Susan Brownmiller is an author and a strongly opinionated feminist. She is the founder of Women Against Pornography and author of the book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975) and several other books and essays. In Let's Put Pornography Back in the Closet, Susan is contending the extent of rights bestowed by the First Amendment of the Constitutional Bill of Rights of the United States about what she terms as obscene sexual exploitation, dehumanizing and degrading of women through pornographic productions. While she feels the First Amendment has delivered a fairly enormous success in freedom of speech and expression, particularly in the minority unpopular ideas and dissenting political voices, she has a problem with the extent of application of this law in the production of sexual literature, particularly the commercialized pornographic sector. However, in the wake of vibrant civil societies and democracy and personal freedom deeply enshrined in the constitution, Susan fails to provide a 'safe' way of controlling pornography without appearing as reducing the democratic space currently being enjoyed by the citizens and guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Susan provides a background of the 1950s which are days before the First Amendment and the 1960s after the Amendment. Indeed, she notes the major success of this constitutional milestone in safeguarding the voices of the minority in the United States. She acknowledges the Hollywood Ten, who went to jail for refusing to testify about their political affiliation before a congressional committee. The fact that today we have vibrant civil societies, more political parties with different political ideas and more libertarians is a great indicator of how far we have grown in fundamental democratic space. However, while the political class and the press have been liberated, the application of the law has been inappropriately used to 'liberate' commercialization of extreme sexual material.
