But violence and dominance are everywhere in literature. To single out erotic violence for censure smacks dramatically of the very same anti-sexual protectionism from which we are barely recovering. The politics of patriarchy, then as now, assigned sexuality to men and its repudiation to women. To wit, the media is not the message, and no message is safe when the media is itself imperiled. But limitation, under government sanction, of printed or spoken materials is by definition censorship.
Silence Is Death Unlike art, silence does indeed kill - and often.
In such a context, to focus on dominance-erotica is to tilt at windmills, giving false suggestion of addressing gender imbalance, while at the same time endangering the primary means, i.e. free expression, through which any civil liberties have ever been attained. Yet, for 2,000-odd years preceding this country's Constitution, slavery and misogyny, integral aspects of the dominate religions, were organizing principles of the entire planet. The Constitution was considered a gateway to this rubric's undoing. But the media is not the message and the pedestal is still the pits, so let's stop endangering the media, our message's only vehicle, and let us eschew government-sanctioned criminal and civil speech restrictions so that the powerful metaphysical and political weapon of thought in speech may continue the upward evolution of this planet. Let us focus legislation on behavior, not words.