Andrea Dworkin Didn’t Care

When the public-relations firm Gray & Co. was hired by a publishers’ industry group to develop a strategy to defeat the anti-pornography ordinances being proposed across the country in the early 1980s, one of the two pillars of its strategy was to create the impression that the campaign “is being orchestrated by a group of religious extremists.” (The other was to deny any “factual or scientific basis” for a connection between porn and crime.) The association of the anti-pornography cause with Christian fundamentalism was considered one of its primary vulnerabilities—correctly, as it proved. All of the proposed ordinances were eventually defeated.