Rethinking Democracy: Legal Challenges against Pornography and Sex Inequality in Canada, Sweden, and the United States.

The paper rethinks democracy in light of evidence and analysis showing pornography to be a harmful practice of sex inequality. The question is what is in the way for democracies to address these harms and deliver equality. Empirical conditions as well as political-, legal-, and feminist theory - including implications from new developments in international human rights law -are drawn upon to address the problem. Most prior political or legal research has criticized, defended, or proposed alterations to existing laws. By contrast, the civil rights approach created by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon in 1983 - an early inspiration to feminist democratic theory - is the most original work so far. This paper contributes to cumulative research by comparatively analyzing political responses to legal challenges in three countries where subordination based on gender - not moral notions such as "obscenity" - has been the driving rationale for change. The cases for comparison are Canada, focusing on the 1989 Butler decision and its aftermath, Sweden, focusing on the Swedish 1998 Act Against Purchase of Sexual Services, and the United States, focusing on state- and federal responses to the anti-pornography civil rights legislation. This material represents similar consumption and distribution of similar pornography materials across a broad range of legal frameworks and approaches.Preliminary results show that even modified obscenity laws recognizing inequality and harm are ineffective, since they rely on "community standards" and exhaustive criminal requisites that won't empower those victimized. Similarly, strong democratic ideals such as deliberative consensus-making, or "democratic elitism" where certain freedoms are protected against mass-politics, cannot account for victimized social groups not adequately represented. Furthermore, criminal laws against purchasers of sexual service, while reducing the demand, do not empower prostituted women. In all cases institutional structures representing victimized women and providing empowering remedies are desperately needed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]