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December 1993

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Subject:
From:
Norm Holland <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 16 Dec 1993 13:58:29 EST
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I find the idea that "expressions that tend to maintain or further the
unequal positions of another group . . . are questionable in light of
the Fourteenth Amendment" "utterly horrifying.  Talk about
dictatorship!  And who ever supposed all groups would be equal?  And
what does "another" mean in that phrase?  As the recent stories about
Canadian censorship make clear, this is the totalitarianism to which
MacKinnon/Dworkin would take us.
 
Is no one willing to make a case *for* pornography?  As the expression
and advocacy of sexual possibilities.  It is well to remember that
without Freud, D. H. Lawrence, and other admittedly sexist writers
we might still be thinking of women's sexuality as the Victorians
did.
 
The real error was in the U.S. Supreme Court's ever introducing the idea
that there was a genre called "obscene" that could be banned.  That
opened the door to the kinds of banning we are now seeing all over.
 
As for using the "equal protection" clause to ban speech against
equal protection--hey, bring in the thought police!
 
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Norman N. Holland       Marston-Milbauer Professor of English     |
| University of Florida   Gainesville FL 32611  Tel: (904) 377-0096 |
| BITNET: nnh@nervm       INTERNET: [log in to unmask]         |
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