Robert Brannon's article ("Torturing Women as Fine Art...") makes an impassioned case for boycotting the publisher of American Psycho. Brannon, like many others horrified by this book, advocates a boycott of all Knopf and Vintage titles, "except those few by feminist writers." Let me suggest some reasons why feminists should think twice about boycotting books.

The Goal is Censorship

A boycott is a powerful economic weapon whose purpose is to punish the target - in this case, for publishing a book - and to deter it and other booksellers from disseminating similar literature in the future. Therefore, the goal of boycotting a bookseller is to suppress, or censor, some literature, because of its offensive content, or its poor taste, or both.

Although censorship by private individuals or groups doesn't raise the same legal questions as government censorship (because the First Amendment only applies to "state action"), it does raise some of the same moral and political questions. Whether done by government or by private individuals, censorship has the same dangerous purpose: To shrink the expressive landscape. Here, the boycotters hope, through economic coercion, to persuade Knopf, and, by example, other publishers and booksellers, to impose an ideological litmus test on works that they consider for sale or publication.

What's wrong with suppressing literature as foul as American Psycho? One problem is that it will be the publishers, not the boycotters, who apply the litmus test. And because there are many other pressure groups in society that wish to impose very different ideological tests, the likely result will be that publishers and booksellers develop censorship apparatus with no clear standards except an inclination to avoid anything controversial. Thus, publishers are as likely to steer clear of homoerotic art or literature, works dealing with sexual abuse in a critical way, or feminist groundbreakers such as Our Bodies, Ourselves, as to censor only those works that the organizers of this boycott would consider unacceptable. Indeed, part of the problem with ideological tests is that creative works are amenable to such differing interpretations. Andrea Dworkin's Pornography, for example, is chock full of descriptions of sexually-charged violence and perhaps, for censors, difficult to distinguish from literature with similar subject matter but a different message. Likewise, Madonna's sometimes sadomasochistic imagery carries a heavy load of sexual and religious meanings. Brannon's article itself contains extensive quotations from the very work he wants to suppress. Who is to decide, in short, whether Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" is blasphemy or a cry of protest against the commercialization of religion; whether 2 Live Crew's lyrics are deeply misogynist or satirical exaggerations; or whether Huckleberry Finn is racist, a protest against racism, or just a great work setting forth the racial and cultural texture of its times? Lina Wertmuller's film Swept Away...and the Lois Gould novel A Sea Change are other examples of works with sexually violent content but certainly ambiguous themes.

History bears out the view that censorship ostensibly designed to protect women has often ended up perpetuating sexist stereotypes and depriving women of the freedom to choose what to read, see and think. Anti-obscenity laws in the United States were used repeatedly to silence Margaret Sanger and suppress the information and views she expressed about birth control.

The fundamental point is that no group should have a monopoly on orthodoxy or the power to decide what ideas are fit for public consumption. Humane, progressive people may be seduced into thinking that if such a power is acknowledged, it will be wielded wisely to shield the public from evil and dangerous ideas. That's not how it usually turns out.

The notion behind the First Amendment is that instead of suppressing noxious ideas, we should respond by contesting them; as Justice Louis Brandeis said, "The fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones." The battle for the hearts and minds of Americans on the issue of sexual violence, as on other urgent feminist issues, will not be won by driving images of rape and torture underground. Indeed, it is only by examining and understanding the images as well as the reality of sexual violence and torture - as Brannon does by quoting American Psycho at some length, as Dworkin does in Pornography, and, by analogy, as human rights activists have done in alerting the public to the graphic atrocities of torture worldwide - that we can even talk about the roots of violence and misogyny.

The terms of the boycott, as described by Brannon, dramatize the dilemmas created by ideological litmus tests.The boycotters are exempting "feminist" authors.

But who will decide whether an author meets this standard? Will there be a list of approved books? And if so, how can an excluded author make a case that he or she should be on it? Once you set yourself up as an arbiter of ideological correctness, you are no different in concept from the American Family Association, the Christian Coalition, or, indeed, the blacklisted of the 1950s who published lists of approved and disapproved authors and other artists.

The Argument About Causation

But, it is argued, works like American Psycho are different. They do not just depict or advocate horrible crimes, they cause them. Brannon cites "scientific research" to argue that there is (or at least may be) a causative link between images of sexually-charged violence and actual sex crimes. But when examined, the evidence he cites doesn't support the conclusion he tries to draw, as he himself acknowledges.

The studies by Professor Edward Donnerstein, and others that Brannon cites, show at best desensitization, that is, a change in attitude, by small samples of males who are shown sexually violent images in laboratory tests. Brannon omits the fact that the same tests showed the desensitization effect can be remedied by post-experiment "debriefing." Moreover, as Donnerstein has pointed out, it is not the sexuality but the violence that desensitizes, and he has publicly distanced himself from those who misuse his work to promote censorship of sexually explicit material. Donnerstein has written (in the December 1984 issue of Film Comment): "Censorship is not the solution [to the problem of sexual violence]. Education, however, is a viable alternative."

Finally, even accepting laboratory findings of a link between desensitized attitudes and prolonged exposure to violent material, there is a long distance between attitude and crime, between fantasies of violence and actual violence. Violent imagery saturates modern society, yet most people do not commit violent crimes, including sex crimes. Many personal and cultural factors contribute to violence against women, as experts have observed. In Japan, for example, pornography is more violent, and violent pornography is more widely available, than in the United States, yet the incidence of rape and other violent crime is lower. Societal factors probably account for the difference. In short, despite the noisy pronouncements and prefabricated conclusions of the Meese Commission in 1986, no causative relationship between pornography and actual violence has been proven. What studies have shown is that when countries stop suppressing sexually-oriented literature, as in Scandinavia, the rate of sex crimes goes down. And so, eventually does consumption: People become glutted, and ultimately bored, with treatments of sex that are repetitive, grotesque, or unimaginative. By contrast, societies that repress pornography often have a high incidence of violence and discrimination against women.

We should be careful about loose arguments for banning antisocial literature on the theory that it causes crime. In the 1910s and '20s, people went to jail for opposing U.S. entry into World War I or advocating revolutionary social change; the Supreme Court permitted it on the theory that such speech was dangerous and might cause violence or other crimes like draft resistance. In the 1950s, people were sent to jail for advocating communism; the Court linked advocacy and action without requiring proof of direct incitement to crime.

The Supreme Court has since rejected those cases, and our society is freer because of it. Under current First Amendment doctrine, expression cannot be punished or suppressed unless it is proven to incite imminent harm. Without a requirement of such direct causation, Americans could quickly lose their freedom to think, hear, create and receive information. For any provocative or controversial literature can be viewed as giving people bad ideas and creating dangerous attitudes.

Brannon rightly points out that the publishing industry is commercially motivated. Because selling books is a relatively precarious trade, publishers and booksellers are highly vulnerable to pressures from both governmental and private groups. Witness the shocking acquiescence of Waldenbooks a few years ago in removing The Satanic Verses from its stores after Islamic fundamentalists pronounced a death sentence on Salman Rushdie. Record and video store chains have also caved in to pressures to remove material with sexual themes.

We depend on publishers and booksellers to get our messages across. Forcing them into self-censorship won't help.

Marjorie Heins is director of The ACLU's Arts Censorship Project.

Also See: Torturing Women as Fine Art: Why Some Women and Men are Boycotting Knopf by Robert Brannon in this issue of OTI.