If his missing the point of the book is surprising, his misstatement of the Seventh Circuit’s decision in American Booksellers v. To join issue, Professor Dworkin should now explain, instead of assume, how pornography really is about “ideas,” or how being discriminated against on the basis of sex really is just “being offended.”

It is one thing to disagree on these points it is another to miss them. His discussion of the “offensiveness” of pornography is equally irrelevant to its actual harms. We are talking about acts of discrimination: sex-based coercion, force, assault, and trafficking in sexual subordination. In light of this, Professor Dworkin’s discussion of protecting “views,” “ideas,” “opinions,” and “tastes” through protecting pornography is beside the point. Maybe a decade from now he will figure out the argument that is new, or newly developed, in Only Words: the argument on pornography’s status as “speech,” that pornography is what it does, not what it says. Now, after a decade of respectfully repeating ourselves, it becomes clear that he has had no idea what we have been saying, hence no idea what he was talking about. She even read to him about equality from his work.Īre we to understand that it took him until now to hear it? This is one example of the “silence” he has such trouble understanding. Equality was Andrea Dworkin’s argument against Ronald Dworkin’s defense of pornography in a debate with him at Davis in the mid-1980s. Equality was the central argument in writing of mine that Ronald Dworkin criticized previously. Equality was the “compelling state interest” urged in support of the Indianapolis ordinance.

Every harm pornography does is a harm of inequality, and we have said so. Since then, every argument we have advanced to support this initiative has been an equality argument. It is appalling to read that the equality argument advanced in my book is a “new argument.” In 1983, Andrea Dworkin and I advanced our equality approach to pornography through our ordinance allowing civil suits for sex discrimination by those who can prove harm through pornography.

This letter is no exception.Įven in this editorial context, Ronald Dworkin’s review of my recent book is startlingly incompetent, inconsistent, and ignorant. Dissent from this point of view is confined to letters which must focus on correcting the factual errors in the articles. NYR consistently makes sure that its articles defend pornography and do not take its harm to women and children seriously. This letter is not part of a dialogue over pornography or my book, Only Words.

Dworkin right wing women