The following was taking from the SF Bar 10/14 ================================================================== The Crime of Sex By John Leo Catharine MacKinnon's new book, "Only Words," is very short -- 107 pages of text. It is also very angry. Much of it is one long-scream about sex and men. The book's second sentence is: "You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs." After that, it gets worse. On Page 19, she says some doctors may "enjoy watching and inflicting pain during childbirth" - quite a novel idea, it seems to me. By page 60, she is explaining that sexual harassment "begins in your family." Apparently this refers to families of all her readers. MacKinnon, the University of Michigan law professor who wants to suppress pornography, repeatedly lashes out at horrible sex crimes against women. Good. But, as always in her work, pornography, sex, sex crimes and heterosexual masculinity all fuse into one giant evil. Follow her argument. Women constitute an oppressed class. Heterosexuality is a social system for the domination and subordination of women. Pornography creates, reflects and sustains this system. All of it - not just violent porn, but mild nudie pictures, too -- is really violence against women that must be banned. In MacKinnon's new book, the possibility that sex may involve pleasure and closeness between a man and woman who actually like each other doesn't arise. Instead she talks about "the social coding of sexuality as intimate and pleasurable." (Translation: The oppressive system has led us to believe that sex can be used that way, but it really can't, because sex is about power, which men have and women don't. Since women are so oppressed, there's no real difference between rape and consensual sex. As MacKinnon's sidekick, feminist author Andrea Dworkin, writes, "Romance ... is rape embellished with meaningful looks.") Does it matter what MacKinnon thinks' Alas, it does. In the mid-'80s, she and Dworkin were way out on the feminist fringe. But she has very rapidly been mainstreamed (a gushing profile in The New York Times Magazine, a seat as network commentator at the Clarence Thomas hearings). Now she has respectability and clout. The stranger parts of her doctrine are rarely mentioned. Her arguments seem to be at the core of current legal attempts. to reposition rape and opposition to abortion as sex discrimination. And it is probably safe to say that no champion of censorship has ever been so revered at American law schools. MacKinnon's thought closely parallels that of campus censors who want hate-speech codes: What appears to be merely distasteful speech (porn, racial and sexual slurs) is really violent action against an oppressed group. This makes her anti-porn message easier to take at elite law schools and creates a powerful pro-censorship alliance on the left. Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, is worried about this. (Me . too.) She says the pro-censorship forces now dominate legal academic meetings and law journals. Strossen thinks appointments and promotions at law schools and certain courses, like those on "feminist jurisprudence," are largely under the sway of pro-censorship forces. One straw in the wind was a conference last March at the University of Chicago Law School on "Speech, Equality and Harm: Feminist Legal Perspectives on Pornography and Hate Propaganda." Strossen noticed that no anti-censorship feminist was invited to attend. Some law professors believe it's only a matter of time before the MacKinnonites put a dent in the First Amendment big enough to allow the banning of some sexual expression. It's already happened in Canada. Last year the Canadian Supreme Court accepted the arguments of Canadian feminists and MacKinnon (she filed a brief), banning degrading sexual materials deemed harmful to women and children. No proof of harm is required to ban a hooker video, weekly assessment of what the Canadian public believes is harmful. In 1992, Canadian customs official seized 8,118 publications. The 1993 total will include two of Dworkin's books, confiscated in January. Lesbian bookstores have complained that they have unfairly been singed out for attention. Maybe so, but that's what tends to happen when police or customs agents make censorship decisions according to a vague standard. The vast expansion of ice porn industry is very troubling, but censorship won't stop it, any more than Prohibition stopped alcohol (or any more than official punishment for racial jokes helps whites and blacks get along better). And if MacKinnon's thinks all - women are oppressed by men, why does it make sense to have the male dominated government decide what sexual material women get to see? Instead of calling in the cops, a free society ought to try discrediting and stigmatizing people who deal in violent pornography. I am bound to think that MacKinnon is a wrong turn for feminism and the left. So many disastrous notions are buried in her work: Sex is something done to women; porn is at the root of all women's woes; all sexual imagery involving females amounts to anti-woman violence; men are an implacable and probably unchangeable group enemy. These are really dumb ideas. Is this where feminism wants to go?