Equality & Free Speech

Disputes about free speech are almost always high constitutional moments....
They signal that something is wrong somewhere, either with the body politic or with ourselves.
That something may have little do with free speech.
- Simon Lee, The Cost of Free Speech 70

In a "Letter from a War Zone," Andrea Dworkin throws down a gauntlet against pornography: "The war is men against women; the country is the United States." ⁷¹ Camille Paglia, the nemesis of the radical feminists, picks up the mail glove: "[S]ex is basically combat.... [T]he sexes are at war." ⁷² What is the war and who are the combatants? For Dworkin, the battle against pornography is part of the war against the subordination and violation of women. For Paglia, by contrast, the battle for pornography is part of the war for the liberation and fulfillment of women and men. In the struggle between these camps, those who demand protection clash against those who pursue unbridled pleasure; the sexually dominated clash against the sexually dominant; and the sexually objectified clash against their sexual objectifiers.

Interestingly, this war is producing a state of constitutional affairs in which free speech is no longer the exclusive domain of the First Amendment. For the radical feminists, the First Amendment must now share the battleground with the equality principle: "[T]o defend pornography as consistent with the equality of the sexes is to defend the subordination of women to men as sexual equality." ⁷³ Constitutionally speaking, "if true equality between male and female persons is to be achieved, ... the threat to equality resulting from exposure to audiences of certain types of violent and degrading material [cannot be ignored]." ⁷⁴

Thus understood, the equality principle can be used as a cannonade against the pornographic state. Were concerns of gender equality to triumph over free speech liberties, pornotopia would never be actualized. Yet pornotopia's protectors are not without their own forceful strategic moves. Free speech liberties in the pornographic state will happily promote an egalitarianism for sexualized tastes that do not conform to community appetites. Hence, pornography's one­way sexual degradation (women demeaned by men) can be remedied by pornographic depictions equally degrading to both men and women of all sexual tastes. In pornotopia, women porn men, men porn women, women porn women, and men porn men with equal vengeance. At its pinnacle, the pornographic state is constituted to ensure equality of eroticized exploitation.

Thomas Hobbes would be mortified at the prospect that his theory of political peace might one day lead to a sexual war of all against all. Such monstrous hedonism would devour the dictates of Right Reason. Indeed. By Job, we are asked, "Who can confront it and be safe?" ⁷⁵ Perhaps no one. And that is just how life is "lived" in pornotopia.