Censorship: it's bad, because it can happen to men

 
Having recently written about what qualifies as free speech and who we generally take to have a right to it, I was grimly amused to read Nick Cohen's Standpoint piece on censorship in the Left.

It's not so much that I disagree with the main thrust of Cohen's argument: I signed the original letter to the Observer expressing concerns about the creep of no-platforming on British university campuses, which I do think is both a symptom of a worrying conservatism among young people too buffeted by (often unacknowledged) worry about the future to be able to meet opposing, confusing or upsetting information head-on, and a cause of further narrowing and blunting of public debate. No, it's more the fact that in setting out a narrative for the self-destructive descent into Orwellianism, Cohen chose to place its beginnings at the door of Katharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.

It was only thank to the United States' superior legal protection against censorship, Cohen writes, that

The US Supreme Court duly struck down an ordinance MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin drafted for Indianapolis City Council in 1984 which would have allowed women who could say they were harmed by pornography to sue.

The proposed ordinance, Cohen claims, was but a censorship tactic seized upon by disgruntled feminists, frustrated by their inability to prove that pornography was harmful to either its consumers, its performers, or the public at large. Legally allowing women to openly test in court their contention that they had been harmed by pornography is censorship. Going all the way to the SCOTUS to prevent them having their day in court is protecting free speech.

This seems both very silly and very telling. Cohen, neither a misogynist nor, ordinarily, a stupid man (only one guilty of what all men are guilty of: thinking he understands women's issues based on no research, because hey, it's girl stuff, how hard can it be?), here falls neatly for two of the dumbest and most pervasive conservative tropes of the backlash age:

1. Feminists are themselves to blame for the social ills they now complain of, from the second shift to rape to, in this case the silencing of feminist voices: had we only not meddled with traditional values, men would be more respectful, women would have to work less hard, and reactionary tendencies in society would not be expressing themselves through surveillance and censorship. You made your bed, ladies, don't cry over unintended consequences

2. When women fight for their human rights, they necessarily and by design deprive men of theirs, in a zero sum game (after which this blog is named) that positions every gain for women as a direct attack on men. More women in the workplace are at fault for fewer men being able to earn a decent wage (the collapse of the unions had nothing to d with it apparently). Better justice for victims of male partner violence is really an attack on Fathers' Rights. And, in this case, a right for women to bring civil suit for damages done to them is an attack on the freedom of speech of the men who create and consume the majority of pornographic material. Hands off our Hustler, girls, what is this, North Korea?

To be anti pornography is not to be, by necessity, pro censorship. I should know, because that happens to be the position I hold. I don't want Page 3 to be banned: I want to expose its irrelevance and misogyny, as the NMP3 campaign repeated ad nauseam. But of course nobody listened - it was always "they want to ban P3", never "they want the Sun to reconsider it". Because the idea that feminists are fun-sucking, humourless, totalitarian granola munchers is so ingrained, even respected columnists who remember to mention Mary Waterhouse later in the piece feel like a coherent narrative of suppression must, somehow, start with them.