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Wendy McElroy

Wendy McElroy Quotes

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Famous Wendy McElroy Quotes

“Moreover, some of the images covered by the definition go far beyond what can reasonably be considered pornographic. For example, "women's body parts . . . are exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts." This description would include everything from blue jean commercials which zoom in on women's asses to cream ads which show perfectly manicured hands applying the lotion-the sort of advertisements that have appeared in Ms. magazine. Although it is commonplace to criticize such ads for using sex to sell products, it is a real stretch to call them pornographic.”

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“The current backlash of censorship is an alliance between the Moral Majority (the Right) and the politically correct (the Left). This alliance is threatening the freedom of both women and sexual expression. The Right defines the explicit depiction of sex as evil; the Left defines it as violence against women. The result is the same.”

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“It is charged that pornography objectifies women: It converts them into sexual objects. Again, what does this mean? If taken literally, it means nothing at all because objects don't have sexuality; only human beings do. But the charge that pornography portrays women as "sexual beings" would not inspire rage and, so, it has no place in the anti-porn rhetoric.”

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“To get upset by an image that focuses on the human body is merely to demonstrate a bad attitude toward what is physical. If I concentrated on a woman's sense of humor to the exclusion of her other characteristics, would this be degrading? Why is it degrading to focus on her sexuality? Underlying this attitude is the view that sex must be somehow ennobled to be proper.”

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“Pornography, it is said, presents false images about women. Pornography is a lie, because it presents women as large-breasted nymphomanics. If this accusation is true, the remedy is not to ban pornography, but to recruit a wider variety of women into the industry.”

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“But even generously granting the assumption that a correlation does exist between pornography and violence, what would such a correlation tell us? It would certainly not indicate a cause-and-effect relationship. It is a fallacy to assume that if A can be correlated with B, then A causes B. Such a correlation may indicate nothing more than that both are caused by another factor, C. For example, there is a high correlation between the number of doctors in a city and the number of alcoholics there. One doesn't cause the other; both statistics are proportional to the size of the city's population.”

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“Although anti-porn feminists cry out against viewing pornography, they must admit that there is at least one group of people who can survive such exposure without harm-namely, themselves. In their zeal, radical feminists view more pornography than the general population. Moreover, they dwell upon the small percentage of pornography that depicts violence. Either they are wonder women or they are human beings who have a normal response to brutal pornography: They are repelled by it.”

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“The right to choose hinges on the right to make a "wrong" choice. Freedom of religion entails the right to be an atheist. Freedom of speech involves the right to be silent. Freedom of choice requires the right to make bad choices-that is, a decision society considers to be wrong. After all, society is not going to stop a woman from doing what it wants her to do. But radical feminists are going one step farther than simply denying that women have the right to make wrong choices; they deny that women have the ability to choose.”

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“According to radical feminists, even if a woman in pornography signed a contract with full knowledge, she can sue on the grounds of coercion. What legal implications does this have for a woman's right to contract? What legal weight will future negotiators give to a woman's signature? Women's contracts will be legally unenforceable; their signature will become a legal triviality.”

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“The mere fact that some women are upset by the presence of pornography tells us very little. It tells us nothing about whether porn is right or wrong, valuable or useless. After all, feminism distresses a great many people. Yet feminists would argue that the movement should not only be tolerated, it should be nurtured. They consider women's rights to have a positive, rather than a negative effect on society-even if it causes distress. Perhaps the same is true of the graphic depiction of sex.”

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“Further, although pornography is predefined as a form of violence against women, several clauses of this definition have nothing to do with such abuse. Instead, they deal with explicit sexual content-e.g. women as sex objects who "invite penetration." This is more of an attack on heterosexual sex than it is on pornography. After all, if there isn't an "invitation to penetration," how can the man know that consent is present?”

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“One step toward defining anything is to determine what it is not. A popular approach to the word pornography is an appeal to its ancient Greek roots. This approach should be discarded. The word pornography originally meant "writing about harlots or prostitutes." But its meaning has evolved over centuries of use through dozens of different cultures. Like the Greek word gymnasium, which originally meant, "place of nakedness," the word pornography has lost its connection with the past.”

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“Historically, feminism and pornography have been fellow travelers on the rocky road of unorthodoxy. This partnership was natural, perhaps inevitable. After all, both feminism and pornography flout the conventional notion that sex is necessarily connected to marriage or procreation. Both view women as sexual beings who should pursue their sexuality for pleasure and self-fulfillment.”

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“In the wake of two other Contagious Disease Acts (1866, 1868), prostitution became virtually a state-run industry. The government issued cards to women who were medically checked our and "registered." Then, they were allowed to work the streets. With unlimited powers of arrest, plainclothes policemen picked up women at random. Often, the police proceeded on the basis of gossip or reports from people who had grudges. Women who refused to be surgically examined could be detained at the magistrate's discretion and imprisoned at hard labor.”

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“Freelovers vehemently denied the state had any right to intervene in the sexual arrangements of consenting adults. They focused on empowering the weakest and most abused partner in sex: the woman. There were two keys to securing sexual rights for women. The first was to reform the marriage laws, which gave husbands almost absolute authority over their wives. Marriage-free-lovers insisted-should be a voluntary and equal association between two people who shared a spiritual affinity.”

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“Sexual freedom-especially pornography, which is sexual free speech-is an integral part of the battle for women's freedom. The censoring of sexual words and images does not simply lead to the suppression of women's sexual rights. It is an attempt to control women themselves. For women's rights have traditionally been phrased in terms of their sexuality: marriage, abortion, and birth control. To surrender one iota of women's control over their own sexual expression is to deny that it is their sexuality in the first place.”

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“People in the industry kept telling me intimate and unsolicited details about their sex lives. I realized that pornography was as much an attitude or lifestyle as it was a business. The line between private and public was sometimes blurred to the point of being erased.”

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“Let's examine the second accusation first: the idea that pornography is degrading to women. Degrading is a subjective term. Personally, I find detergent commercials in which women become orgasmic over soapsuds to be tremendously degrading to women. I find movies in which prostitutes are treated like ignorant drug addicts to be slander against women. Every woman has the right-the need!-to define degradation for herself.”

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“For over a decade, I have defended the right of women to consume pornography and to be involved in its production. In 1984, when the Los Angeles City Council first debated whether or not to pass an anti-pornography ordinance, I was one of two people -and the only woman-who stood up and went on record against the measure. I argued that the right to work in pornography was a direct extension of the principle "A woman's body, a woman's right.”

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“Anti-pornography (or radical) feminists will consider me a heretic-fit only for burning. Or, to put it in more politically correct terms, I am a woman who is so psychologically damaged by patriarchy that I have fallen in love with my own oppression. My arguments will be dismissed. In other words, if I enjoy pornography, it is not because I am a unique human being with different preferences. It is because I am psychologically ill.”

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“In the social turbulence following the Civil War, thousands of men and women enlisted in a purity campaign. They sought to establish a single standard of sexual morality for both sexes. This was not a drive for greater freedom; it was a puritanical campaign to narrow the choices of individuals down to socially acceptable ones.”

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