*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Down with the Reactionary Anti-Porn Crusade!

Click on the headline to link to a Website featuring the paintings, nude and non-nude of the great artist, Titian. Close your eyes if you are offended by the nudes. Okay.

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Spring 1985 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

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Down with the Reactionary Anti-Porn Crusade!
Granddaughters of Carry Nation in Bed with Jerry Falwell

Reprinted from Young Spartacus No. 123, December 1984/January 1985

MADISON— Formerly a hotbed of campus protest, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's "radical" reputation has given way in large part to smug, "me generation" liberalism. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), scabs on the anti-Vietnam War movement, carry a lot of weight in city and county government. With prudery that suits Madison's Protestant environs, "alternative" lifestylism has been institutionalized. You will live a wholesome life. Some manifestations are just plain silly: Madison was declared a "nuclear-free zone" and sandwiches come with beansprouts whether you order them or not. Some are absolutely infuriating: liquor stores close, at 9:00 p.m. and you can't buy cigarettes anywhere on the huge UW campus.

The latest target for moral uplift of the community is pornography—Penthouse and Playboy have been pulled from the Student Union newsstand on the dubious grounds of "low circulation." DSAer Kathleen Nichols, a Dane County supervisor, is proposing legislation modeled on Andrea Dworkin's Minneapolis ordinance to make pornography a civil rights violation. Material in which "people" are "reduced to body parts," "presented in postures of sexual submission" or "presented as whores by nature" would be outlawed (Badger-Herald, 8 November 1984)! Under this law, you can't consent to buy, sell, photograph or pose for pornographic pictures. As the Badger-Herald commented, "Groups normally in solidarity, such as pseudo-feminists and homosexuals, are at odds. Groups normally in opposition, such as pseudo-feminists and the local fundamentalist ministers, support the ordinance." Talk about obscene!

We print below a slightly edited version of the Spartacus Youth League statement submitted to the Madison Isthmus and UW Daily Cardinal. It appeared in a shortened version in the Isthmus (16 November 1984) while the Cardinal has refused to publish it.

Contrary to prevailing liberal opinion, Madison is part of Reagan's USA, albeit with a twist. Witness the New Right's drive to "clean up America." It's going strong in Madison. There's legislation to ban dirty pictures. On 19 October 1984, demonstrators picketed at a State Street porno store; someone stenciled "Burn Me Down" on the wall—and they mean it. Rampaging fundamentalists? Nope. This particular anti-sex crusade is led by Madison's "alternative" to the Army of God— the "radical" feminists.
Finding Robin Morgan in bed with Jerry Falwell may surprise some who thought feminism had something to do with women's liberation. After all, the '60s feminists posed as right-on revolutionaries. They rejected "male-defined" sex roles, denounced "family values" as scams to keep women isolated, dependent, condemned to domestic servitude. They worried about racism and poor people. But the feminists never opposed the oppressive capitalist system itself: their "program" consists of escapist lifestylism, "consciousness raising," "women's" vegetarian co-ops. That's why the feminist "movement" didn't move. It remained confined to rarefied microcosms like Madison, lily-white and middle-class.

What's left of the "movement" no longer even worries about real human oppression. While the feminists are busy trying to stamp out fishnet stockings and high heels, genuine assaults on women's rights go unanswered. Legalized abortion is seriously threatened; abortion clinics get firebombed, their patients harassed, but you don't hear a peep from the feminists. Then there's the case of Patricia Ridge—a single, black, working mother. Last year her five-year-old son was shot pointblank in her bedroom in a Los Angeles-area housing project by a white cop. The cop got off, but a grand jury tried to charge her with everything from child neglect to Murder Two. The Marxist Spartacist League came to her defense. But the organized feminists did nothing. For them, "women's oppression" equals nude photos: they're blind to real class and race oppression facing working-class and black women.

This "Take Back the Night" crusade is a slice of middle America at its worst—about as progressive as forbidding sex education. It dovetails with the current incitement of every backward, sexist, racist, jingoistic prejudice of American society in preparation for war against the USSR. The Democrats and Republicans have been humming "Onward Christian Soldiers" since Cold War II began under born-again Jimmy Carter; with Reagan the crusade has reached new lows. They both want a "prepared" society with social relations straight out of "Leave It To Beaver." No "extramarital" sex, no porn, no abortion, no gays.

The feminists even share Cold War/Moral Majority terminology (e.g., "Porn is the new terrorism"). And there's a certain ideological congruence. The feminists basically buy the Moral Majority's "me Tarzan, you Jane" view of human sexuality: women are gentle nurturers, children are "innocent" and asexual, while men are sexual aggressors. That's what "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice" boils down to: men are barely controlled rapists—all it takes is a little leg to set 'em off. In that case, why stop with censoring Penthouse? According to Annie Laurie Gaylor, editor of the Feminist Connection, Rubens and Titian can go too: they painted women ravished by swans! (Perhaps when Gaylor leaves the Connection, she can get a job at the Elvehjem Museum chiseling the genitals off classical statues.)

Then there's the touchy question of First Amendment rights. With the exception of the rabid crackpot Andrea Dworkin, most feminists try to squeak past it by making a snooty differentiation between pornography and "erotica." It works like this. "Erotica" is printed on expensive paper with "tasteful" hand-drawn illustrations; "pornography" goes for $2.50, with tacky overexposed photos. As the saying goes, "perversion" is what you aren't into.

As Marxists, the Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth League oppose all attempts at puritanical censorship, whether launched by outright reactionaries or feminist ayatollahs. You can't legislate sexuality. We defend the right of consenting individuals in any combination of age, race, sex, in any number, to engage in the sexual activity of their choice—or look at the photos of their choice—without state intervention.

Pornography is not violence: it's fantasy. Rape is a form of violent criminal assault. Among other things, we advocate the repeal of gun control laws: women should have the right to carry arms and use them in self-defense. To argue that "porn is rape" or, like Robin Morgan, that any sex not initiated by a woman is rape, is—aside from being pretty damned presumptuous— to trivialize and confuse the issue. Capitalist society— its forced poverty, rigid family structure, hypocritical straitjacket morality—breeds the poisonous frustrations that explode in violence. The liberation of women requires getting rid of the repressive constraints imposed on women by the nuclear family, thus creating the possibility of new relationships based on social equality—free from compulsion and stultifying "moral" restrictions. In short, women's liberation requires socialist revolution.

While the feminist anti-porn crusaders rely on candlelight vigils, their Reaganite allies have access to systematic state repression and vigilante terror. And Reagan has launched a full-scale attack on democratic rights. Political opposition becomes "terrorism." Cop/ media hysteria about child abuse at daycare centers carries the message that the only safe place for kids is locked up at home with a non-working mom. If your sexual preference doesn't suit Jerry Falwell, you could be locked up for life.

That's no idle threat. The campaign for "decency" has been viciously anti-gay from the start. Vanessa Williams lost her crown not least because those photos were of lesbian sex. Boston-area photographer George Jacobs got 20 years for the "crime" of having consensual sex with his 14-year-old roommate. Jacobs was tested to determine if he was a "sexually dangerous person" and could have been put away in a mental hospital permanently. The cops and press went wild over NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association), an organization for the defense of civil rights of "men and boys involved in consensual sexual and other relationships with each other." NAMBLA members were beaten, framed and sent to psychiatric institutions. And that's nothing compared with the Justice Department's plan to research "behavior modification, chemical treatments, physiological stud¬ies of those suspected of psychosexual dysfunction—as evidenced by...their divorces or homosexuality" (Village Voice, 7 August 1984)!

The reactionary nature of anti-porn legislation masquerading as protection of "civil rights" is spelled out in a new law pending in Suffolk County, New York. The bill is identical to Dworkin's Minneapolis anti-porn law, minus feminist verbiage. It's sponsored by groups like the National Federation for Decency (an actual organization!) explicitly to "wipe out sodomy" and, according-to one supporter, "pornography [that] could cause social decay leading to a possible communist takeover"!

It's not like the feminists can't smell this anti-gay stench; far from it. Kathleen Nichols, lesbian activist member of the "Democratic" Socialists of America, is the Dane County supervisor behind the Madison censorship. This bigot told OUT! magazine that if the ordinance closes adult bookstores where gay men meet, all the better to stop AIDS because "that kind of anonymous sexual congress has resulted in 5500 cases of AIDS" (OUT!, September 1984). For this anti-democratic liberal, male gay sex is a health hazard. This is vile anti-gay bigotry. Do lesbians active in the anti-porn movement believe that once they outlaw everyone else's sexual practices, their own will be protected? They're on mighty thin ice. Check out Khomeini's Iran: no porn there—and they stone homosexuals to death.

Pornography reflects, and only reflects, some human behavior. In this violent, irrational society, those reflections sometimes aren't pretty: but you can't change society by changing its images on a screen. "Positive images" won't materially advance the cause of women's equality any more than those movies with Sidney Poitier as the black neurosurgeon changed the harsh reality of racist oppression. Socialist revolution alone can create the economic basis to replace the nuclear family and liberate women. We don't pretend to know what human relations in socialist society will be like. But we assume that, liberated from the artificial constraints currently imposed on human expression, sexuality under socialism will be more free, more open, more tolerant, more rich and more diverse. May the day come soon.

Carla Norris
for the Spartacus Youth League

THE FIRST SPORTING PROPOSITION OF THE 2008 ELECTION SEASON

COMMENTARY

CHOICES- DEMOCRATS- SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS-REPUBLICANS- JUST THE DWARFS- SO HERE'S A BETTING PROPOSITION INSTEAD

FORGET REPUBLICANS, DEMOCRATS AND GREENS! BUILD A WORKERS PARTY THAT FIGHTS FOR SOCIALISM!


One of the few pleasures that someone like myself gets out of covering this ultimately dreary and meaningless 2008 presidential election cycle is the chance to make a few friendly wagers on various propositions. In the wake of last week’s political activities here is some background for my first betting proposition of the season.


Last week, the week of April 23, 2007, all of the announced Democratic Party presidential candidates met for what today passes as debate at South Carolina
State College. Make no mistake-the 2008 presidential election is strictly the Democrats to lose after the debacle of the Bush years. Under those terms the Democratic Party nomination very much means something this time. So what happened in South Carolina? Everyone made ‘nice’ (with the exception of anti-warrior/relic former Senator Mike Gravel). If President Bush and the Congressional leadership are doing a minuet over the Iraq War budget the Democratic candidates were doing a waltz. Nobody apparently stumbled but no one took any lead on anything, especially on Iraq. The leading candidates are all waiting to take over the war from Bush in 2009. That, my friends, is almost two years way. So much for the courage of the parliamentary opposition. These are not good times for anyone with a bold vision in American politics, except those who favor more jails, more bombs and more debt. Off the performances down South it looks to me like Hillary at 5/2 against the field. That is not for betting purposes. Yet.

And the Republicans? Rudy Guiliani apparently has too many wives. Mitt Romney has too few. (I would definitely have given the founder of Mormonism Joseph Smith, Mitt’s co-religionist, a careful look based on his politics in the 1840’s as a Free-Soiler. Even Mitt’s great-grandfather seems interesting with his five wives- now that is displaying executive ability. Poor Mitt is, however, just a poor cookie-cutter copy of what passes today for a standard brand Republican). And the latest official entry into the race, John McCain, is a toothless old hag. Anyone who in 2007 makes defense of the Iraq quagmire a central theme of his or her campaign truly suffers from a “ Manchurian Candidate” complex (meaning the original film version, not the more recent one starring Denzel Washington). Even the lackluster Democratic field looks like the Founding Fathers (oophs, Founders) compared to these guys. So what are the Republicans to do against the seeming Democratic lock on 2008? Well, how about Jeb Bush? Madness, you say. Hear me out, please.

After the mid-term 2006 elections I wrote, rather off-handedly I thought at the time, that the idea of a Hillary Clinton run at the presidency was too depressing to contemplate. I stated that any bourgeois republic that could do no better than to come up with a perennial Bush/Clinton dynastic quinella deserved all the trouble it got. And it does. However, since we are going to get Hillary anyway we might as well take Jeb Bush in the bargain. What the hell, the Republican strategy in 2008 has got to be to win the Southern states as usual, try to hold their own in the non- coastal West and fight it out in the Midwest. Old Jeb fits that strategy to a tee. He is suppose to be brighter than his brother (not a particularly hard thing to do) and ran Florida no worst than any previous governor. If the Republicans are going to have to run off of the decrepit Bush legacy anyway they might as well get the real thing. I think a Hillary/Jeb confrontation in 2008 is about 20-1 against now. Any takers?

IT IS TIME TO GET NASTY IN THE FIGHT AGAINST THE IRAQ WAR

COMMENTARY

WHILE BUSH AND THE DEMOCRATS DO THE MINUET-IMMEDIATE WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ-THAT MEANS NOW.

FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY THAT FIGHTS FOR SOCIALISM!

At the price of beating the reader over the head once again this writer finds the need to comment on these recent acts of parliamentary hubris between the Bush Administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress. This past week, the week of April 25, 2007, both branches of Congress passed their joint compromise version of the supplementary Iraq war budget by slim margins. Next week Bush promises to veto that bill because it contains timetables for troop draw down. The Congress, at this point, does not have enough votes to override that veto. So on the parliamentary level it is back to square one. Remember two things. First, the Congress voted FOR continued funding for the war against all reason. That includes all the leading Congressional presidential contenders, notably Hillary and Obama the “Charma”. Second, this war will get funded one way or the other. No one in Washington with any weight is committed to any other course. The net effect of these acts of parliamentary cretinism is that this war will continue on course until at least 2009. That is the nut of the matter.

Anyone who was gullible enough, or idealistic enough, to believe that there would be a swift end to the conflict should by now be thoroughly disabused of the notion that, well-intentioned or not, the Democrats would get this thing over with soon. Moreover, even in the narrow confines of military strategy Iraq commander General Petreus spent the week backing off a timetable for when the public should see results from this summer to the fall. Additionally, the daily news out of Iraq gets grimmer each week the ‘surge’ continues. It does not take a hardened communist, although that does not hurt, to realize that such would be the outcome. I have been playing the role of Cassandra on this war for the past few years. Now it is time to get nasty with those people. This war, if it is to be finished, will take the efforts of those willing to go out into the streets, go into the factories and offices, go into the schools and, most importantly, link up with the rank and file soldiers fighting this war to do that. So let us get to it. The time for parliamentary niceties and waiting for good new is long past over.


On another note. Just when it seemed that every one is abandoning the ship Titanic, I mean the ship Bush , I read an article in the Sunday April 29, 2007 Boston Globe by Op/Ed columnist Jeff Jacoby defending the Bush ‘surge’ and taking the Democratic Congress to task for not taking the fight against ‘war on terror’ in Iraq seriously. Moreover, Mr. Jacoby does a rather crude job of linking up the Democrats and Al Qaeda.

Where has this guy been for the last several years? Former top Bush strategist Matthew Dowd has written off his former bosses as fools. Former CIA Director George Tenet, of ‘slam dunk’ fate, self-servingly questions whether Bush can tie his own shoes. But the intrepid Mr. Jacoby counts himself among the approximately seven ‘true believers’ who still think that while things are tough ‘victory’ is possible in Iraq.

The only part of Mr. Jacoby’s commentary that I can agree with is that Al Qaeda is happy with the American quagmire in Iraq. But not for his reasons. One of the main fallacies of American policy makers and their hangers-on, like Mr. Jacoby, is that Al Qaeda and its network condition their policy on American moves. Sure, they take advantage of stupidities like Iraq but it is apparent that they pretty much keep to their own counsel and are immune to the niceties of American rationalism, such as it is. Thus, to premise continuing a massive troop presence in Iraq on keeping Al Qaeda out is wishful thinking. Make no mistake these ‘guys’ are the enemy but bombing Iraq back to the Stone Age is not the way to defeat them.

How then, Mister Smart Guy Markin? I have written elsewhere that Islamic fundamentalism is a threat to every one of us that seeks a democratic secular world, to speak nothing of a socialist one. The options in that fight objectively are fairly narrow. Know this- a workers government would, of necessity, have a fight to the death with these forces, particularly in the Middle East. Not like that ultimately half-hearted fight the Soviets waged in Afghanistan. In the end that only whetted the appetites of Bin Laden and his followers. No question. But it looks to me like diligent police work would be more effective. On the level of police work, while not conceding any political points to that fundamentalist monarchy, the news out of Saudi Arabia this week points in the right direction. The Saudis were able to foil various plots against their regime by what appears to be good police work. And if that fails? Believe me, if a workers government needed to take military action to root these buggers out then that strategy would be placed squarely on the agenda. Know this also-under our own worker-controlled government we would have not problem getting workers councils to fund that kind of war.