DIAN HANSON IS sorting through dozens of porn magazines. In one pile are Jaybird nudist publications from the late 1960s, featuring what she calls "crotch liberation" fantasies of happy, unshaven hippie kids. Filed in a different category are the British magazines, which "are so tidy and sensible - they have names like Practical Photography."

Hanson, a career pornographer who has run popular adult magazines like Leg Show and Juggs, is working on several pictorial histories of men's magazines for art publisher Taschen. She's been on the editorial staff of various porn mags since 1976, and although she's joined the art world now, she says proudly, "I still consider myself a pornographer."

Although Hanson estimates that close to 10 percent of adult magazines are run by women, public perception lags behind the facts. Most people assume women avoid pornography. Playboy's CEO may be Christie Hefner, and the wildly popular adult Web site Danni's Hard Drive may be woman-owned, but the conventional wisdom is that naked pictures exist only in man's domain. Women are supposed to be deeply disturbed by porn - that's why companies marketing "adulteryware" on the Internet aim their e-mail ads at women, who will supposedly want to catch their male companions in the "naughty" act of downloading a little tits and ass.

There's a reason for this. In the 1980s and '90s, antiporn feminist crusaders Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon sparked intense debate among feminists and progressives by forming a coalition with the religious right to stamp out pornography, based on the idea that it violated women's civil rights. They never managed to push through a piece of federal legislation called the Pornography Victims Compensation Act that would have denied porn First Amendment protection as free speech. Although Dworkin-MacKinnon ordinances in more than a dozen states were struck down - largely owing to feminists who organized against them - they nevertheless left a mark on U.S. pop culture, as well as the municipal laws of several cities, including Indianapolis. These days women, and feminists especially, are still being treated as if pornography should threaten and disgust them.

Yet the truth is, women are generally in the vanguard when it comes to fighting sexual censorship. The civil rights lawyers, activists, sex workers, media pundits, and professors who fight for your right to have dirty pictures are by and large female. Many call themselves feminists.

And the people fighting to stamp out pornography today are most decidedly male.

Attorney General John Ashcroft; his sympathizers in Congress, such as Mark Foley and Orrin Hatch; and powerful male-dominated lobbying groups like the Family Research Council and the American Family Association are on the warpath to eliminate "obscene materials" on the Internet. They're doing it using an argument conservative pundit George Gilder would undoubtedly deem feminine in the extreme: these antiporn boys say they want to protect the children.

Legislation such as the Child Pornography Prevention Act (the so-called morphing law recently ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court) and the Child Online Protection Act (the American Civil Liberties Union has challenged COPA's constitutionality, and a ruling is expected from the Supreme Court any day now) is aimed at censoring adult free speech to protect children and teens. Ann Beeson, the ACLU's chief counsel in the COPA case, told us that although "the rationale is to protect children, every single law [like COPA] we've seen considered is to censor adults' access to speech. I think [conservative groups] are trying to legislate morality through these laws."

The conservative "morality" that inspires COPA is just one reason feminists are combating legislation that could ultimately cripple the First Amendment. They are also fighting for a basic civil liberty that women gained only a few decades ago and that teens are rapidly losing: the right to speak freely about your sexuality without fear of social, political, or legal reprisals.

Female pornographers (not porn stars) are featured regularly on AVN Online's covers, and a recent cover was devoted to queer adult Web sites. While women may be underrepresented in the tech industry, they make up more than half the people surfing online. And as adult e-commerce leader Xandria.com has proved, women are consuming more sex-related retail items than ever before.

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the Internet has helped empower women sexually by providing them with a way to gain easy access to sexual information and education - in a form that's safe and private. Therefore it seems natural that the energies feminists once put into fighting Dworkinite antiporn lobbies will now go toward fighting censorship online - whatever form that censorship takes. Indeed, it would seem that civil liberties online are quickly becoming a cause célèbre for feminists, even if they aren't a feminist issue per se.

ACLU counsel Ann Beeson speculates that future legal battles around obscenity in cyberspace might turn into right-wing appropriations of classic feminist issues like sexual harassment. "We're seeing people dredge up old laws about harassment and public nuisance to justify mandatory [Web] filtering in public places," she says. Conservatives might argue that it constitutes "harassment" if people are able to find pornography on the Internet using a computer terminal in public libraries or at work. But, Beeson states firmly, "we're going to prevent the expansion of indecency law."

There's no doubt that the future of obscenity law is bound up with the Internet. New legislation and regulations will determine what can be posted online, as well as who can view it and where. As we wait to find out how the Supreme Court will rule on COPA, dozens of similar cases are waiting to erupt all over the country. In March, for example, the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed a law that requires Internet service providers to monitor the Internet-usage activities of all their customers to stop child pornography. Because such monitoring is astronomically expensive, most ISPs will simply resort to filtering content using the same kinds of censorware that are at issue in COPA. This sort of law is an invitation both to invade citizens' privacy and to censor their Web surfing.

Many cyberlaws that will lead to censorship - like the one in Pennsylvania - are based on protecting children. "Perhaps they don't feel comfortable censoring adults. That's the positive spin," Beeson muses. "But that's also the negative. They're still legislating morality with these laws." And obscenity is only one issue among many that confront cyber-liberties feminists of the 21st century. Other First Amendment activists, like Cohn of the EFF, are concerned about the chilling effects on free speech caused by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act - which limits fair use and criminalizes copyright violations. Still others, like Sarah Andrews, research director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, focus on protecting people's privacy online.

The feminist-led battle for freedom of expression on the Internet is part of an ongoing crusade, according to Strossen. "[Internet censorship] was part of the agenda under Clinton and Reno, too," she says. "Democrats and Republicans both gang up on free speech. Clinton signed all three federal pro-censorship laws. All that's happened recently is that the caption on the case changed: now it's ACLU v. Ashcroft instead of ACLU v. Reno." As future cyber-censorship laws are written, the caption will no doubt change again. But one thing is for certain: feminists will continue to be powerful players and activists in the battle for free speech online.

As Hanson argues, "real feminism isn't about worrying whether porn is for you. It's feeling free to make your own choices. We don't have to be protected. We can go out into the world and deal with what's there."

E-mail Annalee Newitz at annalee@techsploitation.com.

excerpted from an excellent, much longer article
(highly recommended - Betty)
"Obscene feminists"
Why women are leading the battle against censorship.
By Annalee Newitz
from ©Guardian Online sfbg.com May 8, 2002