SLOW LOVE

摘要

This is is a commemorative comment whose title is hard to live up to, but if I start now I may get there in future iterations. It is less new than a constellation of notes on Barnard's legacy. Some may find it a little domesticating; not my intent, but not a grim outcome. I first encountered the Barnard Conference as an event that had already happened. I could have been there (I am certainly not too young), but I wasn't. What brought me to it shortly afterward was a sample viewing of a Women Against Pornography (WAP) slide show at the law school of the University of Pennsylvania. The format was Free Speech vs. Pornography, free speech represented by a distinguished constitutional lawyer and law professor, pornography and its harms represented by a WAP trainee who was also a sister graduate student at the Annenberg School. It was uneven turf and I admired my colleague's courage; indeed I remember being surprised by her confidence that whatever might be argued for free speech, the "reality" apart from the "legal argument" about pornography was that it was an unmitigated source of harm to women.