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 Contentâ€. 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.