The solution to pornography lies ultimately in our ability to effect a fundamental change in personal and social values. It will be an arduous and long process, but it has begun. Women are beginning to ask men why it is that they need to consume such material. We are beginning to express our need for a non-coercive, non-exploitative sexuality.

Griffin's book is a deeply textured, feminist indictment of the development of pornographic values in western culture.

She argues that pornography feeds our culture, but at the same time is a product of culture and that we need to understand the underlying motivation of western culture in order to find the source of these negative values. She locates this motivation in a violent, unnatural and unnecessary split of body and mind, reason and emotion which led to the establishment of culture in opposition to nature. In this world view, nature is seen as something wild, threatening and alien; something which is feared and therefore must be controlled. Traditionally, within our culture, the prevailing abusive and violent male attitude and behavior toward women has been seen as instinctive, or at least "natural". Griffin calls this aggressive attitude pornographic and argues that it is not instinctive but chosen; as was the development of a culture in opposition to, rather than in harmony with, nature. Griffin calls the collective human mind which created, continues to create and participate in this culture, pornographic.

Drawing on western myth, history, literature, philosophy, psychology and science she shows how the pornographic mind has made woman the major symbol for nature, for what it fears in itself and in the world. Because nature is ever-assertive, the fear is ever present and requires continuous acts of control and violence to- ward women and other symbols of nature to reassure the mind of its supremacy. She reviews behavior patterns and historical events to illustrate how this dynamic of the collective mind is repeatedly acted out. Her analysis of the Holocaust is of particular import.

Griffin documents how men have been the key actors and perpetrators of the values of the pornographic mind which has resulted in women being silenced. The motivation of culture causes men to deny that part of themselves which is natural, to war within themselves against nature and to act in a violent and/or controlling way toward women. It causes women to shrink in fear and do violence to themselves by effacing their true natures, their true selves in an effort to become the symbol assigned to them by the culture. Her analysis of Marilyn Monroe, in the chapter in Silence, is particularly relevant to this theme. She concludes that in both men and women, Eros is strangled.

Griffin poses Eros as a state of being which results from a form of human organization based on the harmony of body and mind, reason and emotion. The result is a culture which nurtures and complements the nature of human beings and our environment.

The book is a strong, compelling argument against the commonly held view of the inevitability of human "nature" and cultural development. Griffin's thesis firmly reestablishes our responsibility for exercising the human power of will and choice in the formation of behavior, attitudes, social values and the treatment of others with whom we interact and coexist.

For those of us working against pornography through a movement to change social values and men's violent behavior to ward women, Griffin provides both insight and hope. For those who have been silent or silenced on this issue, she offers a way to find a voice.

Margaret Smith is a feminist adult educator. With her colleague, Barbara Waisberg, she has conducted a number of workshops for women on pornography and is currently writing a trainer's guide on the same issue which will be published this summer.