Women Against Pornography

By Ann Jones

(Equal Times, August 12, 1979)-"A new, active, exciting group of women is at work or. the feminist frontier," says Lynn Campbell, co-coordinator of New York's "Women Against Pornography." Right now that frontier is on Ninth Avenue at notorious 42nd Street in a former greasy spoon hurriedly rehabilitated as the storefront office of fifty or more determined women. Their aim is to bring pornography out from under the counter into the public eye so that everyone can understand how it fosters violence in our lives. As part of the process, they plan

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to hold an anti-pornography conference in New York City September 15-16 and to march with at least 20,000 people through Times Square on October 20. The groundwork for this campaign was laid years ago by Susan Brownmiller whose cogent analysis in Against Our Will of pornography as "the undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda" made the connection between the violent image and violent action against women. Since then it has become increasingly clear to marchers taking back the night in one city after another that rape, wife battery, incest, and street violence are stimulated and in fact taught by pornography. To the rapist or the sadistic wife beater a hard core porn magazine is a do-it-yourself manual for violence.

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Five hundred women came together to confer about the issue in San Francisco in November 1978, Five thousand took to the streets in a march through the tenderloin section of the city. The energy generated by that conference and march has crossed the country and now makes camp at Ninth and 42nd, in the heart of New York City's porn empire, behind a hand-lettered sign: Women Against Pornography. Leading the New York campaign are Lynn Campbell, a former organizer for the United Farm Workers who organized the San Francisco conference and march, and Dolores Alexander, a NOW founder, long-time New York feminist organizer, and journalist. They have been joined by a large and growing group of women, including many "old hands" in the movement and many young women who have found their first feminist issue in the antipornography campaign. Backing has come from such well-known feminists as Susan Brownmiller, who has been working full-time on the campaign, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and many others, and from many organizations, including Women Against Violence in Pornography and

Page 4/What She Wants/September, 1979

Media, Women Against Violence Against Women, and New York Radical Feminists. Since the storefront office opened on June 16, owners of reputable businesses in the neighborhood and people employed in the pornography industry itself have dropped in to offer encouragement and help.

It is not surprising that the fight against pornography enlists such a diverse army of supporters, for pornography is a four billion dollar a year industry that lines a few pockets at the expense of the rest of society. All of us suffer from the effects of pornography: men who are indoctrinated with a perverse and dangerous sexuality; adolescent boys who too often find no other role model; neighborhood business people whose ventures succumb to the general blight the porn industry spreads through the area.

But the effects of pornography are felt most heavily by women and children (particularly female children) who are the main targets of porn's hostility, the primary victims of the violence pornography engenders. Any woman who sees the images of .women and girls degraded, assaulted, violated, mutilated, often left for dead, is shocked into instant recognition of the connections between porn and all violence against women, whether on the street or in the bedroom.

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The trouble is that hard core porn is so revolting, presents such a disgusting lie about female sexuality, that most women, until now, have looked away. And men, who simply take over whole neighborhoods for peep shows and dirty book stores and topless bars and brothels have certainly not encouraged us to explore their terrain.

The result is that very few women even "know the enemy." We haven't seen the women tied up and mutilated in the bondage magazines. We don't know about the sado-masochistic sexual fascism portrayed in the thriving genre of neo-Nazi porn. We haven't seen the naked women dancing in the peep show "carousel" or performing "live lesbian sex" on stage while men jerk off and the janitor comes around time and time again with the Lysol bucket. And we haven't seen the men who walk out after the show: men in blue collars or Yves St. Laurent suits or Adidas sneakers; men who are husbands, fathers, boyfriends; men who hurry on back to their offices or to their homes.

Women Against Pornography gives women the chance to see what pornography is all about. They give slide shows and regularly scheduled tours for small groups of women through the porn establishment of the Times Square area. For most women, to see pornography is to hate it, so the tours, in the few weeks they have been offered, have brought hundreds of women, whose consciousness has been raised in an instant, into the fight against porn.

The tours also raise funds to enable the group to continue to work for the fall conference and march. The conference, planners hope, will also raise participants' consciousness and energize them to go back into their communities and turn out people for the march. And that march on October, 20, the high point, but certainly not the end of the feminist fight against pornography, will bring together thousands upon thousands of women to testify in unmistakable tones that we have seen pornography and we will tolerate it no more.

To find out more about the conference and march, contact Women Against Pornography, 579 Ninth Avenue, New York, NY 10036, (212) 594-2801. Attendance at the September Conference will be limited, but if you wish to begin organizing a contingent for the October March, write WAP for information on the rental or purchase (at cost) of a slide show and script, and for information on how to develop and lead tours of your own city's pornographie bookstores, movie theaters, and topless bars.

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(Jo Anne Johnson, Pandora) Billboards around Seattle recently depicted the lower face, neck and bared shoulders of a woman with a bright red slash across her throat. From a distance it looked as if her throat had been cut. Upon closer inspection, the red line turned out to be a red ribbon.

The billboard was advertising a new film in Seattle, "Bloodline". The depiction of a woman who appeared to have her throat slashed was undoubtedly intended to capture attention, perhaps to shock. But what these billboards effectively did was display violence against a woman. The advertisement is violent, sexual and harmful to women.

Many women in Seattle objected to the billboards. The Seattle chapter of Women Against Violence Against Women protested the billboards through conventional means: letters and telephone calls. It worked. The billboards soon came down.

However, the Seattle Times is apparently less conscious of the problem of violence against women. [They] ran a quarter page ad of the same picture that was on the billboards, and the ribbon was in red. Very eye-catching; very harmful to women.

Sperm Causes Cancer?

(Her Say) The New England Journal of Medicine is out with a report linking cervical cancer in women to a virus carried by the male sperm. The Journal cites a study by Drs. Shanna Swan and Willard Brown at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Walnut Creek, California. The doctors studied 72 cases of cervical cancer and three matched control cases for each actual case of cancer.

According to the doctors, they found that the risk of cervical cancer for women whose partners had not had vasectomies was four times greater than for those women whose partners had been sterilized. This, the researchers say, supports theories that some agent in sperm which is absent in vasectomized men carries a cancer-causing virus.

The virus believed to cause cervical cancer, the doctors say, is herpes simplex two, belonging to a family of viruses which cause genital lesions, cold sores, shingles, and chicken pox.

News in Breast Surgery

(Her Say) The National Cancer Institute has recommended that most women with breast cancer should be spared radical mastectomy surgery which removes chest muscles as well as the breast and lymph nodes. Dr. John Moxley, Chair of a National Cancer Institute conference on breast cancer, reports that a panel of seven cancer specialists has determined that "a new standard of therapy" should be implemented for breast cancer which removes the breast as well as underarm'lymph nodes for women with small tumors, but leaves the chest muscles intact, Said Moxley, “I think it is everyone's goal to maximize disease-free survival but at the same time to be as careful as we possibly can to reduce the morbidity and disfigurement.

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The Institute has also recommended that the initial biopsy to diagnose whether a breast lump is malignant and the surgery to remove a breast if cancer is found should be performed separately to give both patients and doctors time to decide what course should be taken.