sectors – white career women in metropolitan countries, The women’s movement must also choose whether or not to make the connection between its own demands and struggle and the demands and struggle of other exploited sectors of society, or whether to reject any common ground and make only a ‘special’ – isolated, separatist – case.
The women’s movement has had to face such choices many times in its history. The US suffrage movement at the end of the 19th century had to decide whether it would aim to win at the expense of Black and immigrant women and men, or at the State’s.
Many suffragists reacted to the new immigration either by pointing out that white, Anglo-Saxon, native-born women outnumbered men and women of other groups, so that woman suffrage would increase the proportion of fit voters; or by advocating an educational qualification for the vote, which would disenfranchise both men and women of unfit sections of the population. (Aileen S, Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement 1890-1920, Columbia, note 36, p30).
The ‘unfit’, ‘undesirable’ voters included ‘the poor, ignorant and immoral elements in society’: Black, prostitute, ‘frontier riff-raff’ and other working class women. This is not surprising since
Few suffragists were radicals; the vast majority of them simply wanted the right to participate more fully in the affairs of a government, the basic structure of which they accepted. (Ibid, p. 41)
This describes many feminists today. One clear example is the way in which the anti-porn/pro-censorship lobby has consistently discussed and proposed legislation without discussing the ways such legislation is likely to be enforced. Those of us at the bottom who go on the game, shoplift, commit SS ‘fraud’ or other crimes of poverty, in order to support ourselves and our children, can’t afford the luxury of viewing legislation as an abstraction rather than a power shaping our lives. For us the political is personal. It is we, and our sons, brothers, husbands and friends, who are at the receiving end of police brutality, illegality and racism. We don’t have the right colour, accent, passport, background, connections and/or careers to protect us from the police. Some feminists have refused to deal with the fact that increasing the power of the State to decide what is ‘acceptable sex and sexuality’, can only lead to more State violence against women, starting with those of us who are labelled ‘ignorant’ or ‘immoral’ because we are poor and working class.
Such bypassing of the implications of legislation is just what happened with kerb crawling. In response to the anti-porn/pro-censorship lobby, and some residents in red-light areas (often concerned with property values), politicians from all political parties anxious to be seen to ‘do something for women’, helped the Thatcher government to give the police additional powers to arrest any man they choose for kerb crawling. An article we wrote in Spare Rib appealing to feminist groups got very little response. A couple of Rape Crisis Centres joined the Campaign Against Kerb Crawling Legislation we had initiated. And Everywoman, the magazine for ‘real’ women, chose to give a whole page to Janet Fookes, the Tory MP who put forward the Bill, rather than to prostitute women who were opposing it. A right-wing Tory who glorified the police was considered to speak for women, not us.
The most immediate result has been that prostitute women are forced further underground by police raids on red-light areas and that nonprostitute women and men are also harassed by police.
I have frequently been followed and on two occasions stopped by men in vehicles while walking to and from home. These incidents have taken place since the passing of the kerb crawlers Bill and my harassers have been the police… Kerb crawlers can easily be deterred by telling them in a loud vioce where to go. Uniformed nuisances cannot. The police presence in Bayswater is becoming much more of an irritant to respectable young female residents than men in search of sex ever were. (Jean Ridley, Letters, TheStandard, London, 25 Feb 86)
This is not the first time that prostitute and other women in the sex industrv have been under attack from feminists. When the ECP started in 1975, most of Women’s Liberation was hostile to prostitute women – the London Women’s Liberation Workshop even refused to meet with a prostitute – on the grounds that exchanging sex for money was uniquely degrading, They said it encouraged rape by leading men to believe that all women are available (conveniently forgetting that men already got that idea from their pervasive experience of women’s financial dependenceon men and our service work for them). Susan Brownmiller is one of the best known exponents of this dominant feminist position: “The case against pornography and the case against the toleration of prostitution are central to the fight against rape, and if it angers a large part of the liberal population to be so informed, then I would question their concern for the rights of women.” (5) Either her concern for the rights of women was selective and didn’t extend to prostitutes, or she didn’t consider prostitutes to be women.
The sex industry is not the only industry which is male-dominated and which degrades women, but it is an industry based on sex which tends to pluck many repressive strings in many psyches. Secondly, in this industry the workers are illegal and can least defend publicly our rights both to our jobs and against our employers. In November 1982 the English Collective of Prostitutes were driven to occupy the Church of the Holy Cross for 12 days to demand an end to police illegality and racism against prostitute women in King’s Cross, London. The Occupation was a turning point in the struggle for equal rights for prostitute women – it put prostitute women on the political agenda. Since then the attack against the ECP has taken another familiar form – that of pimping: the sex industry has become a career option within the feminist Establishment. A few months after the Occupation, Rights of Women, a group of feminist lawyers, got money from the Greater London Council to “monitor the policing of prostitution” in red-light areas, many of which were also Black areas, without any reference to Black organisations or the prostitutes’ organisation whose struggle had paved the way for these jobs. We protested: “They treat us like ‘whores’ – one doesn’t consult a ‘whore’ but decides what kind of help you will give ‘them’. ” Camden Women’s Unit and Women’s Committee, which together supported ROW, summed up their contempt for prostitute women: “In the sex industry a woman’s worth consists in being a woman and nothing else. No personal (human) qualities are needed – purely to be a woman, an object.” (26 Oct 1983.) These women, whose refined sensibilities are offended by vulgar pornography, can nevertheless without a blush speak of other women as though they are less than human.
Feminist public figures have yet to acknowledge prostitute women’s contribution to the women’s movement.
Prostitutes are in a long tradition of resourceful women who have tried to turn sexual exploitation to their own advantage… used their bodies to bargain daughters, sons, husbands, out of concentration camps and border towns; to feed or arm their kin or their movement; and to attain the financial independence necessary to escape from intolerable relationships or situations, (Selma James,The First Sanctuary – An Account of the Occupation of the Holy Cross Church by the English Collective of Prostitutes.)
Nor have prostitute women been the only ones under attack. Some feminists, among whom are spokeswomen for the anti-porn lobby, have also accused Greenham women’s work of 24-hour-a-day resistance to nuclear madness of being a ‘diversion’ from the real enemy: “Do some women prefer to put their energies into attacking the symptom they can see [ ‘an anonymous, overwhelming militaristic threat’] rather than the fundamental cause, which is perhaps too dangerous to confront, i.e, the man next door.”(6) Margaret Thatcher couldn’t have found a better way to defend the military-industrial complex, especially since “the man next door” is often working class and often also Black, immigrant, gay, on the dole, an activist… in police words, a potential threat to law and order. Thus separatism winds up as a defense of the State and its powers over us all.
Even many feminists who join political parties remain selectively separatist – like their male colleagues, they keep ‘women’s issues’, and therefore women, separate from the more important ‘political issues’. Whenever necessary they can disconnect rape, abortion, child custody, lesbianism, pornography and prostitution from the social, political and economic issues of racism, policing, unemployment, welfare benefits, health care, military spending and State repression. Like the government-backed kerb crawling and video nasties laws, feminist MP Clare S’hort’s Indecent Displays Bill which aimed to ban “sexually provocative pictures of women” had nothing to say about women’s poverty, unemployment or the Bill’s implications for police powers.
Margaret Thatcher and Mary Whitehouse, Reagan, Bush and the Moral Majority, have been able to use puritanism among feminists as an additional justification for increased State repression and control. Nor do feminists necessarily cringe at the connection. Listen again to Sheila Jeffries, a leader in the crusade against pornography:
The women in the NVLA [National Viewers and Listeners Association, Mary Whitehouse’s organisation] who object to porn very likely have the same gut reaction to porn as do feminists. We all see the degradation of women, (City Limits, March 4-10 1983)
Feminists’ perception and that of Mary Whitehouse and her followers are, she says, fundamentally the same, though she leaves the exact nature of the perception appropriately vague, and then invites readers to fill in their own fantasy: “We all see the degradation of women.”
Then Jeffries describes where the two differ.
“They choose to retreat into the false securities of monogamous, reproductive heterosexuality. We see the only solution as an end to compulsory heterosexuality, and the sexual colonisation of women’s bodies by men in the marriage bed, in porn and all its forms.” (Ibid)
So for Sheila Jeffreys and her sisters, Mary Whitehouse, friend of Tory ministers, the police and the most reactionary wing of the church, etc., is not on the offensive with and for her friends. Rather she is making an honest mistake: retreating, even choosing to retreat, into heterosexuality. And this, says Jeffries is the difference between feminism and the NVLA, between women’s interests and the extreme right. Thin partitions do their bounds divide it seems.
What is at stake is not only heterosexuality but State power over every aspect of sexual expression, over information, over freedom of movement, over the economy and the military, over life and death, Jeffreys’s portrait of the enemy covers for it.
The State knows such feminists can be relied on to protect its power generally, and their separatism has often made them powerful friends (though, like members of the National Front, they are not themselves necessarily powerful). Thus feminists who call for or support the institutionalisation of State censorship have often been listened to and promoted by those above them as if they spoke for women, and have been rewarded with careers in academia or politics. And this is treated as a victory for women. No one seems to ask what such career women do for or against other women. We are expected to be grateful that some women have joined men in doing what they have always done: building their careers off our struggle.
The Race Relations Act (1978) has been cited ‘as a precedent and a model’ for the promotion of censorship. In an attempt to disguise the racism which lies behind the promotion of police – since Black people will suffer first from such powers – the anti-porn/pro-censorship lobby have sometimes hidden behind the credibility of anti-racism, a credibility which has been won by Black people braving persecution and by other hard work. Resolution #17 on pornography put to the National Council for Civil Liberties at their 1987 Annual General Meeting by Catherine Itzen [then member of the Women’s Rights Committee, now member of the Executive Committee and of the Campaign Against Pornography and Censorship] uses this credibility as a cover:
That in the Race Relations Act the NCCL now has a precedent for restraints on freedom of expression which can be oppressive and harmful to a particular group (a racial group, or in the case of pornography, of women), and model for the definition of the offence and its enforcement.
But, here again, since the legislation is taken out of the context of its enforcement, there is no mention that this Act which was supposed to combat racism, when used at all, is most often used against Black people.
In July 1983, we wrote to the GLC Review of Cinema Policy which was considering censorship, asking: “Is there any evidence to support the theory that tighter censorship would increase women’s safety? Countries where explicit sex scenes are banned from the screen do not seem to have a higher safety record for women.” We never received an answer.
As a Third World woman who grew up under a military dictatorship, I have first-hand experience of censorship, of a society where walls had no posters of naked women and where explicit sex was censored out of films. The attitudes of men who raped, battered and murdered women and children in Argentina, therefore, were not shaped by video nasties or porn magazines. They were shaped by economic and political relations which forced women into the servitude of dependence, poverty and overwork. And, as we said in our letter to the Guardian above, these shape metropolitan attitudes also. There was, if anything, more male violence against women in repressed Argentina than in ‘permissive’ London, not less; among other reasons, because if there is sexual – or any other – repression, women pay the highest price.
Nor can censoring pornography be disconnected from other censorship. it is not an accident that the Argentinian military junta which caused the disappearance and murder of tens of thousands of people and prevented it from being reported in the media, was obsessed with repressing pornography also. Their ‘Principles and Procedures to Be Followed by Mass Communications Media’ included:
Work towards the eradication of stimulants based on sexualism and violence. Take firm and consistent action against vice in all its manifestations. Eliminate all obscene words and images that are vulgar, shocking or have double meanings. (John Simpson and Jana Bennett, The Disappeared – The chilling story of Argentina’s ‘Dirty war’, Sphere, p. 216.)
Who benefitted from this censorship programme, which strongly resembles what the anti-porn/pro-censorship lobby are demanding?
It was too dangerous to be on the streets; you could be stopped by a police patrol and be arrested, perhaps to disappear for good, simply for being young or for having an appearance which displeased them. Women were particular targets, and an unknown number were picked up to be tortured and raped. And anyway it was often not worth going out; the cinemas… were mostly closed down, and the films themselves banned. (Ibid, p. 211)
Argentina is not unique. The same is happening all over Latin America, in South Africa and elsewhere. In Britain the Police and the Public Order Acts are to deal with protest both by individuals and groups against Thatcher’s economic_ and social policies and the ‘Victorian values’ they promote – values much like the ‘fundamental values’ of the Argentinian military: ‘order, labour, hierarchy’ and ‘the defence of the family institution.’ (Ibid, p. 216)
Increasing the power of the State to control sexual expression is crucial to and inseparable from more generalised economic and political repression. By trying to determine which relationships and which forms of contact to allow and which to condemn and even to criminalise, the State tries to claw back our victories, particularly those won by the movement for welfare and the women’s and gay movements, which have concentrated on establishing our right to do what we want with our own bodies, and our right to economic, legal and social independence from the family. The anti-porn lobby has consistently said that pornography is the theory, rape is the practice. On the contrary: anti-porn is the theory; economic and political repression – and that can only mean universal rape – is the practice.
Our bodies cannot belong to us if Margaret Thatcher, or any minister, local authority, institution, or even individual has the power to decide what we are allowed to do and see, and what kind of sex is ‘acceptable’. When a gang of six people wearing balaclavas and wielding crowbars attacked the Market Tavern pub which caters to lesbian S&M, claiming it was “racist, anti-semitic and woman-hating”, the publican asked “Who are the fascists, I’m beginning to wonder?”(7) Good question.
Footnotes
(1) New Democrat, April 1983
(2) Well-Founded Fear by Jalna Hanmer and Sheila Saunders, Hutchinson, 1984, pp.14-15
(3) “Playboy Isn’t Playing” by Judith Bat-Ada, Take Back the Night, Morrow Quill, 1980
(4) Black Women and the Peace Movement by Wilmette Brown, Falling Wall Press, 1984
(5) Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller, Penguin Books, 1976
(6) “Is Greenham Feminist” by Linda Bellos, Carolle Berry, Joyce Cunningham, Margaret Jackson, Sheila Jeffreys and Carol Jones, Breaching the Peace, Onlywomen Press, 1983, pp.20-21
(7) Capital Gay, March 1987
**************
UPDATE November 1989
In response to those who, like us, have consistently exposed the anti-porn lobby by putting questions they did not want to consider, and in order to regain credibility on the Left, the recently formed Campaign Against Pornography and Censorship (CPC) has had to incorporate some of the arguments they were unable to defeat.
For example. We said that “the first quantification of the economic, political and physical violence against women emerged in 1980 when the United Nations said that women do 2/3 of the world’s work for 5% of the income and 1% of the assets. This is the basic violence – our exploitation – from which all other violence by both institutions and individuals flow. In February 1988 Labour MP Mildred Gordon put forward an Early Day Motion, which was signed by 101 MPs, pressing the government to implement the 1985 UN decision as amended by the Wages for Housework Campaign, to count women’s unrenumerated work in the home, in the fields and in the community, in every country’s GNP. In their June 1988 Policy Statement CPC admits that “… women are discriminated against… by the fact that women’s work as wives, mothers and carers is unvalued and unrewarded… their work as wives, mothers and carers should be valued, rewarded and supported.” We agree.
Another example is the name. Campaign Against Pornography and Censorship suggests that anti-porn feminists have come up with ways of opposing porn without promoting censorship. They have not.
The CPC have agreed that there is more to violence against women than pornography, but they insist on singling out pornography:
“…pornography is the most extreme portrayal of women as less than human and less than equal… pornography sexualises inequality… We are totally against censorship in every form. Censorship is about the limitation of freedom: eliminating pornography is about promoting the freedom of women… pornography silences women and censors the freedom of women.” (CPC Policy Statement, June 1988)
There is now general agreement on the findings of Women Against Rape that the majority of rape and sexual assault goes on within the family. This is not because husbands and fathers are more likely to read or watch porn, but because women’s economic dependence on men prevents them and their children from leaving violent situations.(1)
In the past two years the government has cut Child Benefit and many other welfare benefits and has introduced Workfare (which particularly affects young people and single mothers), the Poll tax, Section 28 (which labels lesbian households as ‘pretended families’), tighter immigration controls (which make it harder for immigrant women to leave violent husbands because of threat of deportation)… All these policies are a clear signal from the State that it will back men against women. yet the feminist media has hardly protested, and instead has coined the phrase “Welfare Feminism” to describe those of us who fight urgently to protect and increase benefits to women. We have been censored for insisting on putting women’s poverty and overwork at the top of the political agenda. The uncensored spokeswomen of feminism have a lot to answer for. Their obsession with ‘dirty pictures’ has hidden the full impact of the government’s attack on working class women’s pockets – less economic independence and therefore more rape and other violence against women and children.
Our article refers to MP Clare Short’s Bill against Page 3 girls. We would like to add a question. We have not heard Clare Short or any of her anti-porn colleagues connect Page 3 with the sexist and racist lies on every page of the Sun. Are they not connected? Which is most dangerous, pervasive, frightening? Is degradation less visible or less damaging when women’s breasts are covered?
CPC wants to promote “sexually explicit material premised on equality”. (2) What is it? Where is it? In other spheres such ‘equality’ material has often meant a cover-up of women’s reality. Books and films that portray man-pushing-pram and woman-engineer as the norm are often a put-down of working class women in unwaged or low waged ‘women’s jobs’: housewives, nurses, factory workers, cleaners, secretaries, teachers, etc., who don’t have the time or the opportunity to train men for housework or to take up well-paid careers and get other women (and men) to do it for them. To replace sexist images of women with images which gloss over women’s lives, can keep most women’s workload invisible and therefore harder to refuse. It may even glory the double day of working class women. All images of women are important and all must be seriously discussed. What is wrong with most images is that women’s struggle to refuse all forms of violence and degradation is rarely presented: not only that women are portrayed doing the jobs that we do, whether with our clothes on or off, but that we are portrayed as consenting, even happy slaves. Anti-porn lobbyists don’t seem to notice this lying image if the models are dressed.
We are constantly deprived of information about ourselves and our movement. Women making trouble and making history in bed, at home, in the community, in the waged workplace and on the streets, are mostly censored. Those are the ‘positive images’ we need, not propaganda about afictional equality. Our work must not be hidden; it must be counted.
CPC’s statement that “pornography sexualises inequality” is startling. Are they seriously suggesting that pornography introduces sexuality into inequality? That without pornography inequality would be desexualised? What about marriage, sexual repression, heterosexism, rape and sexual assault…? We wonder whether women in positions of power are hostile to pornography because it reminds them of what they are trying so hard to forget – that they cannot entirely escape from being identified with the less powerful sex.
Anti-porn feminists are so determined to impose their views and taste on everyone that they ignore the fact that many women read and watch porn, and many more who may not like porn don’t want it banned. In a 1985 Gallup poll more women than men felt that pornography should be available to those who want it; and in a recent Channel 4 ‘Signals’ programme on sex and television, women said they would like more sex on TV., not less(3) A woman who wrote to protest against CPC spoke for many when she said:
As a feminist I don’ like pornography, but I dislike this campaign even more… The CPC clearly wants its sex to be mutual, loving and soft-focus. This lukewarm act to be carried out in ‘real’ relationships between ‘real’ men and women. That’s fine – but I don’t want my sexuality policed in this way. (Suzanne Moore, City Limits, 27 April-4 May 1989)
The Guildford Four have undeniably exposed how deep and wide the corruption of the police and the judiciary are. Their release is a tremendous victory not only for themselves and the Irish liberation struggle but for the many Black and other working class women and men convicted on police lies. Are these racist, sexist, violent and criminal police, judges and politicians to be given more powers to decide about our sex lives, what we read, what we see and what we do?
CPC takes no position on homosexual porn, Catherine Itzen says that “…it is a very important issue and must be addressed properly. At the moment, we do not have the resources, knowledge, understanding or experience with which to do so,”(4) Some of the feminists who advocate censorship opposed Section 28 before it became law, but they don’t seem to make any connection between these two forms of censorship. This is another indication of their unwillingness to look at how any legislation against pornography is likely to be used.
Clause 28 is integral to the government’s double-edged economic strategy: removing access to wages through unemployment on the one hand, and on the other, lowering the social wage through cuts in welfare benefits, health care, housing, social services, the NHS, etc. To succeed, this strategy must be accompanied by an attack on our rights to self-determination and to information/education about ourselves and each other – in other words, an attack on our power to organize with all kinds of people against exploitation and repression. Monetarism – government by market forces, needs moralism – government by police forces, in the bedroom, the classroom, and on the street, (Out of the Clause into the Workhouse – A lesbian women’s view of what Clause 28 intends, pretends and promotes, and what we intend to promote against it by Wages Due Lesbians, Centrepiece 7, King’s Cross Women’s Centre)
On 19 July 1989, MP Dawn Primarolo introduced a Presentation Bill, the Location of Pornography Bill drawn up by members of the CPBF. The Bill proposes licensing, and separate locations for the sale of porn. The NCCL (now Liberty) has also agreed to ‘consider’ possible forms of legislation. CPC and NCCL member Catherine Itzin agrees that legislation would force the sex industry underground: “There is no question that when things are prohibited, they go underground. ” (5) She expresses no concern for what this would mean, especially for women in the sex industry.
Since 1975 we have been campaigning for the abolition of the prostitution laws, and against legalisation, which would institutionalise women on the game. Zoning legislation against pornography is the first step towards State-run red-light areas and a further erosion of prostitute women’s human, civil and legal rights. The prostitution laws which criminalise women for making a living are responsible for prostitute women’s extreme vulnerability. Serial murderers like the Yorkshire Ripper are a common recurrence. Over a hundred women, mainly Black prostitute women, have been murdered on the US West Coast in recent years. At least one woman was murdered and another woman was left for dead, in King’s Cross recently, possibly by the same man. Like anti-porn feminists who are not concerned with prostitute women’s needs, the police have their own priorities: removing ‘the problem’ by arresting prostitute women and kerbcrawlers. Police clean-ups take away prostitute women’s only limited protection – a support network of friends and the presence of other members of the community.
The CPC say: “We believe [the pornography] industry exploits the poorest and most vulnerable women, whose opportunities to earn a living arelimited by sexism and sex discrimination”, and, we add, by the CPC; “…it takes advantage of the existing cycle of abuse and sexual abuse (eg a majority of prostitutes have been found to be the victims of childhood sexual abuse, in which pornography played a part).” And therefore? What is their evidence? Have they established that the majority of housewives, nurses, secretaries, teachers, nannies, even grocers’ daughters were not sexually abused as children? Do they not know how widespread the rape of children is or are they making a special, unconnected case about prostitute women? Special cases lead to special laws and special enforcement – prostitute women know all about that.
Finally, an update on kerb crawling legislation. As we predicted in 1984, the law is being used to arrest prostitute women first, making it harder for women to earn a living, In addition, the Bristol police have devised “a profile of the typical kerb crawler” and they propose writing to employers giving the name of the employee stopped, the time and date. In the same way as women are labelled as ‘common prostitutes’ by two police cautions before they appear in court, men are now being labelled as kerb crawlers before they are charged or convicted. This erosion of civil rights now extends to men, while the police pose as defenders of feminism; “Kerb crawlers were thinking that any woman on the streets was likely to be a prostitute, which was most insulting to the women of St Paul’s,”(6) Which women? Not for the increasing number of single mothers struggling on Income support, or the young women running away from violent families and/or trying to build an independent life, refused Income Support because they are under 16 or because they turned down Employment Training for slave wages – many people in such situations are going on the game, and nowadays everybody knows it.
All women must be in charge of our own bodies and money, not the police or the local authority. If feminism means apartheid for women in the sex industry and support for the police who arrest working class women, we will continue to spell that out – not to protect the sex industry, but as members of the same movement of millions of women who are refusing poverty and unwaged work, including by going on the game or working as nude/porn models and actresses.
Nina Lopez-Jones
Point of reference for the English Collective of Prostitutes and coordinator of Legal Action for Women, a grassroots legal service for all women based at the King’s Cross Women’s Centre, London.
(1) This was followed in April 1989 by a 10-Minute Rule Bill Counting Women’s Unremunerated Work
(2) Ask Any Woman – A London inquiry into rape and sexual assault, Ruth E. Hall, Falling Wall Press
(3) City Limits, 27 May 1989
(4) Observer, 23 April 1989
(5) Spare Rib, May 1989
(6) Ibid
(7) Independent, 13 November 1989