Voting for Porn
by Nadine Strossen
Scribner $22.00 (Hardcover)
review by Tracy Quan
review by Tracy Quan
Nadine Strossen has produced a comprehensive handbook for women who hope to keep Big Government out of their panties, and for other devotees of the anti-censorship crusade. Like it or not, this effort has become just that -- a crusade. So the informative sections of Defending Pornography -- like her chapter on the "MacDworkin" anti-porn bill drafted by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon in 1983 -- must sometimes compete with feel-good pep talks which make her sound like she's running for office.
MacKinnon and Dworkin have the ability to arouse horrible fears and they can sound like they're running for office too, but they are more like the gifted demagogues who currently dominate the Republican Party. Porn has its own extremists. Al Goldstein (publisher of SCREW and host of the adult cable show Midnight Blue) makes other males recoil in embarrassment because he's a sleazy old man crossed with a bumptious ten-year-old boy -- everything smooth, sensitive urban guys don't want to be. Sometimes, when defending cable porn, I am asked, "How can a nice girl like you allow yourself to be associated, even in abstract conversation, with Al Goldstein?" Goldstein, like Dworkin, doesn't mind if people think he's a bit much. A caricature of the peep show customer or the phone sex john, he's their self-elected representative, celebrating the depths to which horny guys sink.
Strossen's approach to sex is more palatable than Goldstein's, more wholesome and friendly than Dworkin's or MacKinnon's. And it's more impersonal. Is this because of her temperament or her position? She combines the best and worst traits of a centrist politician. Men and women who find Dworkin irrational and Goldstein crude might be comfortable with Strossen's message. But there are moments when her refusal to leave the center makes her sound disingenuous. When Strossen tells female readers that we need not choose between freedom and safety or between equality and freedom of expression, she sounds like every other politician who has promised to cut taxes without reducing services. Are women really "entitled", as Strossen puts it, to enjoy the thrills of sex without giving up personal security? How about men? What if your thrills come from being a compulsive exhibitionist? Surely you risk your safety and security by exposing yourself in Central Park. If you crave casual encounters, if your appetite propels your body toward the open highway -- or into anonymous, hidden alleyways -- you choose, to some degree, excitement over safety.
