"Virtual" Rape and Real Threats

In 1994, a male University of Michigan student posted a sexually explicit short story to alt.sex.stories, a widely-read USENET newsgroup. (While USENET hosts are technically neither a subset nor a superset of the Internet, it, like the Internet, is a decentralized computer network, and the vast majority of its traffic passes over the Internet.) It is unclear whether anything would have happened to Jake Baker, who posted the story, had he not used the name and physical description of a female student who attended a class with him and either lived in the same dorm or nearby. The government tried to prosecute him on the basis that he had made a threat of violence against her, but eventually failed to achieve any remedy in the courts. An activist named Catharine MacKinnon contributed an amicus curiae brief to the proceedings, and has since stated that the government neglected to raise all the relevant issues in the case. She has also campaigned for laws to stop pornography.

MacKinnon claims, in general, that pornography is violence. In this particular case, she argued to the court that the Baker pornography was the threat of violence. To back up her argument about his intentions, she used excerpts from his E-mail correspondence with a like-minded young man in Canada. E-mail is normally personal communication, and so it is harder to classify as a "threat" in the traditional sense of something communicated to the target, but her own argument is that the story itself was a threat and an instance of violence. (The appeals court dismissed the case on technical grounds mostly relating to the specificity of the threat.) It is clear that this story and others that Mr. Baker had been composing were reports of intended violence. It is a good concrete example of MacKinnon's general thesis: that pornography by its nature is violent, and that violence and harm are efficient, practical measures for defining pornography under the laws of a liberal society.

One possible objection to MacKinnon's argument is that it only condemns violent pornography, and that not all pornography is violent nor degrading to women. For instance, in a TV interview, after a quote had been played from Ted Bundy, MacKinnon's associate Andrea Dworkin stated categorically that all pornography causes harm⁽¹⁾. In fact, Mr. Bundy had only said, "My experience with [violent pornography] is that, once you become addicted to it -- and I look at this as a kind of addiction -- you reach that jumping-off point where you might begin to wonder if maybe actually doing it would give you that which is beyond merely watching it."⁽²⁾ He hadn't spoken, at least in this quote, about pornography in general. As another example, when I took a high-school health class, the teacher told us, "Rape is violence. All rapists do it because they want to control women, and not to satisfy physical needs." I wondered, "Would this statement be false if we could find even one man who had forced a woman to have sex with him only because of a biological need, and not with any desire for social or emotional control?"

MacKinnon uses an effective indirect argument to combat this sort of objection about pornography. She begins by stating why it might be different from other forms of speech which should still be protected: "Pornography contains ideas, like any other social practice. But the way it works is not as a thought or through its ideas as such ... Its place in abuse requires understanding it more in active than in passive terms, as constructing and performative rather than as merely referential or connotative." (Only Words 21). After making her argument without dealing with this particular objection, she goes on to say, "The most elite denial of harm is the one that holds that pornography is 'representation', when a representation is a nonreality." (28) She contends, "In terms of what the men are doing sexually, an audience watching a gang rape in a movie is no different from an audience watching a gang rape that is reenacting a gang rape from a movie, or an audience watching any gang rape." (28) Thus, the act is offensive to everyone involved, whether or not they are separated by time, space, or a phone line. We may need other evidence to show universality of violence, but the violence of rape implies that any pornography depicting rape is, by its nature, violent.

Another different objection might be that "There are women who watch strip-shows, read Playgirl, or enjoy taking a male role in Internet sex, and so forth; these women do these things by their own choice." MacKinnon dismisses most of these arguments by pointing out the social construction of gender and reality. For her, the important thing is that women are sill objectified and humiliated. If anything, it does no good to point out that men are also being objectified, because there are still people (the consumer, the pornographer) who are taking advantage of others.

It is regrettable that no legal remedy was ever applied to Mr. Baker. It is clear that, for him, the incidents he described were compellingly real, even though they hadn't happened yet in an objective construction of reality: "I've been masturbating like the devil recently. Just thinking about it anymore doesn't do the trick..."⁽³⁾ MacKinnon anticipated this when she wrote, "The most common denial is that pornography is 'fantasy'. Meaning it is unreal, or only an internal reality. For whom? ... The consumer masturbates to it, replays it in his head and onto the bodies of women he encounters or has sex with." (Only Words 26) The consumer of pornography may forget what caused him to feel that way, but many men report that it is a difficult process; the images and feelings will never be totally gone.

Even though the court case died, we can learn about our society by studying it. Ted Bundy blamed his actions on pornography, thus showing its real-world impact. In the case of Mr. Bungle, the members of an electronic, partly "fantasy" community were savagely attacked and defiled by someone who was probably just following scripts that had been taken from pornography, either directly or through the medium of society as a whole. Unlike this case, there are numerous instances where men actually use pornography as a means of control over women, or gain control over women by involving them in the production of pornography. Such social cost is high. The fact that U. S. citizens spend between eight and ten billion dollars on pornography each year⁽⁴⁾ should be the final straw compelling us to be more careful individually and take appropriate measures collectively to stop this deadly plague.

1. 48 Hours, 18 Nov 1992

2. Ibid.

3. Legal brief by MacKinnon. www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/Porn/Baker/sc.html, 26 Jul 2001

4. Thomas S. Monson. Liahona, Nov 2001, p.4. Salt Lake City: La Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Últimos Días.