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83 Geo L.J. 1959 (1994-1995)
Vindication and Resistance: A Response to the Carneigie Mellon Study of Pornography in Cyberspace

handle is hein.journals/glj83 and id is 1987 raw text is: Vindication and Resistance: A Response to the Carnegie Mellon Study of Pornography in Cyberspace* CATHARINE A. MACKINNON** Like a trojan horse, each new communication technology-the printing press, the camera, the moving picture, the tape recorder, the telephone, the television, the video recorder, the VCR, cable, and, now, the com- puter-has brought pornography with it. Pornography has proliferated with each new tool, democratizing what had been a more elite possession and obsession, spreading the sexual abuse required for its making and promoted through its use.1 Ever more women and children have had to be used ever more abusively in ever more social sites and human relationships to feed the appetite that each development stimulates and profits from filling. More women have had to live out more of their lives in environ- ments pornography has made. As pornography saturates social life, it also becomes more visible and legitimate, hence less visible as pornography. Always the abuse intensifies and deepens, becoming all the time more intrusive, more hidden, less accountable, with fewer islands of respite. In the process, pornography acquires the social and legal status of its latest technological vehicle, appearing not as pornography, but as books, photo- graphs, films, videos, television programs, and images in cyberspace. Pornography on computer networks is the latest wave in this tide. Pornography in cyberspace is pornography in society-just broader, deeper, worse, and more of it. Pornography is a technologically sophisticated traffic in women; electronically communicated pornography trafficks women in a yet more sophisticated form. But as new technologies open new avenues for exploitation, they can also open new avenues for resistance. As pornog- raphy comes ever more into the open, crossing new boundaries, opening new markets and pioneering new harms, it also opens itself to new scru- tiny. Carnegie Mellon's landmark study of pornography in cyberspace is also * © 1995 by Catharine A. MacKinnon. ** Professor of Law, The University of Michigan Law School, co-author with Andrea Dworkin of civil rights ordinances recognizing pornography as a sex equality violation. 1. For documentation of the harm of pornography, see generally U.S. DEP'T OF JUSTICE, ATT'Y GEN. COMM'N ON PORNOGRAPHY: FINAL REPORT (1986); Public Hearing on Ordi- nances to Add Pornography as Discrimination against Women, Minneapolis City Council Government Operations Committee (Dec. 12-13, 1983) (on file with The Georgetown Law Journal); Diana E.H. Russell, Pornography and Rape: A Causal Model, 9 POL. PSYCHOL. 41 (1988); Mimi H. Silbert & Ayala M. Pines, Pornography and SexualAbuse of Women, 10 SEX ROLES 857 (1984); Evelyn K. Sommers & James V.P. Check, An Empirical Investigation of the Role of Pornography in the Verbal and Physical Abuse of Women, 2 VIOLENCE & VICTIMS 189 (1987). 1959

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