Even if their bombs are made of words and ideas, agents provocateurs are rarely popular people. Dworkin’s book – far more than her presence or her Radcliffe speech – elicits defensiveness, and not only from men. Her attempt to expose the depth and breadth of male power by defining the meaning of pornography is an impressive artifact of anger that is frightening both in form and content.
It is written in a scream and moves at a fevered pace. It hammers away in repetitive, almost hypnotic prose at the organization of life under which “male sexuality is the unifying thematic and behavioral reality of male sexuality,” and under which women exist as men’s prey. It tells us that the fear women individually experience on a daily basis is part of a coherent system that terrorizes us, that no one is immune from or above this system. This is a difficult insight to accept – especially if you’re used to thinking of yourself as a self-conscious, non- or anti-sexist man, or as a self-controlled, successful heterosexual woman. Perhaps in some ways our resistance to her ideas is a measure of their power to reveal unpopular truth.
Still, it is a theoretical book, an abstract book. And the strength of a theoretical approach is also its weakness. Dworkin’s distance allows her to challenge assumptions – for instance the belief that women who pose for Playboy are expressing themselves or an authentic, uncoerced form of female sexuality. But her detachment also does violence to experience by flattening it into a behaviorist diagram.
Dworkin’s book boils down all female experience to one ugly image taken from an issue of Hustler magazine, which she describes in brilliant detail. In it, a woman is tied, spread-eagle, on the hood of a car. Two men carrying rifles have just “bagged” this “trophy.” The picture is captioned, “Beaver Hunters.” “This photograph elaborates the physical power of men over women,” writes Dworkin. “Terror is finally the content of the photograph, and it is also its effect on the female observer.”
It is a powerful image, one that blows a hole in the wall of choices that individual women and men build between themselves and the world of sexual violence that they cannot escape. Even in resisting our culture, we are, inevitably, part of it.
Still, we want to ask of the image, “How am I like the woman on the hood of the car and how did I get trapped?” “How am I the man with rifle and who gave it to me?” Even more important, in terms of individual change, “How do I resist becoming part of that image? What are the alternatives?”
Dworkin is not primarily concerned with why so many men are attracted to a distorted and violent picture of human sexuality at the expense of women's lives (though she does hint at it in a brief discussion of the process by which boys are turned into men in this culture). Nor is she interested in exploring the complex psychological and social mechanisms by which women defend themselves against a system of images and actions that conspires to make them into trophies. Says Dworkin, "I don't make the popular distinctions ... the distinction between Playboy and other magazines, or of women who are moderately successful in their lives ... I make the important distinctions."
But there are other important distinctions to be made, and in another new book, Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature, Susan Griffin attempts to explain how and why in our sexual arrangements women have become trophies and men have become hunters.
The two books share a great deal of common ground. Griffin takes for granted the system of male supremacy that Dworkin takes great pains to expound; and she goes on to build a theory of social psychology based on that very unpopular assumption.
Griffin's book is a much more pleasant reading experience, both in form and content. Her prose style is as evocative as Dworkin's is confrontive. Griffin uses the language of poetry, mythology, and psychoanalysis to expose the human costs of pornography -- the price it exacts from men as well as women, in what she calls its "choice to forget eros."
Where Dworkin lumps together behaviors and images and asks the reader to buy her insights wholesale -- for instance, "The Western preoccupation with high-heeled shoes is no less ominous (than bound feet)" -- she makes it easy for us, distinction-makers and ethical relativists that we are, to dismiss her theories altogether. But Griffin manages to explain the fundamental similarity between mass-market centerfolds -- which are now considered soft-core enough for distribution in many supermarkets -- and a novel like The Skin Flick Rapist, which graphically depicts scene atter scene of torture and abuse. Both are simply expressions, she says, of a pornographic mind in a pornographic culture.
"At the very core of the pornographic mise-en-scene is the concept of woman as object. A woman's body forms the center of a magazine," she writes. "Her hands pull apart the lips of her vagina, the same way a man might pull up the lips of a horse at an auction, so that the teeth may" be counted. She shows her goods . . .