Pornography, Feminism and the First Amendment

Alternet is running a follow-up in posting the responses to an article that Robert Jenson ran last week, a Call for an Open Discussion of Mass-Marketed Pornography.

One quote:

"The last time I reviewed the American Psychological Association (APA) abstracts for studies on pornography, as opposed to the feminist rhetoric that had I read in the early '80s, I found that pornography was essentially positive and correlated with the following:

1. liberal attitudes

2. a large reduction in sex crime, as when the Netherlands allowed pornography to be sold over the counter

3. orgasm and sexual responsiveness in women

Men and women respond similarly to most forms of pornography, and dislike of pornography tended to occur in women that were victims of sexual abuse and/or raped. Pornography is a good thing, and if you dislike it, you need to examine society, not its expression."

And another:

"When opinion ranges from regarding a Victoria's Secret catalog as soul-killing pornography on the one hand, to excusing depictions of people being involuntarily tortured and degraded on the other, it's hard to find common ground. I'm sure there is some -- maybe a even lot of -- truly horrible stuff out there. The evil stuff does not somehow slop over and contaminate everything else. I've heard plenty of vicious denunciations and hyperbole directed at innocuous material -- material that would be tame by even U.S. standards in the 1950s. Something is not necessarily evil because you personally find it distasteful."