Shifting Positions: Humanist Perspectives on Porn

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PRIOR TO THE sexual revolution of the 1960s, pornographic material was kept private amid a culture that labeled it too risque for the public eye. With the mass production of magazines like Playboy and Penthouse, porn's increasing visibility elicited outrage from the more conservative members of society. Twenty years later, pornography became a full-blown civil rights issue.

The 1980s gave rise to some of the most vitriolic critiques that had ever been aimed at the subject. While moral objections to pornography were nothing new, it was only starting in the '80s that many outraged feminists and humanists willingly teamed up with the religious right to oppose what both considered to be a truly sick and disturbing trend in adult entertainment.

Not surprisingly, the creation of this unlikely coalition put the allied humanists in a very awkward position. How could they, as strong proponents of social equality and sexual freedom, ever justify siding with the kinds of people who took their philosophy from an overtly misogynistic and homophobic text? It was a controversial move that provoked much debate within the humanist community.

For one, humanists were typically pornography's sympathizers and not its assailants. Unlike the members of the so-called moral majority, who objected to porn mainly because it showed people fornicating in a slew of "unacceptable" ways, humanists found nothing inherently obscene about the graphic depiction of sex. They certainly weren't appalled by the act …