Diana Russell argues for tough government policy which recognises the harm of pornography to women. For her there is a disturbing connection between images of sexual violence, produced for men's amusement, and the high incidence of rape. Is the thriving porn industry guilty of hate speech?

In 1993, Frene Ginwala, now the Speaker in Parliament, invited me to prepare an anonymous proposal on pornography for the African National Congress (ANC). Presumably she asked me to do this because I have researched and written about pornography (1) and other forms of violence against women (2) for over 20 years. I formulated my anti-pornography analysis and policy proposal for the ANC in the hope that their leaders would recognise the harmfulness of pornography and choose to try to prevent it when they took over the reins of Government.

Judging from the fact that President Mandela's government chose to adopt a laissez-faire policy towards pornography (3), my proposal appears to have been singularly ineffective. Probably in reaction to the former white government's criminalisation of pornography in the past, the new government leaders, supported by the majority of the white population, decided to lift all restrictions on the pornography industry. This policy has served to bless the growing proliferation of pornography in the new South Africa.

Nonetheless, I fervently hope that the South African government will recognise that pornography is just as harmful to women as racist material is to the people it targets. This open forum is an opinion piece based on my anonymous policy statement.

What is pornography?

I define pornography as material that combines sex and/or the exposure of genitals with abuse or degradation in a manner that appears to endorse, condone, or encourage such behaviour. I define erotica as sexually suggestive or arousing material that is free of sexism, racism, and homophobia, and respectful of all the human beings and animals portrayed.

Because of their sexist nature, the following types of material qualify as pornography rather than erotica: sexually arousing images in which women are consistently shown naked while men are clothed; in which women's genitals are displayed but men's are not; or in which men are consistently portrayed in the initiating, dominant role. In addition, depictions of women that are confined to young, white bodies that are thin, large-breasted, and blonde - that is, conforming to many white men's narrow concept of beauty and promote sexualised racism as well as sexism (Mayall & Russell, 1993).

A particularly important feature of my definition of pornography is the requirement that `it appears to endorse, condone, or encourage abusive sexual desires or behaviours'. These attributes differentiate pornography from materials that include abusive or degrading sexual behaviour for educational purposes. Movies such as The Accused and The Rape of Love, for example, present realistic representations of rape with the apparent intention of helping viewers to understand the reprehensible nature of rape and the agony experienced by rape victims.

Rape statistics in South Africa

In 1994 there were 32 107 cases of rape reported - an increase of 16 percent over the previous year. In 1993, 28 318 cases of rape were reported and police estimate that only 2.8 percent of all cases of rape are actually reported. If this were true, South Africa would... probably have the highest level of rape among countries which have taken the initiative to collect statistics on violence against women. (United Nations Economic and Social Council, 1996:3)

These rates are not confined to whites. Journalist Dele Olojede also notes that South Africa:

has the highest incidence of reported rape in the world, 10 rapes per 1 000 population per year (San Francisco Chronicle, `Tidal wave of rapes alarms South Africa', February 1 1997:A13).

He maintains that this figure is approximately two-and-a-half times higher than the incidence in the United States (US).

Tolerating pornography

Although Court focuses on the relationship between pornography and rape, this is by no means the only negative effect of pornography. Nevertheless, it is a very serious one, particularly in South Africa, which is believed to have one of the highest rape rates in the world (United Nations Economic and Social Council, 1996:3).

Because Court believed that in South Africa `the desire for pornography appears to be much more pronounced among whites', he limited his analysis of rape rates in this country to those committed by whites (1979:239). Unfortunately, Court does not make it clear whether his analysis of the South African statistics includes black female victims.

Court compared rape rates from 1960 to 1977 in three regions with permissive (he calls it liberal) legislation on pornography (the US, Denmark, and South Australia) with those of Singapore and South Africa, both of which imposed restrictions on the availability of pornography. Court selected these five regions because complete data were available for them for the period from 1960 to 1977 (1979:240).

After comparing the rape rates of these five regions, Court drew the following conclusions:

Countries adopting a liberal approach to pornography have, contrary to expectations, experienced major increases in rape reports in the years following the inception of that approach. By contrast those jurisdictions taking a conservative [repressive] stance have experienced only minimal increases.

It is not argued that the availability of pornography is the only relevant factor. Social attitudes, and many other factors can contribute. One important factor discussed elsewhere is the way in which the law is enforced in relation to the rapist. Where the probability of being sent for trial, and receiving sentence if found guilty, is low, a higher rate of offenses could be expected (1979:240) (4).

Court concluded:

Any proposals to liberalise the laws relating to pornography should be considered in the light of the adverse consequences which have now been experienced consistently where liberalisation has been tried (1979:241).

Court's data are consistent with a great deal of other research in the US confirming that the proliferation of pornography leads to increases in sexual violence against women (Baron & Straus, 1984; Koss & Dinero, 1988; Russell, 1994a). Because South Africa's rape rate was very high before pornography was legalised, sceptics maintain that pornography cannot therefore be a causal factor in rape. However, this argument is fallacious - just as fallacious as it would be to argue that because lung cancer is a serious problem in a country where few people smoke, smoking cannot be a significant cause of lung cancer. No one, to my knowledge, is claiming that pornography is the only cause of rape and other sexual violence, or even that it is the main cause. Some feminists, including myself, believe that its causal significance depends on a number of factors such as the content of the pornography; how widespread it is; whether authority figures deplore or applaud it; and whether making or distributing porn is profitable for the Government or individual entrepreneurs.

If no porn is available in a country, obviously it is irrelevant as an explanation for that country's rape rate. But since pornography does play a causative role, we can expect to see the prevalence of rape escalate in South Africa as this women-hating material proliferates.

While Court's conclusion is certain to be unpopular with liberal white and black South Africans who have been most influenced by white male culture, it is obviously not reasonable to dismiss it just because of its association with reactionary regimes. Many feminists in the US are wary of aligning themselves with left-wing or right-wing male politics because neither side effectively advocates for women's rights. For example, the left has typically supported the rights of criminals as opposed to victims. Since relatively few women commit violent crimes, whereas they are frequently the victims of such crimes, this left-wing policy is clearly antithetical to women's interests and well-being. The fact that the right- wing - especially in South Africa - has been responsible for much greater violations of black people's rights, does not make it reasonable for those concerned about women's rights to blindly support every policy that the male-dominated left advocates and/or to automatically damn every policy that the right-wing champions.

One example of the effect of the Mandela government's toleration of pornography involves white South African pornographer Johan Theron, who lives in Houghton, Johannesburg, and was described by British Guardian journalist Luke Harding as `the South African porn magnate' (The Guardian, `Dirty war on the top shelf', January 13, 1997). Theron operated the South African and British divisions of the international edition of Hustler magazine. In 1996, a mere three years after the first issues of Hustler became available in South Africa, Theron was arrested in England for importing 470 South African-made pornographic videotapes between August 1994 and February 1996. At his London trial in March 1997, one of these videos, Leather Looks, was described as containing a scene in which a woman is lashed while she is tethered to a wall by a cord pierced through her tongue. It also shows a woman chained by the neck crawling out of a small metal cage before she is slapped by hand by women and a man (Sunday Times, `SA Hustler man in court on porn charges', March 12, 1997). Theron acknowledged that the torture video Leather Looks had been featured in his magazine's listing of its top 20 videos. Nevertheless, he told the court that Hustler `did not condone sex involving children, animals or violence' (The Independent, `Sex with animals? Not in the Hustler stable, publisher tells London court', republished in the Sunday Times, South Africa, March 15/16, 1997). Prosecutor Nigel Peters asked him why, in that case, `Hustler carried advertisements for videos that appeared to fall foul of this policy,' ie, they did contain sexual acts involving children, animals and/or violence. To underline his point, Peters referred to a video found in Theron's possession called Animal Love Farm (selling for R850) which was `described in an advertisement as part of `Europe's most bizarre collection' and as `only for the most unshockable viewer'.

How tragic it is that nearly four years after the glorious April 1994 victory of Nelson Mandela and the ANC over the white supremacist government, predators from South Africa and abroad are preying on South African women (and probably children too), many of whom have already been sexually exploited, (5) to make and profit from woman-hating masturbatory material manufactured for men's amusement.

The governments in some Western-influenced countries, like Singapore and South Africa, have taken an anti-pornography stance. On gaining independence, leaders of many African nations also chose to restrict pornography, which they perceived as an undesirable and immoral Western import. The following analysis of pornography by Soweto-born Mary Masechabe Mabaso (Russell, 1991:67) corresponds to those of many African leaders outside South Africa:

In our tradition, sex is a private thing and you have to respect it... We have never before seen things like some of them are showing [on videos]. Now we realise that... other countries are not worried about sexual abuse. They do it in public whereas with us, it is a curse. The boys here are now taking advantage of what they are seeing. They want to sit with a girl and kiss her. But that is not our nature. It is not our culture. Boys nowadays want to practise what has never before been practised in our country.

Confirming Mabaso's statement, University of Cape Town (UCT) Political Studies lecturer Mary Simons also noted that when she was an honours student at UCT, her black male colleagues:

found that one of the most difficult things about coming to res [residence] was their exposure to blue movies, which they had never seen before (Kim Dunlop, `Porn - Stripped bare: women used as sexual"porns"', Varsity, 52, 2, March 9, 1993:9).

As already mentioned, Court was also in agreement with this view. So why are the black leaders in post-apartheid South Africa so out of step with their brothers further north? Could it be because black people in South Africa, where the number and percentage of whites is much higher than in the rest of Africa, have absorbed more white culture than the black people in other African nations? And since women have typically been found to feel far more negatively about pornography than men, would black women have been more willing to restrict pornography in the new South Africa than black men? We need to find the answers to these questions.

Non-sexist policy

In the US and Britain pornography involving adults has been conceptualised as speech and protected in the name of freedom of speech. Only the more extreme forms of adult pornography in these countries are defined as obscene and made illegal. (6) However, feminists in the US have formulated other ways of conceptualising pornography than the free-speech-obscenity approach. I will describe these in the hope that the approach most suitable to South Africa may yet be chosen by a leadership that becomes more enlightened about the serious violence and sexism-promoting effects of pornography.

Pornography as hate speech

Viewing pornography as a manifestation of hate speech rather than as a form of obscenity shifts the focus away from the issue of censorship. It also reduces the likelihood that charges of being pro-censorship will be used to protect pornography - as has happened in the US. Significant inconsistencies in the ways that racist hate speech and sexist hate speech are handled would be more obvious if the same laws applied to both.

Pornography as a form of discrimination

There is a long respected tradition of legislating against discrimination on the basis of race, and sometimes on the basis of sex as well. If porn is conceptualised as a form of sex discrimination, anti-sex discrimination laws would necessarily include this material.

Pornography as a form of sexual harassment

It seems reasonable to consider porn in settings other than the workplace as sexual harassment as well, eg, in church, in courts, in doctors' offices, and even in the home.

Pornography as a form of sexual abuse

Some feminists in the US consider pornography to be a form of violence against women. While there is a great deal of non-violent pornography, porn promotes violence in some male consumers. In addition, the manufacture of porn requires the degradation of women. Many of the rapes portrayed in porn are actual rapes. The same applies to painful forms of bondage and torture. Pornography is not `just fantasy' for the women who are used to make it.

Pornography as a means of gender subordination

Pornography as a civil rights issue

However progressive South Africans opposed to pornography choose to conceptualise it, it is imperative that this problem be tackled now, before it has become too deeply entrenched, and before men have become so dependent on having it at their disposal that it becomes virtually impossible to eradicate.

Education about the harms of pornography

Were it possible to do a presentation about the content of pornography to all the members of the Government, I believe that they too might come to recognise the misogyny in pornography and the danger to women and children that it poses. But I am not so naive as to believe that the leadership would be open to such an educational experience.(7)

Personal accounts of children

These testimonies are excerpted from in-depth interviews with incest survivors that I conducted between 1991 and 1993 in Cape Town. The complete interviews with three of these women may be found in my book, Behind Closed Doors in White South Africa: Incest Survivors Tell Their Stories (1997). All the accounts here were given by white women about their childhoods (8). Adult pornography is frequently used by men who commit sex crimes against children.

Marie Malan

When I was about 10 or 11, my stepfather made me watch two movies and then do what the women had to do in them. In one of the movies a lot of men raped a woman, and did whatever else they wanted to her. The other movie showed a woman being cut up alive after the men had sex with her. My stepfather threatened to do the same to me if I told anyone what he was doing to me. That is why I would rather have died than tell anyone. The movies pumped into my head that `this is my life'. Also, I thought what was happening with my stepfather must be normal, that it must be happening to other girls, so I started accepting it.

Elsa Foster

One of the first things Hoffie and Pieter did together was to make me watch movies when I was nine years old. Today I know that they were videos, not television, but I didn't know that then, and I believed that whatever was shown on television must be true. The news was real, so how could these rapes not be real? I remember a young Indian girl being raped by three cowboys in one movie. In the other a woman was cut up with an electric saw after she was raped. I vomited after I saw that, and I was very sick for a couple of days afterwards. I was sure that she really was cut up and that the Indian girl really was raped. I believed that these things happened in everybody's lives. If it happened in a movie and it was happening in my home, how could I say it was wrong? I became very doubtful about what was right and what was wrong, and what was allowed and what was not. Today I can still picture the way those women were raped, and how one of them was cut up after the rape. (9)

Kathy Schultz

My brothers started photographing me when I was a young child. They made the photographs for their private collections. When I became rebellious at 13, I felt very embarrassed that they still had these photographs. I wished that nobody would see them, and I still feel that way. But obviously people have seen them since they were used as evidence when Ronald was on trial for sexual assault in 1988.

Ronald was put on trial for abusing three girls. Because he had sexually abused so many, he specifically asked that others not be contacted because, he said, it happened years ago and we had all grown up. He had a lot of photographs of girls, including me, which the police confiscated. He asked the police not to speak to me saying that it would affect my life if I had to be brought into court. They agreed to his request.

Lara Newman

During all those years my grandfather showed me his [pornographic] books and magazines. He made me pose in seductive positions like the women in them. He would show me the pictures and say, `This is what I'm going to do to you, and this is what you must do'. Or he'd say, `Do you see how pretty this girl looks? You must sit with your legs like she does'. There were pictures of lots of nude women in them - women in fishnet stockings with no panties on. There were a lot of open crotches and open legs. He always made me sit with my arms on my hips and my legs spread open like in the pictures. I still often sit like that automatically, with my legs up and my hands on my knees.

Rape, battery, and murder are typically considered criminal offenses. Yet the portrayal of these crimes against women in pornography is a popular form of entertainment in many countries. Countless males regularly ejaculate to degrading pictures of women. This in turn intensifies their sexual response to women being abused. It is this sexual component, including the sexual gratification involved, that sets pornography apart from non-pornographic depictions that are degrading and/or violent towards women, and which makes pornography particularly dangerous.

That it is considered acceptable to treat women in the ways they are portrayed in pornography implies more than a tolerance of, and desensitisation to, women's pain and degradation. It constitutes a massive hate crime against women as a gender. Would males be so cavalier about pornography, labelling it as mere free speech, if instead of the rape of women by men, pornography celebrated women cutting off men's penises and testicles? Societies that call themselves civilised cannot at the same time continue tolerating pornography's invitation to men to rape, abuse, mutilate, and kill women (10).