A View from Another

Country
Susan G. Cole

Canadians, and Canadian women in particular, face a troubling situa­

tion. We live next to the richest, most powerful country in the world,
a country that also produces more pornography than any other country
in the world. We do feel threatened by American hegemony, so much
so that we worry we will become the fifty-second state at any time. It
is a problem particularly because we speak English like you do, well,
sort of like you do. I am not convinced that you could waltz into Mex­
ico and appropriate that country, its economy, and its culture with the
same ease as you might swoop into Canada. Canadians are more sus­
ceptible. We are at a critical point in the delicate relationship between
our two countries. Canadians are very concerned about the free-trade
agreement negotiated by our Prime Minister and your President. To
me personally, free trade means pornography and always did. It means
that Americans are going to take the trees out of our country and sell
them back to us in the form of pornography.
We are worried about two things. One, how to avoid importing your
pornography, and two, how to avoid importing your liberalism.
First, let me deal with the pornography. In my work I've discovered
that pornography has the same effects on Canadian women that it has
on American women. When women are around pornography, they ex­
pect it to be used against them, and they experience it as a form of
abuse. I should say that not many Canadian women are used in the
pornography itself. That is because, like many cultural products, the
economics of the situation are such that it is cheaper for Canadian dis­
tributors to import American pornography and sell it (just the way it
is cheaper to import American television programs to give another ex­
ample) than it is to develop a home-grown product. But although there
is not a Canadian pornography industry built on Canadian women's
subordination, the pornography sure as hell is coming into the coun­
try.
To find out what that has meant to women, I have undertaken a
research project in conjunction with shelters for assaulted women. In
it I ask shelter residents five questions: (a) Does your spouse use por­
nography and what kind? (b) Does he ask, expect, or force you to buy
it? (We asked this question so that we could respond to video retailers
who keep telling us that 53 percent of their clients for pornography are
women. We suspected that many of these women are purchasing or
renting these materials under conditions of inequality and coercion.)
(c) Does he ask, expect, or force you to look at it? (d) Does he ask,
expect, or force you to do the things in the pictures? (e) How do you
feel when these things happen?
Since 10 percent of Diana Russell's random sample reported being
upset by pornography,1 we guessed that as many as 20 percent of our
sample of assaulted women would report similar abuses. In fact, a full
30 percent in our survey answered yes to the first question. All those
women described some kind of abuse in association with pornography.
This research continues.
I wanted to do the research because I thought that with the excep­
tion of the Russell study I just mentioned and Wendy Stock's (1983)
and Carole Knafka's (1985) work, women's voices were breathtakingly
silent in the laboratory. I realized that these men, and they are mostly
men, were showing tons of violent pornography to their subjects, look­
ing at it, and looking at it, and still they were unable to see the harm
there, even though it was right there on the screen. They were wiring
up their male subjects' penises, and their hearts and their brains and
their sweat glands to see what they were thinking and feeling, never
wondering what women thought about the pornography that is forced
on them so often. So we decided to ask women. My research method­
ology begins with the premise that women matter and that we should
believe them when they speak.
We found that the presence of pornography in our lives makes a
difference. I don't know if you are aware that in the United States there
is a high value placed on a particular kind of pornography. The por­
nographers in Hong Kong— they are the Americans' chief competitors
— produce two different kinds of pornography for the world market:
one that is sexually explicit and one that is explicitly violent, tailor-
made for the American market. Did you know that Americans con­
sume more violent pornography than any other country? The problem

1Diana E. H. Russell, 1982. Russell's study was the first to canvass a random sample of
women on the sexual violence they experience.
for us in Canada is that the sexually violent pornography is the mate­
rial that crosses our border.
Now surely you have detected a note of nationalism in my ap­
proach, but I don't want you to get the wrong impression. I've cer­
tainly tried to imagine it, but I don't think there is such a thing as a
Canadian sexuality. The sexuality of male dominance crosses the 49th
parallel and other borders quite easily, and it is probably a global phe­
nomenon. What I mean is that there are some patriarchal phenomena
we nurture in Canada without the help of Americans. But I do value
my Canadian identity, and I do know that pornography hurts Cana­
dians. So, what are we going to do about the pornography?
This brings me to the big C-word: censorship. We have an obscenity
law that, like American obscenity doctrine, does not do much. But we
do have one law that has been particularly useful, to us anyway, and
that is our Customs Tariff. It says to the pornographers, "Keep it out."
It's not a perfect law. The main problem with it is that it was con­
structed in the terms of decency and morality, which are not words
feminists use when we discuss pornography because we see it as a
political problem having to do with power, not morality.2 Recently, a
court decision compelled Parliament to reframe the law with clearer
guidelines, and at this time we could probably design a tariff regulation
that used a feminist definition of pornography to create a law that would
do a great deal to keep pornography out of the country.
Now if that sounds like censorship to you, you can call it that. But
I would say that when a cultural product from one country threatens
the cultural integrity of another country, to say nothing of the sexual
lives of its people, especially women, then that product has to be dealt
with. I get the sense that this is hard for many of you to accept. In
fact, I have been amazed at the intensity of the anticensorship feelings,
even at this conference. I sat at lunch with some wonderful women
who warned that if the United States allowed any kind of censorship,
Americans would never hear anything about Central America or South
Africa. I thought this rather bizarre, for in reading your newspapers,
(frankly I have found readable ones only in Los Angeles, Chicago,
Boston and New York, and even in those, foreign news seems to be
anathema) I find very little about what is going on in those countries
and other areas of struggle. In Canada, we had been reading reports
of Contra activity in Nicaragua for a full year before revelations of Con­
tra activity shocked Americans, and we are farther away from that ac­
tion than you are. What has surprised me is that even radical feminists

2The best explanation of this distinction between the moralist and feminist views of por­
nography can be found in C. A. MacKinnon (1984).
 have bought the notion that a liberal democracy and its companion, a
"free" press, actually thrive here in the United States.
Please understand that I am aware there can be and have been abuses
of censorship. You've no doubt heard the argument. If we allow cen­
sorship, it will get us first. And the Customs Tariff has been used against
the wrong materials. But sometimes liberals and their partners, anti-
censorship feminists, can be misleading about how dangerous these
abuses are. For example, many of you have probably read or heard
that the Canadian antipornography documentary, Not a Love Story, has
been banned by the Ontario Film Review Board. That is not true. The
censor board did decide that the film should not get a license for public
screenings, but that anybody could see the film, provided they agreed
to have a discussion period afterward. Not a bad idea, actually. So all
of you who think Not a Love Story has been banned have been lied to
by pornography apologists who want you to believe that censorship is
the worst thing on earth. Look at women's lives and think about how
ridiculous that claim is. I want to add that Not a Love Story is one of the
most widely viewed National Film Board movies ever made in my
country. Some ban.
I will agree that the Customs Tariff has been administered, shall we
say, unevenly. After the court decision I described earlier, the Customs
Tariff was supplanted by a customs memorandum that offers what I
call a laundry list of all the depictions that are not allowed in the coun­
try. Among the proscribed depictions are the celebration of incest, the
sexualization of rape— those are inspired by feminist antipomography
activity— as well as other depictions that have fallen under our obscen­
ity law, which, in our country, tends to target erect penises and pene­
tration. Some call obscenity anti-sex. If you define sex as the penis, I
guess it is.
Anyway, included in the list is depictions of anal sex. This element
of the tariff has been used against gay male sex education about AIDS.
I'll give you an amazing example, just to show how laws sometimes
miss the point that what we are after is subordination. The customs
officials perused one gay male magazine and read a description of a
spectacularly subordinating experience one man had on his hands and
knees sucking a man off. The description didn't bother the customs
officials. What did vex their standard was a letter to the editor that
asked how to have anal sex without getting AIDS. After Customs was
through with the magazine, the description of fellatio was intact while
the letter to the editor, and the editor's valuable response was deleted.
Very bad.
Fortunately, this case was taken to court, and eventually, anal sex
was removed from Customs' list of undesirables. But my point is this.
Anticensorship activists report that something like 1,700 pro-lesbian and
pro-gay sex materials (which, by the way, are not necessarily not por­
nography) have been kept out of Canada. But what do we do with the
fact that another 8,000 samples of bona fide pornography have been
kept out as well? What do we do with this fact? How do you balance
out the harms? Gay and lesbian identity gets set back by keeping gay-
positive sexual materials out of the country but fewer women are harmed
when we keep the pornography out. Abstract discussions of freedom
will not make these questions go away.
I am still in favor of some kind of customs tariff. I am also involved
with a group pursuing civil remedies, something like ordinances passed
in this country that identify pornography as a violation of women's
civil rights. But what I want to say is this. Yes, there are abuses in
censorship. Yes, censors make mistakes. Yes, I could live with the re­
moval of the Film Review Boards in Canada. But it is also true that we
live with film censorship in Canada and some of us still have sex. When
I hear Americans talk about censorship, they get that glazed look of
fear that betokens what I call future-tense panic. Is there really any­
thing that could happen to us that is worse than what is happening to
women already? Or, let me try this question for antipornography fem­
inists who espouse the anticensorship line: Don't you think that per­
haps you haven't totally exorcised the liberal in you?
Which brings me to the importing of liberalism. I live in a country
that tends to be quite comfortable with authoritarianism. Canadians
really don't have that freedom-loving individualistic liberal streak. For
example, our RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the equivalent
of your FBI) illegally bugged phones in 1973, and Canadians couldn't
have given a damn. The typical Canadian just said, "Go ahead, tap my
phone. I'm not doing anything wrong." We just don't have that civil
libertarian impulse. It all hails back to the fact that we shook hands
with the British instead of throwing them out. We had a very polite
revolution. This tendency is, by the way, not always positive, for it has
paved the way for other government excesses. However, it does create
a healthy psychological block against U.S.-styled liberalism.
Canada just got a brand new Charter of Rights, something like your
Constitution. With any luck we may be able to avoid importing into
Canada the liberalism that has been carved into the legal tradition of
your country for the past 200 years. So far, almost all the charter chal­
lenges based on a freedom of speech claim have failed in our courts.
The Customs Tariff was brought before the courts and though the law
was judged to be too vague, the ruling made it clear that a Canadian
democracy would tolerate restrictions on freedom of expression.
We have been able to stem the tide of freedom of speech absolutism.
 But we are having a harder time with another liberal value: freedom of
sex. You will have heard these values espoused in the pornography
debate in that wishy-washy claim that it is not the sex in pornography
we mind; it's the violence. You've heard this, haven't you? We love
sex. We hate violence. Well, all of that doesn't take into account that
the violence is there for sex, and it completely avoids the conditions of
women used in that so-called "just sex" type of pornography.
We found out how dangerous that avoidance can be in a recent ob­
scenity decision made in Canada. We had a judge who had obviously
been listening to those feminists who tout the "give us sex but spare
us the violence" line. He had been listening to all those liberal plati­
tudes about consent, and in a mad moment decided that he would look
at a picture and decide on its face whether it was obscene. And he
looked at the pornography and said, "This is not obscene because I see
consent on the screen. I see it in the woman smiling." Guess what
movie he was looking at? Deep Throat.
So we have a case in Canada in which Deep Throat has been judged
not to be obscene. Why? For a number of reasons: Because the judge
was looking only at the images on the screen instead of considering
the practice of subordination on which pornography thrives. [Linda
"Lovelace" Marchiano's book Ordeal tells the brutal truth about Deep
Throat.] Because he was listening to pseudofeminists who were refus­
ing to analyze sexuality. Because he was listening to pseudofeminists
who consider prostitution a profession freely chosen instead of an in­
stitution of sexual abuse. Because in some cases in Canada, these pseudo­
feminists have actually gone to court to defend pornography against
obscenity charges.
It strikes me that our movement has to confront these tendencies.
We have to be able to say that speech is not more important than wom­
en's lives. We have to stop celebrating "consent" when we address
prostitution and start noticing the gender breakdown in the so-called
sex trade, especially the painfully obvious questions about who is buy­
ing and who is being sold. And we have to avoid the easy liberal path
to pro-sex politics and be sex-critical instead. These views may not be
especially popular in our hypersexualized culture, but they are the wave
of feminism's future.

REFERENCES
Knafka, C. L. (1985). Sexually explicit, sexually violent and violent media: The effects of
multiple naturalistic exposure and debriefing on female viewers. Unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Madison, Wisconsin.
Lovelace, Linda. (1980). Ordeal, New York: Citadel.
MacKinnon, Catharine A. (1984). Not a moral issue. Yale Law and Policy Review, 2.
Russell, Diana E. H. (1982). Rape in marriage. New York: Macmillan.
Stock, Wendy. (1983). The effects of violent pornography on women. Paper presented at
the American Psychological Association meeting.