The Constitution is for Porn

So in the tiny bit of studying I'm doing for my First Amendment exam tomorrow, I've come across an opinion by Judge Easterbrook. It involves an anti-porn ordinance based on a model ordinance developed by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin in the 1980s. I'll point out the parts of the opinion that stand out to me. If you're interested in reading the whole opinion, it's American Booksellers Ass'n. v. Hudnut, 771 F.2d 323 (7th Cir. 1985) (unfortunately Findlaw doesn't have this case).

The ordinance itself defines porn as graphic sexually explicit subordination of women -- including such things as presenting women as sexual objects who enjoy being raped, women as sexual objects being physically harmed, muitlated, bruised, or dismembered, women being degraded, tortured, or hurt in a context depicting their injury as sexual. Pretty hard-hitting stuff. Easterbrook calls the ordinance unconstitutional. Part of his reasoning: "It is irrelevant under the ordinance whether the work has literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."

Um.

I suppose "I know it when I see it" is a more compelling and constititionally sound standard for outlawing speech (to be applied, of course, overwhelmingly by rich white men). How silly to actually write statutes that attempt to weigh the harm to innocent third parties against barely-implicated (if implicated at all) First Amendment interests.

The True Porn Clerk perhaps best sums up the problem with porn, when speaking of a gay porn store patron who troubles the male clerks:

He freaks the shit out of the male clerks, and I understand why - it's pretty hideous to be an unwitting participant in someone else's sex act.

Sigh. I REALLY hope my First Amendment exam doesn't turn into a feminist rant. I think the prof is pretty level-headed, but I'm not sure how well he would take to a rant.