Feòrag NicBhrìde

On the evening of Thursday December 2nd 1999, Edinburgh witnessed a dramatic farce. The Scottish Campaign Against Pornography had organised a "Pornfire", as part of an otherwise worthy campaign against violence against women. This was promoted on a poster, complete with City of Edinburgh Council logo, which also announced the 'launch' of the Off The Shelf campaign by Scottish Women Against Pornography. This prompted an open letter from a number of groups and individuals suggesting that this was nothing other than a book-burning,

In an attempt to deny this, Councillor Lesley Hinds, convenor of the Women's Committee, told the Edinburgh Evening News:

"Scottish Women Against Pornography bought magazines to see what they were like.

"They were quite shocked about what they could buy. They discussed what to do with the magazines and thought 'we don't want to keep them'. There will be a small brazier and they are going to burn these magazines, so there is no book-burning at all".

She then went on to accuse author Iain Banks, one of the signatories to the letter, of supporting child pornography! (Johnston 1999, p5, col. 5)

On the day, the plan to burn the magazines was abandoned and pieces of paper with headlines from girlie magazines and swear words printed on them were burned instead. The anti-porn campaigners tried to pretend that this was their intention all along. Mike Holmes, one of the counter-demonstrators reported:

"They stated that they'd taken no Council cash but appeared to concede that the Council had funded promotion of their "Pornfire". They also stated that they had never had any intention of burning pornography, something that's certainly at odds with Councillor Hinds' statement. They claimed that if we'd only contacted them directly they could have told us this... I asked why, since they claimed to have had no intention to burn pornography, they'd called the event a "Pornfire" instead of the more usual word, but this produced only apparent exasperation." (Holmes 1999, lines 97-109)

In a prime example of missing the point completely, they thought that the counter-demonstrators were calling them witches because they had brought along a witch-guy carrying a placard quoting Heinrich Heine : Where they first burn books, they will burn people in the end. Attempts to reassure them that they were not being compared to followers of a contemporary sex-positive nature religion fell on deaf ears--they were too busy interrupting.

They persisted with this line insisting to the Evening News that no attempt had been made to contact them directly (The only number on the poster was that of the Council's Equality Unit, who had been contacted for more information), and that the anti-censorship campaigners had given out misinformation about them (Puttick 1999, p3, col.3). They did not complain about Cllr. Hinds for some reason.

Scottish Women Against Pornography¹ has some very interesting views on women. The women at the demo tried to argue that the women in the publications were in no position to have consented to what they were doing. Having so denied that women are able to make up their own minds about what they want to do, they then asserted that this was even truer for women from ethnic minorities. One of them asked Mike Holmes What about Asian Babes? Did they consent?² (Holmes 1999. This particular comment was also overheard by this writer).

The latestScottish Women's Action Network newsletter³ (Winter 1999) is a special "Pornography as Violence Against Women" issue and is given over entirely to SWAP. They make their agenda perfectly clear--they want pornography to be defined as something which harms women, using race relations legislation as a model, and allow people who could prove they were victims of pornography-related harm to take action against pornography manufacturers and distributors. This would ensure tighter controls of the distribution, public display⁴, and availability of pornography throughout Scotland (SWAN, p2). This sounds rather like the "model civil rights ordinance" against pornography put to the legislature in Minneapolis by feminist lawyer Catherine MacKinnon and theorist Andrea Dworkin. Although passed, after a loaded hearing, this law was soon struck down as unconstitutional. The acceptance of such a definition of pornography has badly damaged the civil rights and status of Canadian women especially lesbians (see sidebar). So why do Scottish Women Against Pornography think Scotland needs this? Their reasoning is vague at best. We are told:

"The images themselves are very disturbing. The display of pornography is a pervasive form of sexual harassment. Many women find the display of pornography threatening. Young girls and women grow up surrounded by pornographic images which have a dramatic effect on how they see themselves. We learn to see ourselves as sexual objects, never in control or possession of our own bodies." (SWAN p2-3).

Throughout, the distinction between top-shelf publications and illegal child pornography is muddied, and one statement at least harks back to the ritual abuse myth: Women and children are actively abused during the production of pornographic material (loc. cit.). Much of it is downright dubious 39% of women report being distressed by their partner asking them to act out scenes from pornography (loc. cit., emphasis mine). This last statement is accompanied with the only reference in the entire magazine--a vague one to New Scientist which mentions only the publication and the month. As it's a weekly publication this isn't much help, especially as they don't mention page numbers or the title of the article, or the author! Throughout the newsletter, you get the impression that sex is something women don't like, and wouldn't do out of choice. No woman is an exhibitionist, nor are they ever interested in money. The phrase "women and children" is indivisible. Most importantly, women need to be told these things, because we are not capable of working them out for ourselves.

A particularly ludicrous claim is that every serial murderer has used porn to fuel his fantasies as have countless rapists and child abusers (loc. cit.). In one sentence, these so-called feminists have given rapists an excuse to blame their actions on something other than themselves. They later claim that the porn industry is worth billions, so presumably it's read by a lot of people who are not murderers, rapists or child abusers. Nor do they point out the huge number of such offenders who try to blame God for their deficiencies! Maybe this has something to do with their allies.

To further their cause, the "feminist" anti-porn campaigners have forged alliances with religious groups who wish to reduce women's rights. The original Off The Shelf campaign, launched in November 1989, involved not only Clare Short, and the women's groups but the Townswomen's Guild, the Church Army and fundamentalist groups such as the Community Standards Associations and CARE.

Community Standards Associations aimed to promote and explain the positive value of traditional Christian Standards and warn of the consequences of permissive values and practices threatening to take over our culture. To this end, they orchestrated letter-writing campaigns against girlie magazines, sex shops and sex education material, especially anything gay-oriented. They're best known for their actions against films such as the Life of Brian and Caligula, getting them banned in some areas of the UK.

CARE stands for "Christian Action Research and Education". This organisation has its origins in a 1971 "Rally Against Permissiveness" in Trafalgar Square. Initially called the "National Festival of Light", it pioneered the use of tactics later used to promote the Satanic Abuse Myth. The group provided resources to oppose pornography and abortion. Local groups of fundamentalists would then distribute the resulting newsletters and pamphlets among the local medical professionals, teachers and social workers. They originally had their own anti-porn campaign, "Picking Up the Pieces", but enthusiastically swapped this for "Off The Shelf".

This association is, not surprisingly, somewhat embarrassing to the 'feminist' groups and has often been denied. Catherine Itzen claimed the allegations were simply to discredit her campaign and in her 1992 book Pornography: Women, Violence, and Civil Libertiesinsisted no such alliances exist, or have ever been made, either in the USA or the UK. Presumably the joint CAP/CARE 1990 campaign against sex shops in Bristol was a figment of the participants' imaginations and the photographs of Clare Short at a CARE meeting must have been forged by her detractors.

The Christians themselves are less ashamed of the association. CARE's Nigel Williams wrote, in 1991, CARE works very successfully at a national level with groups and members of Parliament who hold very different views on other issues which are important to us. He then explains that these groups would rather keep the relationship secret. Just to make it clear, a list of campaigning groups in the same book includes CAP, and he refers throughout to the anti-pornography campaign, as if it was a united effort.

Further confirmation comes from a feminist magazine: To me, if something is so obvious that people coming from opposite political perspectives can agree on it that would make it particularly strong (Barbara Rogers quoted by Barbara Norden "Pornography: the Debate Goes On" Everywoman December 1990-January 1991. Cited in Thompson 1994, 231)

This is not the first time campaigners for women's rights have linked up with religious extremists to the detriment of women. The early women's rights activists were particularly active in "social purity" movements which sought to deny access to sex education and birth control lest it led to extra-marital sex. Thompson (1994, 17-21) goes into considerable detail of this sordid episode which reinforced the Victorian stereotypes of womanhood today's anti-porn women seem so keen to uphold.

Canadian experience suggests that, even with a so-called feminist law in place, the sexists and homophobes in government, the police and the judiciary will make sure that women and gay men's access to sexual information and their own writing on sex are the only things censored.