Feminism, pornography, censorship.
In Nadine Strossen’s book Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights, she demonstrates how, time and time again, attempts to block porn (supposedly because it harms women) are usually used to suppress women’s speech — often disproportionately so, as in the case of Canadian anti-pornography laws which caused shipments of books to lesbian bookstore Little Sisters to be seized, while men’s stroke mags got through unchecked.
Chapter 10 of “Defending Pornography” opens with the following quote from Betty Friedan, founding president of the National Organization for Women in the US:
My own book, The Feminine Mystique, which helped start the modern women’s movement, was suppressed as pornographic in libraries in the Midwest. Why, I don’t know. Its only passion was for the personhood of women.
The rest of the chapter lays out many other similar cases: books on birth control and women’s health, feminist artworks, reports of atrocities committed against women, all censored.
Today, Matt Zimmerman posted on his blog:
While on holiday for the weekend, I have been browsing RSS feeds using NewsRob, a convenient offline RSS reader which synchronizes with Google Reader. I came across an article on Kirrily Robert’s blog on the use of the word “offense” in the context of sexism. The RSS content indicated that there were several comments on this post, and so I clicked through to check it out. [...]
My phone was connected to the hotel’s WiFi, which apparently has a SonicWALL content filter installed. This filter seems to think that Kirrily’s blog is “Adult/Mature Content”. I’m not sure why this is. Perhaps because the word “sexism” has “sex” in it?
Perhaps. Yet consider: Hoss Gifford’s blog, talking about Flashbelt is rated by SonicWall as “Games”, as is Kotaku (a gaming news website run by Gawker media) which has 21 pages of search results for “boobs” and 12 for “rape”.
You’d be surprised — or maybe you wouldn’t — at how many people complaining about sexism in the tech community are accused of advocating censorship. I’ve been getting my share too over the last couple of weeks. Let’s make this clear: I am strongly anti-censorship1. If you’re wondering why, this is why.
Strossen’s book is eye-opening. I recommend it highly. Go read.
Notes:
1. As we all know, censorship is the banning or blocking of content by a government. Web content filtering is not censorship — unless its use is mandated by government — but the problems with it, even in private use, do follow similar patterns of disproportionately silencing pro-feminist material. On the other hand, requesting that adult content only be shown to those who wish to see it, when and where they wish to see it, is not censorship at all.
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I absolutely love your note at the end. SO TRUE.
The worst filtering story I heard (and unfortunately the webpage describing it seems to be no more) was about a filtering software checking a code stream, deciding that programming lines that ended with “menu” and began with “define” were saying “me nude fine” – and thus deleted those words, crashing the code. OOPS.
But yes, most actual attempts at censoring or screening for “adult content” tend to catch a lot of important things in their screen, while letting through what they are allegedly screening for. One of my professors has written several of the books that were affected by AmazonFail – one is a clinical text about providing counseling to people who are transgendered, and another is a resource book for LGBT parents.
This is part of why I differentiate between “adult content” and “adolescent content” in my writing. To me, “adult” does not equal OMGBOOBIEZ!
@Anneke Apparently people from Scunthorpe in the UK have a lot of difficulties, too.
There are a great many debates in feminist circles about this very topic. Whether participation by women in sex work makes them “cohorts of the patriarchy”. These women are often dismissed, shamed, and restricted by the very folks that should be most supportive. Indeed that law in Canada that got Lesbian works restricted, had among its advocates, certain groups of self-identified feminists.
Likewise, laws in Rhode Island had moved to decriminalize prostitution. If we accept the premise that being a prostitute is bad for *all* women (a premise hotly disputed by many prostitutes themselves) how can we advocate making life even harder for these women? The law seeking passage, again by certain self-identified feminists, will require land lords to evict any woman practicing prostitution in her home. That most definitely does nothing to aid a woman to find other work, and will likely ensure she remains marginalized in “criminal” activity even longer.
The point is, that most often these ideas that we should prevent some kind of art, or idea, because it harms women, are very often used, once passed, to further marginalize women already in desperate circumstances.
NOTE: While certain group of self-identified feminists advocate these onerous restrictions, which tend to hurt women most, other self-identified feminists repudiate these kinds of harsh, oppressive measures.
@Joseph: Thank you so much for explaining feminism’s sex wars to us all. *rolls eyes*
But you don’t understand, Skud! You can’t possibly understand feminism because you ARE a feminist. It’s just like a fish with a bicycle can’t understand water. It’s in them, it’s around them, it’s part of their universe. You need someone who *isn’t* a woman to explain it to you. Just as I’m ‘splaining it to you now. See?
Yeah, speaking of mansplanation, I realized after the ‘Women and Allies’ BOF at OSCON that I had done just that in explaining to one of the participants why women in general don’t have as much free time to engage in hobby coding. While she actually did need the explanation (and probably will again, since it didn’t ‘take’), it shouldn’t have come from me.
I’m definitely guilty of mansplaining as well. I guess what I’ve come to realize is that part of male privilege is not having to think about how my life is gender-mediated. So, it’s much easier to voice concern or consciousness about gender inequality by reiterating feminist theory or things that I’ve been told by others than thinking and speaking about my own experiences with gender. I found that reading “Men Speak Out” (http://www.amazon.com/Men-Speak-Out-Views-Gender/dp/0415956579) offered some good examples of talking about gender from one’s own (male) experience instead of mansplaining the work, ideas, and experiences of others.
I’ve been excited about the ideas that have been in the threads on this blog in the last week or so because it’s something that’s so often neglected, especially in FLOSS, but it’s a good reality check to be reminded that I need to think about how to engage in the dialog appropriately, respectfully, and productively.
BTW, Speaking of the BOF… Skud, do you still intend to post a summary of the discussion?
That’s a wonderfully clear definition of censorship.
It constantly astounds me when people want to defend their supposed right to have pictures of naked women in their workspace (i.e. on desktop or screensaver) as freedom of speech vs. censorship.
It’s not a matter of wanting to ban people from looking at such images, or even from displaying them, but it is a matter of whether or not the workplace is an appropropate venue. And in most cases, the exception being if you work in the sex industry, the answer will be “No”.
@Michael yeah, but my notes are on the laptop that I haven’t opened since OSCON :) I only took notes on the reading list, but I should post it, yeah.
OK, no rush. I’ll keep an eye out for it. Thanks!