[Greta Christina] Offended
Does a society have the right to protect itself from being offended?
The other day, we were watching “Dirty Pictures,” a made- for- TV movie made in 2000 about the Robert Mapplethorpe censorship case in Cincinnati. For those who might be too young to remember: Robert Mapplethorpe was a gay photographer whose work included a certain amount of sexually explicit imagery, including some depictions of fairly extreme sexual practices. In 1990 there was a big kerfuffle when the director of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, Dennis Barrie (played in the movie by James Woods), was tried on obscenity charges for displaying the Mapplethorpe photos in his museum.
The movie is good — overwrought in places, but overall thoughtful and interesting, and good at giving the events a human face. And the format is unusual: the basic form is a docu-drama, but it’s interspersed with commentary from real people, from Salman Rushdie to William F. Buckley, talking about the controversy and the issues it raised.
It’s William F. Buckley I want to talk about today.
Buckley was speaking in defense of the prosecutors of the case. He said that a society has the right to decide what it’s offended by . . . and to protect itself from that which offends it. And at one point he said — I’m going to have to paraphrase here, since I erased the Tivo before I realized I wanted to write about it — that a society can look at sadomasochistic imagery, and at the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and say, “We don’t want this.”
And I was so offended by this statement, it took my breath away.
I don’t mean mock offended. •I don’t mean “offended as a useful rhetorical device” offended. I was genuinely, seriously, viscerally offended. I wanted to reach into the television and smack him across his smug little rat face. I sat there, shocked, thinking, “Did he just go on national television and equate consensual sadomasochism with Nazi Germany?”
How dare he.
How fucking dare he.
It is, in my opinion, grossly outrageous to equate a sex act between consenting adults that gives them both pleasure with the deliberate genocide of millions. It’s not just offensive to sadomasochists. It’s offensive to people who went through the Holocaust. It dehumanizes the one, and trivializes the other. It was one of the most offensive things I’d heard all month.
And yet at no point in my outrage did I think, “There oughta be a law. He shouldn’t be allowed to do that. There oughta be a law against equating sadomasochism and the Holocaust.”
Why not?
I’m trying to think of a nice way to say, “Because I’m better than him.” I’m failing. Because I’m better than him.
What Buckley failed to realize is that the First Amendment that protects our right to offend one another works for everybody. Him, me, everybody. What he failed to realize is that, if Cincinnati can pass a law saying that an image of a man peeing in another man’s mouth is offensive and can therefore be banned, then San Francisco can pass a law saying that equating sadomasochism with the Holocaust is offensive and can therefore be banned.
I would never try to do that. I refer you once again to the “I’m better than him” principle. But there are some folks on the left who don’t quite grasp the “We can’t ban speech just because we don’t like it” concept. (As I learned when I defended Fred Phelps’ First Amendment right to express his evil, hateful, repulsive opinions . . . and ran into a bunch of progressives who were all too eager to find loopholes in the First Amendment just so we could nail the bastard.) If we don’t protect speech that offends in Cincinnati, we can’t protect speech that offends in San Francisco.
What Buckley failed to realize is something blindingly obvious, something many, many people have said before me: We don’t need the First Amendment to protect the radical assertion that puppies are cute and apple pie is delicious. We don’t need the First Amendment to protect popular speech. We need the First Amendment to protect unpopular speech. We need to need the First Amendment to protect Nazis marching in Skokie, and war protesters wearing black armbands to school in Des Moines; to protect Fred Phelps when he pickets funerals, and lefty radicals when they burn the American flag. We need the First Amendment to protect Robert Mapplethorpe in Cincinnati . . . and we need it to protect William F. Buckley in San Francisco.
In other words: We need the First Amendment to protect speech that offends people.
That’s the whole freakin’ point.
Now, many people at this point are going to argue — Buckley himself would probably argue if he were still alive — “Yes . . . but sex is different. When it comes to sexual expression, we have community standards for what’s acceptable. That’s what was at stake here — a community’s right to define what obscenity is for themselves. Not about politics or religion or art. Just about sex. Because sex is different.”
But I have yet to see any good argument for why sex should be different.
Sex is often seen as different. Sex is often the great exception: to free speech laws, to free enterprise laws, to notions about good manners, to notions of ethics and morality.
But I have yet to see any good argument for why that should be.
And that’s next week’s piece.
This entry was posted on Friday, 16 January 2009 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Saturday, 17 January 2009 at 8:54 pm Laura wrote:
Thank you for this! I am so often flabbergasted when I hear people saying that of course they support freedom of speech–it’s just that nobody should be allowed to say that.
In the same way, for many conservatives, the ACLU is the devil because it supports the rights of people to do horribly offensive things. But as you say, if we don’t protect the rights of people to be offensive, then what are our civil liberties for? There’s very little you can say that won’t offend somebody, after all, and if we ever reach the point where offensive becomes the same as illegal, then free speech is history.
on Saturday, 17 January 2009 at 9:49 pm Mark wrote:
I entirely agree.
I also don’t understand the stigma of *imagery* specifically. I mean, when comparing to the holocaust - even though people are rightly offended by the holocaust, few would say that therefore images of the holocaust should be banned. And he does not seem to have a problem with holocaust imagery - he compares them to the concentration camps themselves.
Sadly here in the UK, the prudes have succeeded in banning sadomasochist imagery - some of it at least, along with other so-called extreme images, will be illegal to possess from a week on Monday.
on Sunday, 18 January 2009 at 7:14 am Jon Berger wrote:
Hey, not just conservatives. My mom was your basic red-diaper baby knee-jerk liberal type, and she regularly sent money to the ACLU every time they sent a little card around asking for it — until the Skokie Nazi rally thing, at which point she never sent them one more dime. A lot of people have a “yes, but they can’t say THAT” line, and for a lot of Jews that came of age in the World War II era, that line is Nazis. I say good for ACLU for being consistent, and I said that to my mom once when the Skokie thing was happening (late 70’s), and she could hardly bring herself to speak to me for weeks.
on Sunday, 18 January 2009 at 12:12 pm Kagehi wrote:
Kind of two minds about this. On one hand, anyone should be able to say what ever they want. On the other, some people take this to mean that they can lie, cheat, generate hate, create organizations dedicated to fucking up everyone else’s lives, etc., and worse, if they call it religion, nothing short of hosting the mass murder of the local maternity ward will get them arrested, even **when** they advocate that members stop talking and actually directly hurt someone else.
Lines do have to exist, hence the, “fire in a crowded theater”, principle. The problem is, people like Buckley think that the line needs to be drawn at, “What makes me feel uncomfortable, or offends my personal prejudices, or which I ***imagine*** is harmful.” Some recognized, even while vehemently disagreeing, that this isn’t sufficient, which is of course why they turn to lying, by having think tanks stage and or make up, studies on the “dangers” of what ever offends them. Oddly, they can never seem to comprehend that it takes more than one study, the studies need to agree with each other, you need to avoid unknowns for them to be valid, and they have to be done by, and the results agreed on, by “both” sides of the political spectrum, not just a lot of the same conservative think tanks. So, they ***still*** don’t get it, even when they try to play what they imagine is some sort of “legitimacy” game, to promote their prejudices.
Annoys the hell out of me. We have far more important things to deal with than the idiot stuff they keep harping about. Except, to them, all those other things “somehow” magically arise from not paying enough attention to when someone has their pants down, or something… Argh!!
on Monday, 19 January 2009 at 7:36 am David Harmon wrote:
Amen!
Kagehl: Sorry to nitpick, but this is one of my bugaboos: The exception you wanted to reference in your second paragraph is for “falsely shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater”! The difference is important, because the corruption of the phrase has been used to silence whistle-blowers and other alerts of real danger, such as with global warming.
Also, direct threats, or even incitement to violence, have (AFAIK) never been protected under the First Amendment. (Corrupt judges are another story….) The Klan and such make it their business to know exactly how far they can take it in public, thus all the “dog-whistle” codewords.
on Monday, 19 January 2009 at 10:44 am Eshu wrote:
Great article Greta!
When offence is really in the eye of the beholder, allowing people to veto something because of your personal distaste is like a blank cheque against free speech.
on Tuesday, 20 January 2009 at 3:33 pm d wrote:
Beyond how offensive and stupid his statement is (if not coldly anti-semitic), it just isn’t logical. If he really thinks that sadomasochism is the same as the Shoah, then photos documenting sadomasochism would be the same as photos documenting the Shoah. Surely he doesn’t want to ban documentaries and books about the Shoah? So by his logic, books and films documenting sadomasochism should be protected.
on Thursday, 22 January 2009 at 4:32 pm Tinker wrote:
As you say, offensive speech is the ONLY thing that needs first amendment protection. Things that do not offend, that we all agree are good and true and fuzzy, DO NOT NEED protection. It is precisely those things that excite controversy, that ’should not be expressed in public’, that need protection.
Just as full-auto full-power weapons are most perfect for the purposes of the second amendment! It’s not about duck hunting, its all about people have arms that are useful in a war AGAINST THEIR OWN GOVERNMENT. Surprise! Get used to it.