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Thursday, May 19, 2005
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BLOGOSCOPY “A Lawyer Outs Himself to Sue for Privacy” the Times of London story is captioned. The headline made UD scratch her head. A guy she never heard of before - a fellow ‘thesdan! - has given UD and the world his name and his most humiliating sexual proclivities in a bid to sue a blogger for invasion of his privacy. This is about that silly bitch, Washingtonienne, a twentyish Hill staffer who kept a blog for a week or two which tabulated the ways and means of six of her sex partners, including this guy, the guy who’s suing. A reporter asks a legal expert about the guy‘s chances: “Charles Abernathy, a law professor at Georgetown University, Washington, and an expert on privacy issues, said: ‘The traditional American position here could not be clearer. If you know something first-person because you have done it with them, you have a tort-free right to tell it.’ The case was ‘an extreme long shot.’” There’s a sad disparity in the outcome of this quickie between the guy (his name is everywhere, but UD doesn’t see why she shouldn’t, perversely, continue to protect his privacy) and Washingtonienne. She is currently rich and famous, while he is suing her for the paltry sum of $75,000 and, having given her recently released book yet more publicity, he will certainly lose the case. You can read everything Washingtonienne said about the guy in his own legal papers, reproduced at Smoking Gun. Marjorie Williams wrote this about Washington: The mixture of that brittle, conservative set of social conventions and all the messy human stuff that goes on inside and among the people who try to climb to the top of the heap makes for such rich material. A lot of my stories (chiefly, my work is writing long, intensive profiles of people in government and politics) are really about what Washington admires, and why, and what it says about the political culture. … I love working this seam between the accepted narrative, usually hammered out between the Washington press corps and its sources, and the grubby human nature stuff that is nearly always as plain as the nose on your face. The messy human stuff, grubby human nature, always seems to astonish and scandalize us when it emerges, even though, as Williams notes, it’s as plain as the nose on your face. She goes on to compare life here to “a Jane Austen novel,” but it’s like any good novel -- an endlessly interesting dance between civilized malcontents and the libido. Which reminds UD to mention that in the wake of Andrea Dworkin’s much-discussed death, her intellectual partner Catherine MacKinnon has made something of a comeback. She gave a talk at Stanford recently, during which she compared what pornography does to women to September 11 (Dworkin used the holocaust the same way). The student editor of the Webster University newspaper correctly calls the analogy “worthless. … All she wanted to do was vilify men.” Dworkin and MacKinnon's atrocity analogies are about their own sense of being caught up in an enormous sex war, and their effort to rally the troops. In a review of MacKinnon’s most recent book, Thomas Nagel nails it: [MacKinnon’s] attitude to pornography and its consumers is massively moralistic. That men enjoy seeing women in these scenarios is itself what she hates. The feeble psychological experiments she cites, which correlate the viewing of pornography with changes in the answers to questionnaires about attitudes to rape,and the anecdotes about pornography being used as a guide in sexual assaults, are merely efforts to lend the weight of interpersonal harm to an essentially moral revulsion toward a form of male sexual pleasure by which she feels violated. I do not have, as she has from her legal work, first-hand knowledge of the depths of female oppression, but I have every reason to accept her grim assurance that the lives of many women are filled from childhood with degradation, rape, violence and coercion. I share MacKinnon’s belief that many men fear and despise women. But the idea that pornography bears a significant causal responsibility for all this is remarkably unimaginative and is not supported, so far as I know, by evidence that sexual violence increases when pornography becomes more available in a society. Some of the most misogynistic and abusive cultures are those with the strictest censorship, and some of the least misogynistic, such as Sweden, were the first to lift restrictions. MacKinnon is right to insist that the unequal status of women pervades sexuality and is not limited to the public sphere. But this causes her to undervalue sexual pleasure, which we all have to take where we can find it. The huge pornography industry serves this end by feeding people’s fantasies. Since she finds most male fantasies revolting and degrading to women, and most consumers of pornography are men, this doesn’t matter to her. In fact she wants to stop it, and therefore fixes on the illusion that she can fight inequality by controlling men’s fantasy life. What about female sexual pleasure? MacKinnon mentions it only once, in a riposte to Judge Richard Posner’s unwise claim that men have a stronger sex drive than women. This, she says ignores “the clitoral orgasm, which, once it gets going, goes on for weeks, and no man can keep up with it, to no end of the frustration of some. (This underlies the often nasty edge to the query ‘Did you come?,’ when it means, ‘Aren’t you done yet? I am.’)” We are evidently in a war zone. MacKinnon’s anti-liberal credo needs to be addressed seriously. It seems to me to require a moral justification that she does not even attempt to provide. It is not enough, in arguing for the deployment of state power, to point to deep social inequalities and say that this is a way to attack them. Not only do the means have to be effective, but they have to respect limits on legitimate invasion by the state of the personal autonomy of each individual within it. This too is a requirement of equal treatment, though it is individualistically defined. If it is given no weight and automatically overridden by claims of group inequality and group subordination, we will get tyranny in the name of equality – a familiar result. Catharine MacKinnon should either explain why her contempt for rights of privacy, autonomy and freedom of expression does not have this consequence, or else explain why it is acceptable. “Controlling men’s fantasy life.” A true 1984 scenario. What Washingtonienne did was savage a man’s fantasy life, which is cruel but not actionable. MacKinnon would outlaw it altogether. |