“Pornography is the instruction. Rape is the practice, battered women are the practice, and battered children are the practice.”

"For most people the greatest barrier to opposing pornography is the ignorance of what is in it."

"White women are subject to sadism and Black women are subject to sadism and compared to animals in these hideously explicit visuals."

"How long before women and men of all races can oppose pornography, and be taken as seriously as Jews who oppose Nazi imagery, blacks who oppose racist imagery, or anyone who opposes depictions of hate and degradation that are not sexualized?"

"Whatever the gender of the participants, all pornography is an imitation of the male-female, conqueror-victim paradigm, and almost all of it actually portrays or implies enslaved women and masterful male."

"Making women seem anti-sex and joyless if we want the right to be sexual without being humiliated or hurt, and making men seem wimpy and undersexed if they prefer cooperation to domination, is clearly the tactic of choice for isolating anybody who tries to separate sexuality from violence and domination -- which is a challenge to male dominance at its heart."

"Looking at... instances of anti-woman warfare led us directly to the propaganda that teaches and legitimizes them -- pornography.  For the same reasons that we had begun to differentiate rape from sex, we realized that we must find some way of separating pornographic depictions of sex as an anti-woman weapon from those images of freely chosen, mutual sexuality."

"These are typical images: women with breasts so dangerously enlarged by implants that they can no longer lie down or walk normally; female bodies turned into meat market parts by gags, bonds, and masks; young girls with tear tracks in their make-up as they experience "pleasure" in their humiliation; women chained with their legs apart while bottles and rods are forced up their vaginas; girls who smile, apparently on drugs, as their nipples and labia are pierced by needles; children being penetrated orally and anally in "how-to" manuals of child abuse; women screaming in pain as they are strung up on harnesses and penetrated by animals or dildos; adult males with little boys playing the "female" role as their bodies are painfully invaded; even very realistic scenes of evisceration and murder."

"Pornography is about dominance and often pain. Erotica is about mutuality and always pleasure. Any man able to empathize with women can easily tell the difference by looking at a photograph or film and putting himself in the woman's skin."

"There are times when a woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual."

"When we protest against pornography and educate others about it... we are strengthening the First Amendment by exercising it. ...None of (the measures suggested by feminists) keeps material from being published: "prior restraint," in the terms of censorship law.  Most just require that those responsible for pornography no longer be immune from prosecution for crimes committed during its production and distribution."

"(Pornography) has nothing to do with sex, with love, with erotica. It is violence.  And in most of the cases of rapists and child abusers who have been questioned, they have said very clearly that they were practicing what they had seen demonstrated in pornography."

"Erotica is as different from pornography as love is from rape, as dignity is from humiliation, as partnership is from slavery, as pleasure is from pain."

""The People vs. Larry Flynt" claims that the creator of Hustler magazine is a champion of the First Amendment, deserving our respect. That isn't true. Let's be clear: a pornographer is not a hero, no more than a publisher of Ku Klux Klan books or a Nazi on the Internet."

"Pornography is a marketing device for sex trafficking: It normalizes degradation and violence as acceptable and even inevitable parts of sex, and uses the bodies of real women and children as objects. The difference between pornography and erotica is clear in the roots of the words themselves -- porne means females slaves, eros means love -- so pornography, like rape, is about violence and domination, not sex. Millions of lives depend on our ability to separate pornography from erotica, and to disentangle violence from sexuality."

"Depictions of mutual pleasure and the sexualization of equality are so rare that pornographers seem to have the franchise on sex. They can get away with claiming that to oppose pornography is to oppose sex. Every time we talk about "sex-drugs-and-violence" as if it were one entity, we strengthen their claim that sex is intrinsically violent."

"We know that... racist propaganda precedes and justifies the racist acts of pogroms and lynchings.  We know that watching a violent film makes test subjects more likely to condone violence, to be willing to perpetrate it themselves, and to believe the victim must deserve such treatment.  Why is the propaganda of sexual aggression against women of all races the one form of group hatred in which the "conventional wisdom" sees no danger?  Why is pornography the only media violence that is supposed to be a "safety valve" to satisfy aggressiveness somewhere short of acting it out?"

"If you have two groups of people and you say one is inferior to the other, which is a lie, then the only way to maintain the lie is through violence or the threat of violence. So where men and women come together most intimately in sexuality in the home has become suffused with violence. We have to disentangle sexuality and violence. We have to say no. Rape is not sex; it's violence, which I think we know now. We have to say pornography is not erotica, porn means female slavery. It means the depiction of female slavery."

"The problem is that there is so much pornography. This underground stream of anti-woman propaganda has existed in all male-dominated societies, but mass communication, profiteering corporations, and a backlash against female equality have now turned it into an inescapable flood in our streets and theaters and even our homes.  Perhaps that's useful in the long run.  Women can no longer pretend that pornography does not exist.  We must either face our own humiliation and torture every day on magazine covers and television screens, or fight back."

"We really need to look deeply at the demand and see what it is that has conned men against their own self-interest into believing that domination and conquering is a normal part and a desirable part of sexuality, rather than equality and cooperation.  We need to sexualize equality and cooperation, or eroticize it, rather than domination."

"Pornography could probably serve as sex-aversion therapy for most women; yet many men and some psychologists continue to call women prudish, anti-sex, or generally uptight if they are not turned on by their own domination. The same men would be less likely to argue that anti-Semetic and racist literature was okay because it gave them pleasure. The problem is that the degradation of women of all races is still thought to be normal.  A male dominant system teaches men that dominance over women is normal -- and that's just what pornography does."

"(Violence against women) is just not taken seriously by society, and pornography justifies it. Much of what goes on television and rock lyrics and illustrations of record jackets and so on, justifies it and makes it seem alright. Sadomasochism -- which we know very well doesn't exist in societies that don't have child abuse -- is regarded as some sort of natural sexual expression."

"Why has separating pornography from erotica turned out to be even more difficult than separating rape from sex, sexual harassment from mutual attraction, and other efforts to separate violence and dominance from sex?  I think most of the answer lies in the billions of dollars being made by a multinational pornography industry on everything from movies, videos, comic books, porn magazines, CD-ROMs, and video games to the live sex shows, child prostitution, sex tourism, and the sexual slave trade of "throwaway" children and imported women who are also used in pornography."

"Obviously, untangling sex from aggression -- from violence or the threat of it -- is going to take a very long time. And the process is going to be greatly resisted as a challenge to the very heart of male dominance and male centrality."

"It's almost come to the point where the best way to protect a crime is to photograph it and sell it as pornography.  The surest way to be condemned as a censor is to suggest that a crime sold as pornography should be prosecuted like any other."

"There's hardly a newsstand without women's bodies in chains and bondage, in full labial display for the conquering male viewer, bruised or on our knees, screaming in real or pretended pain, pretending to enjoy what is hurting and killing us. The same images are in mainstream movie theaters and respectable hotel rooms via closed-circuit TV for the traveling businessmen. They are brought into our own homes not only in magazines, but on videocassettes and on cable TV channels."

"It is a drug, an obsession with masculinity, that is so clear in terrorism, and it is so clear in sex trafficking and prostitution.  The men who go to prostitutes are men who believe they can't function unless they're in control, unless they're dominating. That is what it's about.  The degree of prostitution is in inverse proportion to the degree of equality. The more equality there is between men and women, the less prostitution there is. The more inequality there is, the more prostitution there is."

"Pornography comes from the Greek root porne (harlot, prostitute, or female captive) and graphos (writing about or description of). Thus, it means a description of either the purchase of sex, which implies an imbalance of power in itself, or sexual slavery. This definition includes, and should include, all such degradation, regardless of whether it is females who are the slaves and males who are the captors or the rare examples that are vice versa."

"Blatant or subtle, pornography involves no equal power or mutuality. In fact, much of the tension and drama comes from the clear idea that one person is dominating the other."

"As men no longer can dominate and have to find an identity that doesn't depend on superiority, they also discover that cooperation is more interesting than submission, that empathy with their sex partner increases their own pleasure, and that anxieties about their ability to "perform" tend to disappear along with stereotyped ideas about masculinity."

"It's only going to work if we stop eroticizing domination altogether.  It's also true that the most frequent place that a woman is beaten and killed is in her own home by someone who she is married to or loves. ... We need to look at it in our own lives and not perpetuate violence."

"It's not true, however, that pornography is a private concern.  If it were just a matter of men making male supremacist literature in their own basements to assuage their own sexual hang-ups, there would be sorrow and avoidance among women, but not the anger, outrage, and fear produced by being confronted with the preaching of sexual fascism on our newsstands, movie screens, television sets, and public streets."

"I think we understand things like the Stockholm syndrome better when it is a well-educated white political prisoner. But somehow when it's a sweatshop or a brothel we say: "Why don't they escape?" 

"If distribution (of pornography) were limited -- or, worst of all, if pornography were to become less tolerated and popular -- this biggest of all growth industries would shrink. That's why anti-pornography protests are so much more likely to be condemned as threats to the First Amendment -- even if they are actually strengthening it by using free speech -- than are similar protests against Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, and other less profitable forms of hate literature."

"The feminist movement has been fairly successful in pointing out that rape is not sex, that rape is violence, and that sexual harassment in the workplace is not about sex, but about power. But that's like talking about the corner store when you are talking about hardcore pornography industrialists. I find, and many activists find, you can talk about anything in this country, we can talk about the president, you can say anything about almost any other center of power, but uniquely, if we talk about pornography we are called censors."

"Of course, the notion that enjoying pornography makes it okay is a popular male idea.  From Kinsey forward, research has confirmed that the purchasers of pornography are almost all males, and that the majority of men are turned on by it, while the majority of women find it angering, humiliating, and not a turn on at all."

"Trafficking in people is bigger than it's ever been. Slavery is bigger now than it was in the 1800s, and more profitable. The estimated profits from it are bigger than that from the illegal arms trade. Because of globalization, the Internet, the increased inequity between nations, and between rich and poor, ease of travel -- all of those things have made slavery much easier, more profitable, and much more prevalent."

"Though both erotica and pornography usually refer to verbal or pictorial representations of sexual behavior, they are as different as a room with doors open from one with doors locked.  The first might be a home, but the second could only be a prison."

"Just as there are people so rooted in race or class systems that it feels like "home," there are some sex workers and others for whom prostitution and pornography have an unchosen power."

"There is even role-reversal pornography, with a woman whipping or punishing a man, though it's significant that this genre seems to be created by men for their own pleasure, not by or for women, and allows men to pretend to be victims -- but without real danger."

"We've learned more about the clear linkage between a society's degree of child abuse and its degree of adult sado-masochism. Many people grow up with the conviction that pain and humiliation are an inevitable part of love and intimacy."

"It starts with the slippery slope of the supposition that gender and sexual relations between men and women are dominant passive. That's the beginning of it. Because that's not true. So, you know, it condones domination by saying that. And then it goes all the way up the scale to beatings, torture, murder. You can hardly open a newspaper today without seeing that a woman has been killed by a man for clearly gender-related reasons."

"In much of (pornography), the difference in power between victim and victimizer is made greater by an added difference of race, class, age, or degree of vulnerable nudity."

"Women who feel endangered by seeing ourselves as the victims, and men who feel demeaned by seeing themselves as victimizers, have a long struggle ahead.  In fact, pornography in some form will continue as long as boys are raised to believe they must control or conquer women as proof of their "masculinity," and as long as society rewards men who believe that their success or even functioning -- in sex as in other areas of life -- depends on women's subservience."

"We have to stop talking about how many women are raped, and we have to talk about how many men rape. We use these passive verbs all the time as if it happened by magic. Someone did it. And we have to identify that someone. And everything we know tells us that they only begin to take it seriously when there are very serious consequences for their acts."

"Though much concern about censorship is sincere -- the result of false reports that feminist anti-pornography campaigns were really calling for censorship and prior restraint -- much of this seems to be a cover for the preservation of the pornographic status quo by a left/right coalition that is dependent on this huge industry, whether psychologically or financially."

"Deep Throat has popularized a whole new genre of pornography. Added to all the familiar varieties of rape, there is now the ambition to rape the throat. Porn novels treat this theme endlessly. Some emergency room doctors believe that victims of suffocation are on the increase."

"But at least now we have words to describe our outrage, and to separate sex from aggression.  We have the courage to demonstrate publicly against pornography, to throw its magazines and films out of our houses, to boycott its purveyors, even to take friends and family members who support it as seriously as we would if they were supporting and enjoying Nazi literature or the teachings of the Klan."

"(Violence against women) certainly is the major cause of physical and psychological injury to women. The most dangerous place for a woman statistically speaking is not in the street. It's in her own home. She's most likely to be attacked by a man with whom she lives. It's the trauma of it we're just beginning to realize."

"This confusion of sex with violence is most obvious in any form of sadomasochism.  The inability to empathize with the "opposite sex" has become so great that a torturer or even murderer may actually believe pain or loss of life to be the natural fate of the victims; and the victim may have been so deprived of self respect or positive human contact that she expects pain or loss of freedom as the price of any intimacy or attention at all."

"Slavery really doesn't include the realistic possibility of escape. People are found chained to beds in brothels in Times Square. People are found chained or locked into sweatshops in California. What they have is bare subsistence and their life expectancy is usually not too great, and really very limited possibility of escaping."

"If Nazi propaganda that justified the torture and killing of Jews were the theme of half of our most popular movies and magazines, would we not be outraged?  If Ku Klux Klan propaganda that preached and glamorized the enslavement of blacks were the subject of much praised "classic" novels, would we not protest?"

"And of course prostitution is not present in every society, don't let them tell you that. And it creates the market for sex trafficking. There are now, counting labor and trafficking, there are now more enslaved people in this world than there were in the 1800s.  Because  transportation is so much easier and it's a reusable resource, human beings."

"Even video games offer such features as a smiling, rope-bound woman and a male figure with an erection, the game's object being to rape the woman as many times as possible. (Like much of pornography, that game is fascist on racial grounds as well as sexual ones.  The smiling woman is an Indian maiden, the rapist is General Custer, and the game is called "Custer's Revenge.")

"Prostitution and sex trafficking have always been enormous at all times. About 80% of all slaves are female, for that reason. We have the political ability to deal with this, but it's going to take a lot of pressure. Just as it did take a lot of pressure to get England ultimately to use its ships to suppress the slave trade, to get our own governments and our own state governments to create laws against human trafficking and to enforce them, is going to take a lot of our individual efforts."

"There are a few well-meaning women who are both turned on by pornography and angered that other women are not. Some of their anger is misunderstanding: objections to pornography are not condemnations of women who have been raised to believe sex and domination are synonymous, for we have all internalized some degree of sexism and are struggling to dig it out."

"That would be the greatest celebration, if we stopped behaving as if (violence against women) were a woman's problem. I mean crime is not the problem of the victim, the victim didn't create the crime. And that's true in this case as well. It is the men who are doing the raping. We have to attend to this in the next twenty years."

"Feminist groups are not arguing for censorship of pornography through prior restraint, just as we are not arguing that Nazi literature or racist propaganda of the Ku Klux Klan cannot be published. ... Censorship in itself.. might only drive pornography into more underground activity and, were it to follow the pattern of drug traffic, into even more profitability.  Most important, the First Amendment is part of a statement of individual rights against government intervention that feminism seeks to expand, not contract."

"Any ill that affects the world at large tends to affect females more, whether it's illiteracy or poverty. Slavery or human trafficking is 80% female. Whatever is bad for women turns out to be bad for men too in the end."

"The last screening of a snuff movie showing a real murder was traced to the monthly pornographic film showings of a senior partner in a respected New York law firm; an event regularly held by him for a group of friends, including other lawyers and judges.  One who was present reported that many were "embarrassed" and "didn't know what to say."  But not one man was willing to object, much less to report this evidence of murder to the police."

"The origins of violence against women by men are not biological. If that were the case, it would exist in every culture. And it doesn't exist in every culture. There are tribal and less patriarchal cultures in which there is very little violence, or in which the violence is almost equal, you know, especially among boys and girls. But in any case, there is no organized violence. There is no frequency of rape and so on. So it can't be biological. It has to be social."

"The arguments against taking on pornography seem suspiciously like the virgin-whore divisions that have been women's only choices in the past. The right wing says all that is not virginal or motherly is pornographic, and thus they campaign against sexuality and nudity in general. The left wing says all sex is good as long as it's male-defined, and thus they campaign to protect it."

"We now understand, for instance, that rape is about violence, not about sex.  I think the country has absorbed that.  And indeed in most rapes there is not even a completed sexual act at all.  It has to do with getting hooked on domination and feeling that one is not really masculine somehow unless one is dominant. One needs a fix of domination."

"Until we finally end the male dominance that has equated sexuality with violence and aggression, there will be more pornography in our lives and less erotica.  There will be little murders in our beds -- and very little love."

"Sexuality is so intertwined with domination/submission that we may have to try one other reversal in order to see what's happening here.  Imagine the works by Marquis de Sade if they portrayed torturers as white and the tortured as black, or all the victims as Jews and all the victimizers as Aryans. Would such ideas be so accepted as beginning "in the mother's womb"? 

(The above is a footnote referring to the Freudian theory that sadomasochistic desires supposedly begin in the womb.)

"Being turned on by a rape fantasy is not the same as wanting to be raped.  As Robin Morgan has pointed out, the distinguishing feature of a fantasy is that the fantasizer herself is in control.  (Both men and women have "ravishment" fantasies in which we are passive while others act out our unspoken wishes -- but they are still our wishes.)""

"50% of slaves in the world are children."

"(Pornography) is the industry in which organized crime has been most successful in going "legitimate," even in being defended by civil liberties groups to which pornographers contribute. Just by prosecuting crimes already committed in the making of pornography -- from beatings and imprisonments like those described in the essay on Linda Lovelace, to the abduction and rape of children -- we could make profiteering in this business far more risky."

"It's unlikely that even a masochist expects death, yet "snuff" movies and much current pornographic literature insist that a slow death from sexual torture is the final orgasm and ultimate pleasure.  Of course, it's a form of "suicide" reserved for women.  Though men in fact are far more more likely to kill themselves, male suicide is almost never presented as sexually pleasurable."

"Slavery doesn't work without consumers. And the consumer has to harden his or her heart against all empathy with another human being in order to be a slave holder."

"(Pornography) is a multi-billion-dollar industry, which involves the making of public policy, if only to decide whether, as is now the case, crimes committed in the manufacture and sale of pornography will continue to go largely unprosecuted.  Zoning regulations on the public display of pornography are not enforced, the sexual slavery and exploitation of children used in pornography go unpunished, the forcible use of teenage runaways is ignored by police, and even the torture and murder of prostitutes for men's sexual titillation is obscured by some mitigating notion that the women asked for it."

"(Sex trafficking) is growing because it's so profitable. There's much more likelihood of prosecution if you're selling arms or drugs. But it happens that trafficking in people is more profitable. The average profit per trafficked person is about $10,000 because the price of purchasing and maintaining a person is actually less great than dealing in arms or in drugs."

"There is also homosexual pornography in which a man plays the "feminine" role of victim."

"The answer to pornography lies not only in exposing it as an institution, but making sure that individuals who are drawn to it, but who are not hurting others, don’t feel condemned. It’s partly the feeling of being personally accused that has caused some women, including some feminists, to defend pornography."

"When it happens to women it's called culture. When it happens to men it's called politics. The very definition of slavery owes something to the fact that men were suffering too and therefore there was a greater degree of empathy.  Obviously it's wrong when it happens to anyone, male or female."

"It comes in a very deep sense from teaching men to dominate. If you're going to have a male dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate. So they come to believe that at a minimum, control is part of masculinity. And some men really, not through their own fault, got born into this culture too, but they get hooked on violence and control as a kind of drug, you know, so that if you talk to men who have been violent against women in their lives, they will speak about it almost like an addiction. I needed a fix, you know, I didn't feel like a real man. She was daring to not have the dinner ready on time, whatever it was that made him feel even marginally out of control, then causes him to respond with violence."

"Because we don't have... laws against human trafficking, it's frequently true that the police are not educated enough to know that this is not a prostitute one should jail but a victim of human trafficking who cannot possibly say that in the presence of her captors whose children may be captive by him. We need to be able to recognize this degree of slavery."

"I can’t tell you how surrealistic it is to find myself and others called “puritanical”, “the new Victorians”, or “anti-sex” for the same views that got us condemned as “sexual libertarians” and “immoral women” until a few years ago. Women and men who oppose pornography for its normalizing of violence will have to fight hard if we’re going to avoid the suffragists’ fate of being recorded in history as boring, asexual bluestockings."

"We need to stop raising boys to think that they need to prove their masculinity by being controlling or by not showing emotion or by not being little girls."

"You know the people I get who write me who understand (rape and sexual exploitation) the best are men in prison. They write me and they say "OK. I get it now. I understand that body invasion, that rape, that forced prostitution, I understand that body invasion is a different magnitude of crime. Getting beaten up is terrible. Having your own body invaded is something even more long-lasting.  But we can escape these old hierarchies together, if we name them, if we connect them, and if we understand."

"We have to look at who creates the market: Who are those UN officials who are in Haiti who are using children sexually? We have to punish them.  We have to look at the demand, not just the supply....  It is rape to have sexual assault, to have sex with a child and to have unwelcome sex with anybody. So it is a long-term solution which includes economics, but goes deeper than economics so that we raise our sons without this notion that they have to dominate in order to be masculine."

"You know, we have to imagine change before we can begin to move toward it. Then we also need to not only stand at the side of the river bend and rescue the people who are drowning, which is crucial, which is why we so badly need much more money spent on programs that aid victims of domestic violence and rape and so on. But some of us also need to go to the head of the river and see why people are falling in. You know, that has to do with boys being taught that it's masculine to be dominant and girls being taught that it's feminine to be dominated or to be passive."