Pornography as Group Libel

Jeremy Waldron states two reasons to regulate hate speech. First, he says, inclusiveness is a public good, and our society “sponsors and … is committed to” this public good.¹ Groups in diverse multicultural landscapes, Waldron argues, “must accept that society is not just for them; but it is for them too, along with all of the others”.² Members of groups do not deserve to “face hostility, violence, discrimination, or exclusion by others” on the basis of their group membership, yet where hate speech is tolerated, inclusiveness is undermined. Hate speech is an “environmental threat to social speech, a sort of slow-acting poison, accumulating here and there, word by word”.³ The threat is to the public good of inclusiveness, but it is also to the individual dignities of persons in society who are targeted by hate speech. A second reason to regulate hate speech, then, is to preserve the basic reputations of individuals in society; it is to allow each member of society to rely implicitly on the idea that they may go about their daily lives in peace. Waldron’s project focuses mainly on ethnic and religious injustices: anti-black and anti-Muslim propaganda tend to illustrate his points. Nonetheless, Waldron’s “modest intention”—to make a case for “the constitutional acceptability of [hate speech] laws”—is equally appropriate for matters of sexism.⁴

In this paper I use Waldron’s framework of hate speech to argue that pornography is an instance of group libel. I proceed, first, by explaining Waldron’s choice of terminology to make clear what is meant by group libel. Second, I list the four ways group libel takes form to determine the focus of my investigation. I also briefly speculate on the reasons why anti-pornography legislation tends not to gain supporters in order to pre-emptively dispel some objections to my task. Third, I argue that pornography undermines the dignity of women by disseminating dangerous misogynist ideals. The argument proceeds by clarifying the term “misogynist ideal”, arguing for the female gender itself as such an ideal, and identifying misogynist ideals universally present in pornography. Fourth, I expound the implications of the view that pornography disseminates misogynist ideals to prove that pornography takes the forms of group libel outlined by Waldron. In conclusion, I assert that pornography should be regulated as group libel.

“Hate speech” is a problematic term for two reasons. First, the word “hate” implies that we are interested in correcting negative emotions, silencing certain viewpoints, or characterizing hate speech issues as attitudinal issues. Second, the word “speech” suggests that we are looking to regulate the spoken word or sets of politically incorrect vocabularies. What we are really after with hate speech legislation, thinks Waldron, are restrictions on tangible forms of hateful message. “Hate” does not refer to the speaker’s motivations, but rather to the possible effects of his speech. “Speech” does not refer to the speaker’s conversation, but rather to the speaker’s expression of a viewpoint.

Waldron is particularly concerned with messages that become “established as … visible or tangible feature[s] of the environment—part of what people can see and touch in real space (or in virtual space) as they look around them”.⁵ He believes hateful messages of this kind pose a special threat to public order by compromising the aesthetic of a well-ordered society. A society that allows hate speech publications, argues Waldron, hoards or festoons its lampposts with “depictions of members of racial minorities [characterized] … as bestial or subhuman”. It celebrates and excuses “genocidal campaigns of the past” with images of the swastika. It permits posters baselessly defaming members of minority groups as “criminals, perverts, or terrorists”.⁶ It allows, in short, the semi-permanent and public expression of hatred. It allows the sending of messages that become “part of the permanent visible fabric of society so that, for the [Muslim] father walking with his children … there will be no knowing when they will be confronted by [anti-Muslim] signs, and the children will ask him, ‘Papa, what does it mean?’”.⁷

The term “group libel” captures the phenomenon Waldron has in mind. “Group libel” and “group defamation” are interchangeable. The terms refer to “attacks on human dignity by insulting, maliciously maligning, or defaming part of the population”.⁸ For Waldron, criminal law is concerned with group libel insofar as it is concerned with vindicating public order. Laws are concerned “not just [with] pre-empting violence,” he says, “but [also with] upholding against attack a shared sense of the basic elements of each person’s status, dignity, and reputation as a citizen or member of society in good standing”.⁹ I argue for pornography as group libel instead of hate speech to capture this fact: that citizens of societies have a shared sense of what it means to be a member of society in good standing. Nonetheless, where I quote authors who use the term “hate speech” instead, I understand the terms to mean the same thing.

What does group libel do, and how? Group libel undermines the reputation of a group and thereby the social standing of individuals belonging to that group. Waldron says the concern is not about the group as such, “as one might be concerned about a community, a nation, or a culture”.¹⁰ The concern, he says, is ultimately individualistic. Group libel laws “look … to the basics of social standing and to the association that is made … between the denigration of that basic standing and some characteristic associated more or less ascriptively with all members of the group”.¹¹ These associations are made “in the hate speech, in the libel, in the defamatory pamphlet, poster, or blog”.¹² They are the ideas formed about individuals in virtue of their group membership.

Group libel takes four main forms. The first form I will call libel by factual claim. Waldron says this form of libel proposes factual imputations about a group in order to have these imputations “accepted at a general level”.¹³ An example is the 1952 case of Beauharnais v. Illinois. Joseph Beauharnais, the founder and director of the White Circle League of America, was charged for claiming African-American people “mongrelized” the white race with “rapes, robberies, guns, knives, and marijuana”.¹⁴ The courts held that Beauharnais had portrayed an entire class of citizens as depraved, criminal, unchaste, and unvirtuous. The effects of such claims, argues Waldron, have profound effects on all members of the group. A person who belongs to a group vilified in this way is denied what dignity and respect she deserves: her identity as a member of the group has a direct impact on her social standing as a member of society.

The second form of group libel I will call libel by denigrating claim. This libel characterizes a group on the basis of false or derogatory opinion. It aims to damage the social and cultural reputation of a group so that individual members of the group are isolated and stigmatized. The case of R. v. Keegstra was libel by denigrating claim. James Keegstra, a high school teacher, taught his classes that Jewish people sought the destruction of Christianity and invented the Holocaust to gain sympathy. Catherine MacKinnon characterized this type of libel as promoting the disadvantage of a historically disadvantaged group to “shape their social image and reputation, which controls their access to opportunities more powerfully than their individual abilities ever do”.¹⁵

Libel by dehumanizing claim is what I will call the third form of group libel. This libel “[damns] the members of the group with vicious characterizations that dehumanize their ascriptive characteristics and depict them as insects or animals”.¹⁶ Waldron uses the example of the “racist agitator” who depicted Britons of African descent as apes in the late 1970s. This type of libel “denigrate[s] [one’s] fellow citizens in bestial terms”. It destabilizes the belief that “all humans, whatever their color or appearance, are equally persons, with the rights and dignity of humanity”.¹⁷

The final form of group libel I will call libel by discriminatory claim. This form of libel denigrates the members of a group “by embodying slogans or instructions intended implicitly to degrade (or signal the degradation of) those to whom they are addressed”.¹⁸ Any sign, emblem, or visual publication that reads “Muslim Out!” or “No Blacks Allowed” is libel by discriminatory claim. This libel displays a “poisoning of the social environment” that declares racial or religious hostility toward a group.¹⁹

These are the four ways group libel can be identified. Waldron believes these attacks are attacks on a person’s dignity. He understands dignity as “basic social standing”, as “the basis of [one’s] recognition as [socially] equal and as [a bearer] of human rights and constitutional entitlements”.²⁰ Dignity is a social and legal status that must be upheld by society and the law.²¹ It differs from “subjective aspects of feeling, including hurt, shock, and anger” because dignity “has to do with how things are with respect to [someone] in society, not with how things feel to them”.²² This is an important point: I am concerned not with how pornography makes women feel, but rather with how it affects their status as equal citizens in society. Groups have the right to feel assured that “all are equally human, and have the dignity of humanity, that all have an elementary entitlement to justice, and that all deserve protection from the most egregious forms of violence, exclusion, indignity, and subordination”.²³ “Assurance” here is understood as a technical term, not one referring to one’s emotional state of mind, but rather to one’s social standing as a citizen. This assurance is “implicit, as though the underlying status of each person as a citizen in good standing goes without saying”.²⁴

My task is therefore to prove that pornography is an attack on the dignity of women, an attack that undermines their right to this assurance. My challenge is to reveal the ways in which pornography takes the various forms of group libel outlined above. The examples I provided for each form of group libel were clear. They were obvious cases of libel because their messages, effects, and relationships to the respective libellous forms were candid and largely undebatable. Pornography is a trickier case. Its messages and effects are the subject of debate even among feminists.

I am interested in these academic debates, but partial to everyday debates that inform our pre-theoretical opinions about pornography. This is because pornography exists in real space, and everyday citizens feel and live its effects. With this consideration in mind, I believe there are three main reasons why people hesitate to support anti-pornography legislation.

One reason is that heterosexuality, with its heteronormative mandates, is a dominant but concealed institution, one that Adrienne Rich calls a “beachhead of male dominance”.²⁵ Heterosexuality as an institution covertly permeates all aspects of female life. It convinces women that marriage and sexual orientation towards men are inevitable; it bases female economic survival on traditional roles of femininity; it subordinates women under men. If Rich is right, the effect this institution has on the psyche and identity of women is fundamental. Pornography, as equipment for male dominance, can be understood as simply reiterating society’s foundational social dynamics. It is hard to criminalize the negative principles of pornography if those principles structure our everyday lives.

Another reason is that, historically, sexist claims have been understood as claims to objectivity. The idea that women are naturally mothers, for instance, has mostly gone unchallenged. Whatever sexism pornography is charged with is dismissed as an attempt to pervert the facts. “Men do not objectify women,” someone argues. “Men just are like that. They enjoy pornography because they are naturally sexual and visual creatures.” These “facts” are dubious. As Joan W. Scott points out, “part of the project of some feminist history has been to unmask all claims to objectivity as an ideological cover for masculine bias by pointing out the shortcomings, incompleteness, and exclusive of ‘mainstream’ history”.²⁶ The idea that there exist naturally-occurring distinguishing facts about the genders—and that this has “always been the case”—is itself a sexist interpretation of history. The negative effects of pornography are impenetrable from this perspective.

The final reason is that women are, and have historically been, socialized to internalize sexism. Social mechanisms regulate, and have historically regulated, our cultural ideas of men and women’s personalities, bodies, and roles. Susan Bordo discusses one effect of this social regulation. She argues that “the body—what we eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which we attend to the body—is a medium of culture”.²⁷ It is the site where “prevailing forms of selfhood, desire, masculinity, [and] femininity” are impressed.²⁸ It is no accident, she argues, that women are more likely than men to develop eating disorders: “in the pursuit of slenderness and the denial of appetite the traditional construction of femininity intersects with the [social] requirement for women to embody the ‘masculine’ values of the public arena”.²⁹ It is taken for granted that society’s beauty ideals are somehow objective or obvious. Men and women often tacitly strive toward the ideals without self-reflection. This lack of self-transparency characterizes internalized sexism. Anti-pornography legislation loses support where individuals fail to reflect on the origins of their views on sex, sexuality, and gender.

These three considerations were intended to anticipate and undermine common reasoning that underlies objections to anti-pornography legislation. Of course, there are dozens of other possible objections. I chose to address objections of this type in order to make explicit the assumptions underlying my case for pornography as group libel. I am assuming, first, that there exist patriarchal institutions that enjoy great social control; second, that the feminist case for pornography as group libel comes out of a history of sexism; and third, that sexism is not a superficial product of public life, but rather an internalized element of identity as something partly constituted by gender.

I have now provided a definition of group libel and made explicit its forms. I have established my task as proving that pornography undermines the dignity of women, and I have made my assumptions known. I will now proceed with my argument.

Pornography undermines the dignity of women by disseminating misogynist ideals. The ideals are neither inconsequential nor arbitrary. First I must clarify what I mean by “misogynist ideals”. I call “misogynist ideals” those ideas about social worth that are generated and maintained by patriarchal control. On this view, prevailing ideas or themes in pornography are misogynist ideals insofar as they are created by and for men.

One central misogynist ideal in pornography is the representation of women as essentially sexual. Catherine MacKinnon argues in the journal Signs that the female stereotype is fundamentally sexual. It is constructed so that “femaleness means femininity, which means attractiveness to men, which means sexual attractiveness, which means sexual availability on male terms”.³⁰ The patriarchal construction of female stereotypes is possible because gender is a learned quality. It is “an acquired characteristic, an assigned status, with qualities that vary independent of biology and an ideology that attributes them to nature”.³¹ Women who fail to emulate the idea of the woman as “docile, soft, passive, nurturing, vulnerable, weak, narcissistic, childlike, incompetent, masochistic, and domestic” are thought of as “less female, lesser women”.³²

The sexualized female stereotype is an ideal that lies at the heart of pornographic material. Pornography depends on the stereotype of women as fundamentally sexual by definition. As an industry “that mass produces sexual intrusion on, access to, possession and use of women by and for men for profit”, pornography functions as pornography only when it portrays women in this light.³³ This argument does not depend on blurring the differences in details across a variety of pornographic films. All pornography that features women, features women as sexual commodities for men regardless of its particular content. “The most pernicious message relayed by pornography,” argues Adrienne Rich, “is that women are natural sexual prey to men and love it; that sexuality and violence are congruent; and that for women sex is essentially masochistic, humiliation pleasurable, physical abuse erotic”.³⁴ Even lesbian and “soft-core” pornography reinforce these ideals. Rich points out that “sensuality between women … is … pornographic in itself” because the absence of a male sexual partner is queer, different, and erotic; and soft-core pornography depicts women “as objects of sexual appetite devoid of emotional context, without individual meaning or personality”.³⁵

Especially troubling is the content of “hard-core” or violent pornography. This type of pornography is uniquely troubling for two reasons. It is troubling, first, because what men masturbate to in these films is “women being exposed, humiliated, degraded, mutilated, dismembered, bound, gagged, tortured, and killed”.³⁶ It is troubling, second, because the production and consumption of such pornographic material desensitizes audiences to sexual violence as violence. As “masturbation material”, women’s suffering becomes eroticized.³⁷ As MacKinnon puts it, “your violation [becomes] his arousal, your torture his pleasure”.³⁸ An excerpt from the 1983 Minneapolis Ordinance reinforces the point. The ordinance, drafted by Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, claims that “pornography is the sexually explicit subordination of women, graphically depicted, whether in pictures or in words”. It notes that in pornography “women are presented as dehumanized sexual objects, things or commodities; … as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; … as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped”.³⁹ One section asserts that “women are presented as whores by nature”.⁴⁰ The ordinance continues on in this vein.

A second misogynist ideal in pornography is women’s effortless ability (or inability) to separate sexual desires from emotional feelings. In her essay Exploring the Managed Heart, Arlie R. Hochschild evaluates the role emotional services play in the work of customer service employees like flight attendants. She finds that “the emotional style of offering the service is part of the [flight attendant’s] service itself, in a way that loving or hating wallpaper is not a part of producing wallpaper”.⁴¹ In addition to physical and mental labour, says Hochschild, the flight attendant is expected to perform emotional labour. Emotional labour “requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others—in this case, the sense of being cared for in a convivial and safe place”.⁴² In other words, the flight attendant is expected, first, to physically carry out her job; second, to engage mentally with the work she is doing; and third, to suppress her emotions so that they do not interfere with the desired emotions of the paying customer. Hochschild observes that half of the female workforce consists of jobs that call for emotional labour. More women than men have emotional responsibilities at work, she notes, and “they know more about its personal costs”.⁴³ The phenomenon is the commercialization of emotions as a necessary precondition of economic survival as a woman.

I think nowhere is the commercialization of emotion more prominent than in the pornography industry. Hochschild points out that airlines sexualize their flight attendants with slogans like “We really move our tails for you to make your very wish come true” and “Fly me, you’ll like it”.⁴⁴ This sexualisation, she says, fulfils some male fantasy of the flirty and obedient lady. Pornography obviously fulfils the male fantasy, too. But while flight attendants are expected to feign an emotional connection with their customers, porn actresses are expected to be able to feign an emotional connection in certain instances, and sexual attraction devoid of emotional content in others.

Pornography thus depicts the misogynist ideal that women do not have lasting or legitimate feelings unless it is sexually satisfying for men. Women are not only sex objects, but they are customizable sex objects: they can be emotionally turned on or off depending on the sexual need of the paying customer. The danger here is that, as MacKinnon argues, “as society becomes saturated with pornography, what makes for sexual arousal, and the nature of sex itself … change”.⁴⁵ Pornography is not mere “representation”, where “representation” means non-reality. What is experienced in pornography is real; the emotional emptiness expected of actresses in pornography translates to how we understand sex in the real world.

Flight attendants, too, are surely expected to exercise flexibility in their emotions. The difference is that the rewards of their emotional labour—say, from the successful execution of a great in-flight service—are somewhat tangible. Flight attendants interact with their customers; polite customers thank them for their service, and the quality of their service affects their career mobility. Porn actresses are simply consumed: their immortalization in film as sexual objects brings no such rewards. Every pornographic film asserts something about her sexuality, about the “nature” of her gender as sexual, as emotionally void, as object.

Pornography thus understands woman as such: she is essentially a sexual being available for sexual access; she is naturally sexually subordinate to men and enjoys her subordination; she finds sexual pleasure in violence committed against her (and welcomes it); and she is a sexual object, devoid of human emotion and personality. This is how all women, regardless of their particularities, are depicted in pornography. MacKinnon puts it like this: “pornography says that women are a lower form of human life defined by their availability for sexual use”.⁴⁶ I turn now to showing the ways in which pornography qualifies as group libel.

Pornography is first an instance of libel by factual claim. I argued the claims that women enjoy sexual violence and sexual subordination are expressed in all types of pornography involving women. The claims are “factual” insofar as they are expressed universally in pornographic materials. Distributing pornography therefore always amounts to distributing false claims about women as a group. The effect is that any individual woman—in virtue of her group membership as a woman—is denied the dignity and respect society owes her. Her dignity is undermined because she is represented as a sexual object in pornographic media, and remains a sexual object when she is cat-called on the street or sexually assaulted.

She may not feel her status as a citizen in society has been diminished; she may even genuinely enjoy the attention. As I pointed out, however, group libel is not concerned with subjective feelings; group libel is concerned with how things are. A woman need not feel like a sexual object to be regarded as one by men; she need not feel subordinated to have her identity as a woman developed and forced upon her as something fundamentally sexual. Rae Langton quotes Easterbrook: “Depictions of subordination … tend to perpetuate subordination. The subordinate status of women in turn leads to affront and lower pay at work, insult and injury at home, battery and rape on the streets”.⁴⁷

An objection is to say that some women do indeed enjoy sexual violence and that what is depicted in pornography does not harm them because they agree, wholeheartedly, with the ideals of the pornographer. I believe objections of this sort falsely equivocate the realities of sexual violence with the potential pleasures of “rough sex”. A woman cannot enjoy sexual violence because sexual violence is suffering, suffering is harm, and harm is unwanted. It is an oxymoron to suggest that someone wills their own harm, or that they enjoy it. The very act of willing one’s own harm contradicts the definition of harm, as does the act of enjoying it. The point I am making is not that masochism is impossible, but rather that “sexual violence” as I have used it here refers exclusively to unwanted and painfully endured sexual behaviours. This objection dissolves when this distinction is made clear.

Pornography also qualifies as libel by denigrating claim. Not only does pornography assert false factual claims about women (for instance, that women enjoy sexual violence), but it also asserts derogatory opinions that undermine women’s social and cultural reputation. Keegstra sought to convince his students that Jewish people were malicious and calculated liars. The pornographer seeks to convince his audience that women are passive and unfeeling sexual objects, readily available for sexual consumption at the whim of men. He does this by paying her to enjoy sexual violence, degradation, and the consumption of her body as a mere sexual object. He also does this by making erotic traditional women’s roles: he films scenes where secretaries give in to their bosses’ sexual advances to revive the historical stereotype that “secretaries are for sex”. The pornographer thus shapes the social image and reputation of women; his declaration that “secretaries are slutty” manipulates workplace environments and workplace relationships. He models all women after misogynist ideals and sells their denigrated image for profit. The effect is that oppressive gender roles become deeply entrenched in our social fabric.

Depicting women as sexual objects is also libel by dehumanizing claim. The vicious characterization of the female body as a mere sexual object dehumanizes the entire group at the expense of the individual. It dehumanizes women by equating the sum of the sexual appeal of their body parts with their total worth as women. If to be a woman is to be a sexual object, excellence in womanhood is synonymous with sexual appeal for men. What is dehumanizing about this process is different from what made calling African Britons “apes” dehumanizing. In racist discourse, libel by dehumanizing claim tends to equate some group with animals or insects. In sexist discourse, this sort of libel is ineffective for the misogynistic task at hand. Unless comparisons with insects or animals reassert women’s subordinate position as a sexy thing, dehumanizing a woman consists in stripping the woman of her subjectivity and leaving behind only her body. The belief that “all humans, whatever their color or appearance, are equally persons with the rights and dignity of humanity” comes to include only men.

Pornography is libel by discriminatory claim as well. As I mentioned, any sign or emblem like “Muslims Out!” that intends to signal the degradation of a group is an instance of libel by discriminatory claim. Pornography sends no such explicit messages: “Women are less than men!” is hardly a selling point for the pornographer. Rather, the libellous emblems of pornography are those that describe women using the misogynist language of sexual objectification. They are the signs that hang outside of theatres and strip clubs that advertise “hot women” and “live sex shows”. Signs of this kind demand that women be objectified, thought of as lesser citizens of society, and made other. The sign that advertises big breasted women at a strip club advertises them as sexual objects. The sign also demands, in virtue of having done it itself, that its viewers objectify all women on the basis of their physical attributes. The social environment is poisoned insofar as women’s participation in it becomes possible only on male terms, terms that subordinate women as a group. Waldron adds, “not only does pornography present itself as undermining society’s assurance to women of equal respect and equal citizenship, but it does so effectively by intimating that this is how men are taught, around here, on the streets and on the screen, if not in school, about how women are to be treated”.⁴⁸

In sum, I have presented Jeremy Waldron’s framework of hate speech and argued for pornography as an instance of group libel. My motivation was to attract legal attention to this industry that profits by subordinating and encouraging the subordination of women. Pornography is an interesting case study in hate speech. It requires that we first address endemic sexism as the possibility for its being hate speech, and second that we identify its deeply embedded sexist ideas. In a society that continuously rehearses sexist ideals in its everyday, the task is not easy. I have attempted to show the ways in which women’s dignity and assurance are undermined by pornography; its objective to objectify women, its eroticization of violence, and its invalidation of women as independent, real, feeling persons were among them.

In conclusion, I assert the urgency of the matter at hand. If my arguments hold and pornography is group libel, then it is the libel of an entire gender. Pornography must be understood by the law as a mechanism of sexist control. Only then will its harmful ideas and misogynist ideals be taken seriously as the real oppression of real women. The matter is urgent because pornographic ideals shape our understanding of gender and self. Women will never be equal if society is taught that they are objects; they will never share in the dignity afforded to men if they are objectified by everyone—even their fellow women—as sexual commodities. Liberating women from sexist oppression depends on reshaping our understanding of “women” as a group. The regulation of pornography—understood not as “art”, or “freedom of expression”, or “just images”, but as group libel—is a great step towards this goal.