SOURCE: Dworkin, Ronald. “Women and Pornography.” New York Review of Books 40, no. 17 (21 October 1993): 36, 38, 40-2.

In the following review, Dworkin outlines MacKinnon's arguments against pornography in Only Words, speculating on how her opinions affect national and state governments and the issue of censorship.

1.

People once defended free speech to protect the rights of firebrands attacking government, or dissenters resisting an established church, or radicals campaigning for unpopular political causes. Free speech was plainly worth fighting for, and it still is in many parts of the world where these rights hardly exist. But in America now, free-speech partisans find themselves defending mainly racists shouting “nigger” or Nazis carrying swastikas or—most often—men looking at pictures of naked women with their legs spread open.

Conservatives have fought to outlaw pornography in the United States for a long time: for decades the Supreme Court has tried, though without much success, to...