It's time to change our hearts and minds about pornography

Between the arrival of the inaccurate movie The People vs. Larry Flynt in the theaters and the recent request for those commodities known as "bunnies" and "Playmates" by Playboy magazine in a Daily Collegian advertisement, I feel compelled to write a column on pornography that dares to counteract the weak arguments I hear bounced about on how "natural" and "liberating" pornography is.

It has shown women graphically depicted as beaten, tortured and bound sex objects. Woody Harrelson, who played Flynt, stated that he would not have made this movie if Hustler had ever depicted animals this way.

It is nice to know that women are not as worthy of dignity as animals are.

True to Oliver Stone's reputation as a producer, his movie is full of inaccuracies. No mention of the misogyny of Hustler is included: the issue becomes not one of women's rights, but of pornographer's speech.

Flynt is portrayed as a funny and charming defender of free speech, although the right of women to have freedom from the oppression of pornography is never noted. Only right-wing religious zealots are shown as being against pornography; feminists are banished from this movie in an attempt to show the world that only "prudes" could be against such misogyny.

And of course, defenders of pornography everywhere are insisting that there is nothing wrong with pornographers pimping their prostituted "models."

After all, pornography is about freedom of sexuality, and isn't nudity natural? The "nudity is natural" argument by "libertarians" and "sex radicals" is a clever attempt to silence women so we will not question the unnaturalness of pornography's posed and ever-eager images of women who have, in reality, often been abused by men either before or after they entered the "business."

To dare question this argument is to be seen as being anti-sex and against freedom of speech. Never mind the fact that studies have strongly shown that violent pornography usage significantly increases men's callousness toward rape victims, or that one study found that gender-schematic males (males who think in traditional terms of what "masculinity" and "femininity" are) were significantly more likely to remember more of what a woman looked like and less of what she said in a professional situation.

And this was after viewing only five non-violent pornographic films over a period of five days.

Of course, hard-core pornographers aren't the only pimps who make profits from women's bodies. Many have insisted that Playboy is harmless "speech," the women are consenting objects. Indeed, the latter is often true. In a society that still pays women significantly less than men and still bars women from access to many areas of the workforce, it is no surprise that many women pose in Playboy to be "noticed."

So what if the job offers that come later are based partly on the fact that you have given your potential employers' what they believe is their rightful pleasure; so what if the men who are hired on as well did not have to be prostituted and you are still held to standards that are not equal to men?

The "Playmate" always feels great about posing: In a society in which women are encouraged to make sexual attractiveness to men their primary goal, there is a sense of accomplishment in knowing that you have "made it" into Playboy, the ultimate "proof" that every man in existence has deemed you worthy of their desire.

Of course, pornography is everywhere, now to the point where anti-pornography feminists like myself cannot go anywhere without seeing it. Our own rights to not have to view it are completely ignored. The discomfort we feel in seeing it is real, it is one of many painful results pornography has had on countless human beings.

When I walk down the street, I see it on the billboards. When I go in the video store, I see rows of movie covers with sexually dressed women on the front, often with knives cutting their throats and nooses around their necks.

Funny, I never see any movie covers presenting men this way.

Unfortunately, the act of demeaning "consenting" women through pictures (usually with sexist speech accompanying the images) is often not seen for what it really is: a sexist statement against women that relegates us to sex objects before any other role.

Often, these images are racist, although you can find them in most mini-markets, unlike KKK and Aryan Nation literature. The growing fascination with Asian women is especially disturbing, since these women are also being sexually trafficked in alarmingly high numbers throughout the world.

Should our goal be to censor it? Why bother -- it won't work. Let's fight to change hearts and minds instead. Let's work to define and liberate our very real sexuality without the confining hand of the patriarchal male or female pornographer holding us back.

May we go forward strong enough to fight the sexism of both the Left and Right, strong enough to brave the battle. May we always think twice before we buy or use something which may have hurt -- or will hurt -- a sister.

And may we find solace in knowing that -- unlike the "liberal" men behind the dishonest movie The People vs. Larry Flynt -- the truth is on our side.