25th April 2005
Andrea Dworkin died recently aged fifty eight years. I heard her speak in Dublin, decades ago, on the topic for which she is best known, pornography, of which she was a fierce opponent due to the effect she felt it had on sexual violence. Far from being a harmless pursuit, she felt, it degraded women in the eyes of men and lead to the violation of women's civil rights and to domestic and other violence.
At that time I did not realise that Andrea Dworkin had had first hand experience of what pornography can do to a relationship. Born in New Jersey, she married a Dutch man shortly after she graduated from Bennington College in Vermont and moved with him to Amsterdam. Both she and her husband read pornography and she felt this was responsible for the abuse she endured while she lived with him. She eventually left him when she was twenty five in 1971 and returned to America. Ms. Dworkin lived in appalling circumstances for some years but eventually began writing the books on the effect of pornography which made her internationally renowned.
When I met her she was very, very fat. I'd say she was probably about twenty stones, wearing voluminous denim dungarees. This made me fear her health was more at risk from the fat than from pornography and it also allowed for her to be portrayed as an unattractive man-hater which, I believe, she was not. The weight certainly did for her knees, which apparently gave her trouble for many years and caused her other forms of ill health, but her partner of thirty years, John Strolenberg, must have had a most interesting and entertaining companion. Susie Orbach is wrong. She wrote a book that "Fat is a Feminist Issue", it is a really serious health issue.
My experience of pornography is very limited. If one goes to sleep in a hotel room leaving the television on and wakes up in the middle of the night there can be the most startling stuff on the screen, free gratis and for nothing. To think of people paying good money for it surprises me as much as it does most women.
But why do some men find it so enthralling? A few years ago a friend of mine asked me if I would look at three videos she had found in her local video store and tell her if I thought they were suitable for general distribution.
Not wanting to be disobliging, I sat down one Sunday afternoon to have a look at them. The first consisted of the activities of a very, very large penis. Used as I am from a long medical career to all parts of the human body coming in different shapes and sizes, this was very big. Only the middle third of the owner's body appeared, oral sex was performed by another human, I'm not sure if that person was male or female, it had long blond hair and was pretty muscular, and the sound track consisted of groans of 'Oh baby' in a Germanic accent.
After twenty minutes of this I looked at the cassette holder to see for how long it went on - four hours! I couldn't believe it and decided the video failed the test on story line and went on to video two.
This was not as tedious. It was about a three in a bed romp and the telephone kept ringing every time the action got going. But after this happened five times it failed, too, on repetition. Tape three remains a mystery to me because I could see the sun was still out and we went off for a walk. Surely to heaven human beings would find it more interesting to have relationships with other human beings. I find the desire to acquire child pornography unbelievable. I know more about this sordid trade having attended a couple of international meetings on getting it made illegal.
I do not think a child can ever give permission for sexual activity with an adult to take place and this has to happen for the making of most child pornography. Every week we see reports of men before the courts for accessing child pornography on the internet and we see cases where adults describe the great grief caused to them by their exploitation as children by adults, some of them most trusted people.
Now the sexual abuse of children has taken place I'm sure long before child pornography was produced but it is hard not to feel its easy availability has made it seem quite normal. Normal to some men anyway, because women seem to be rarely involved.
The grief of those young people who had been sexually exploited by priests and religious in the United States of America when they saw Cardinal Law, formerly Archbishop of Boston, celebrate the first memorial Mass for Pope John Paul II in Rome recently is more than understandable. Cardinal Law was described by the Attorney General in Massachusetts as entirely responsible for moving priests who abused children from parish to parish allowing more and more to be injured. Having had some dealings with adults who were sexually abused by trusted people I really doubt if they can ever recover. One woman I know is bitterly critical of me because I have done so little to help her - she insists she was sexually abused by a psychiatrist when she was a teenager and all I give her is 'sweet talk'.
If there were women amongst the Cardinals would child sexual abuse by the clergy be taken more seriously? Even Pope John Paul's words on it were very obtuse but Christ said to us that those who harm children would be better off if a millstone was put around their necks and they were cast into the sea. And what of the woman who complained to me about my lack of action? Are there more culprits in other trusted professions who are lucky not to have been exposed?
Senator Mary Henry, MD
