The 'chilling effect': define it in law

August 14, 1991
Issue 

By Jocelyne Scutt

A woman who wishes to argue that a film made of herself "participating" in particular acts is sex-discriminatory would be entitled to bring an action for damages against the maker, distributor or exhibitor of the movie.

A woman who considers she has been raped as a consequence of particular depiction of women in a film could bring an action against the maker, distributor or exhibitor of the movie.

A woman who has been forced by some other person to look at this material could similarly bring an action. Any woman, on behalf of all women, could bring an action on the ground that the particular film (or other depiction) is sex discriminatory.

Rather than this approach being "censorship", which is suggested by so-called civil liberties organisations — who apparently believe civility and liberty ought to extend only to men — it is crucially based on the notion of giving those who have no freedom of speech precisely that.

Although courts are not often "woman friendly", they nonetheless provide a forum wherein two sides can be argued out, with some in-built possibility of the sides being evenly balanced. Certainly, pornographers would be in a position to employ costly legal representation; it is less likely that a woman or women could do so.

Nonetheless, legal expertise and ability are not the sole domain of the QC. The argument would also be better balanced than it is at present, where the only "speech" of women who are exploited in pornographic movies is the false lines they are obliged to speak in the course of making films, or interviews set up to project the notion that women enjoy being exploited — and even raped, bruised and abused — in these videos.

When feminists speak out against pornography, we are not concerned about patriarchal notions of obscenity, which are found in ideas of what some ("us"; the judges; the rich; the powerful) should be allowed to see, and some ("them"; the poor; the socially and intellectually inferior; the general populace) ought not.

Rather, feminists are concerned about the right of women to be human and not to be thrust into some subhuman category.

American Psycho and its ilk, whether by words or through pictures, create or exacerbate conditions in the world where women are forced into a state of fear. To present women being attacked, defiled and murdered as if it is "all in a day's work"

creates a "chilling effect": women are presented with possibilities that have to be considered to be real in any woman's life. Even if one man is tempted or provoked by a book, a film, a video into responding so gruesomely to the existence of women, every woman is at risk.

Pornography is violence against women, in and of itself.

Now, what people will say is that the right wing could use this [proposal] too, and of course they could. Of course we don't want Our Bodies Ourselves [a women's health handbook containing explicit pictures] to be subject to this process.

But it's true, someone could take the book, if it were made into a film, to the board and say it's discriminatory against women. But the point is that there would be a huge debate then within the board as to whether it is or whether it isn't. At least we would have an airing of what we believe is and isn't discrimination against women.

This would be a mechanism by which women ourselves could bring the action, women ourselves could have control over how we projected the case, which film it was that we were complaining about, the terms in which we were complaining about it, and so forth.

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