Jack Kammer, NCFM member since 1983 is the author of Good Will Toward Men, (St. Martin's Press, 1994).

Those who would censor and suppress pornography tell us that it glorifies and therefore exacerbates men's sexual domination of women. What it does, in fact, is precisely the opposite. It expresses male rage at women's sexual domination of men.

I have in mind a particular movie which no one would think to call pornographic even though it gleefully celebrates the subjugation of a member of one sex by members of the other. I'm thinking of the exploits of Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in _9 to 5_ as they employ a dog collar and chain to subdue their chauvinist boss, artfully played by Dabney Coleman.

If I were to believe and insist that _9 to 5_ is a product and manifestation of women's domination of men in the world of business, I would be quite ludicrously misguided. It is only because women do not dominate in business that the movie found such popularity with women who wished that they did. The movie is a fantasy. In fact, it is a series of three sub-fantasies feeding into the central one. Dolly Parton dreams of lassoing and hog-tying her boss like a rodeo animal, Jane Fonda shows us how she would like to hunt him down and mount his head as a trophy from a safari, and Lily Tomlin has great fun relating her "gruesome, horrible, real gory but kind of cute" fairy tale in which Bambi and Thumper laugh at seeing the boss poisoned and catapulted from his chair through the window of his high-rise office.

The movie, despite its glorification of violence and subjugation, cannot rightly be criticized as an aberration of sick female minds. Any attempt to censor the movie could only be supported by those who fail to see that it vividly expresses an injustice perpetrated upon women. Or by those who seek to keep the injustice in place and intact.

Fantasy expresses wishes, not facts. _9 to 5_ is fantasy about come-uppance. So is pornography. _9 to 5_ is about business because women feel exploited in business. Pornography is about sex because that's an arena in which men feel they are often treated unfairly.

Pornography, if we can be open enough to hear it, is telling us about a difficult problem whose solution will require sincere cooperation between men and women. Censoring pornography is nothing more than killing the messenger for conveying a truth we'd rather not hear.

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