“How can we stop rape and woman-battering by staffing rape-crisis centers and refuges when there are thousands of movie houses, millions of publications, a multibillion-dollar business that promote the idea that violence and the rape of women is sexually exciting to men, and that we like it too?”
- Diana E.H. Russell, giving the concluding speech at the Feminist Perspectives on Pornography conference in 1978, published in “Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography”
Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography is a compilation of essays and interviews edited by Laura Lederer and released in 1980. 28 years later, it’s as valuable and relevant a read as the day it was released. When I first read it in the late 80’s, I was amazed at how many strong pieces were in the book. The essays were as readable as they were revolutionary, thorough and researched without being boringly academic. Two pieces in particular, “Playboy isn’t Playing: An Interview with Judith Bat-Ada” and Helen E. Longino’s “Pornography, Oppression and Freedom”, have stuck with me to this day and are central to my understanding of pornography’s place within American rapist culture.
Anyone looking to understand why pornography is so bad for women (and everyone else too) should read this book a.s.a.p. It addresses all of the popular questions and criticisms leveled at the feminist anti-porn movement, so if you have any questions, suspicions or doubts, get them addressed here! These would include the caricature of feminists as “anti-sex” or “repressed” or “puritanical” in their condemnation of porn. As the various writers make clear, the complaint is not against sexuality but of the eroticizing of male power and female degradation, of the reduction of women to sexual objects, and of the sexualization of violence and children.
The book’s title? Many people have heard of Take Back the Night marches and vigils, and the book notes how that slogan was first used in the U.S. for a protest march down San Francisco’s pornography strip.
From Lederer’s introduction to the book:
“The title of this book, Take Back the Night, refects this growing realization of the links among crimes against women. The pollution of our media with sexist articles, programming and advertisements, and the increasing amounts of pornography readily available, are hardly questioned. Rapes, muggings and sexual harassment of women at all times, but especially at night, are the norm. That we have been unable to walk the streets after dark without a male to protect us from all the rest of the men has been assumed in this society for so long that people can hardly imagine a culture in which this would not be the case.” (Lederer, 19)
Next up: some quotes from the book to hold you over until the copy you’re about to order arrives!
