ABSTRACT
Until 1970 or so, the demand for legal restraints on pornography came mainly from “sexual conservatives,” those who regarded the pursuit of erotic pleasure for its own sake to be immoral or degrading, and its public depiction obscene. The new attack, however, comes not from prudes and bluenoses, but from women who have been in the forefront of the sexual revolution. We do not hear any of the traditional complaints about pornography from this group-that erotic states in themselves are immoral, that sexual titillation corrupts character, and that the spectacle of “appeals to prurience” is repugnant to moral sensibility. The new charge is rather that pornography degrades, abuses, and defames women, and contributes to a general climate of attitudes toward women that makes violent sex crimes more frequent. Pornography, they claim, has come to pose a threat to public safety, and its legal restraint can find justification either under the harm principle, or, by analogy with Nazi parades in Skokie and K.K.K rallies, on some theory of profound (and personal) offense.1
