Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights.

Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women's Rights, by Nadine Strossen (Scribner's, 320 pp., $22)

SEXUAL liberals live in a special universe all their own. Take Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union and self-proclaimed defender of pornography, a/k/a "sexual expression." In Nadine Strossen's America, a conspiracy of right- wing fundamentalists and anti-porn feminists poses "an unprecedented danger to sexual expression"; Nadine Strossen's America is in the middle of "a full-fledged sex panic" in which artists, intellectuals, and women "are increasingly deterred" from fully exploring their own and other people's sexuality in words, pictures, and perhaps even deeds. In Nadine Strossen's America any attempt to exercise taste, prudence, or (ACLU forbid!) moral judgment in sexual matters is frightening evidence of the omnipresent sex "repression" that First Amendment fighters like her are only just holding at bay.

In the course of this overwrought portrait, Miss Strossen makes some just and penetrating observations about the absurdity of the current sexual-harassment and date-rape panic, especially on college campuses. In 1993, for example, the University of New Hampshire suspended English professor Donald Silva, and required him to undergo psychological counseling at his own expense, after female students complained that in lectures he employed such off- color metaphors as, "Belly dancing is like Jell-O on a plate, with a vibrator under the plate." The Chicago Theological Seminary disciplined professor Graydon Snyder for using an anecdote from the Talmud about a man who falls on top of a woman and accidentaly sexually violates her. Elsewhere, such as at the University of Minnesota, official definitions of sexual harassment may include such a vaguely outlined ideological crime as "callous insensitivity to the experience of women."

Miss Strossen's argument would be a lot stronger if she had a more stringent definition of censorship. In her mind, if a school library decides not to stock books by Judy Blume, that's censorship. If a shopping mall in Illinois decides to remove a bust of the Venus de Milo, that's equally frightening evidence of a dangerous lack of regard for sexual expression. If public officials fail to fund, or remove from government walls, art the taxpayers find ugly or offensive, that's the end of sexual liberty as we know it. Everything from city officials' objection to an AIDS clinic's window display of a naked man wearing a condom to Middle American mall managers' refusing to be the proper custodians of high culture is to her a terrifying symbol of the resurgence of strict taboos.

This book would be stronger, too, if Miss Strossen showed more awareness that the "pornophobic feminists," as she labels Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and their followers, have latched onto a piece of truth: sex has a dark side. Many women responded to Anita Hill's accusations, not on the merits of the case, but viscerally, with a deep personal aversion springing from their own experiences of sexual vulnerability. Miss Strossen, like other (what shall we call them?) pornophilic feminists, seems by contrast to believe that sexual expression is a good in itself -- invariably a liberating, wholesome exchange of pleasure. Sex is so inherently harmless, we ought not to get so hot and bothered about the subject. The irony of course is that it is precisely to the desire to take a walk on the dark side that pornography owes its durable appeal. If sex were really as insipid as the sexual liberals try to tell us it is, there would be no accounting for its continuing popularity.

Prudence, as well as a decent respect for the indecent desires of mankind, compels us to accept that the fight against pornography was lost long ago -- when Adam fell, and the printing press was invented. The goal in regulating pornography ought to be more modest: to find ways to prevent private vice from becoming the prevailing public standard of virtue.

Here, too, we fight a losing battle. For, as Miss Strossen points out, conservatives now routinely make the case against pornography (or for its toleration) not in our own language, but in strange new feminist tongues -- outraged no longer on behalf of sexual virtue but only in defense of gender equality. It is a sign of how much ground we have lost, how little respect sex codes that originate in the Ten Commandments, as opposed to The Second Sex, are granted by the respectable women on either side of the current sex wars.