Law has traditionally considered pornography to be a question of private virtue and public morality, not personal injury and collective abuse. The law on pornography has been the law of morals regulation, not the law of public safety, personal security, or civil equality. When pornography is debated, in or out of court, the issue has been whether government should be in the business of making sure only nice things are said and seen about sex, not whether government should remedy the exploitation of the powerless for the profit and enjoyment of the powerful. Whether pornography is detrimental to "the social fabric" has therefore been considered; whether particular individuals or definable groups are hurt by it has not been, not really.
Since, in this traditional view, pornography can only violate an idea of the society one wants to think one lives in, the question of pornography has not required looking into who can violate whom and get away with it. Once pornography is framed as concept rather than practice, more thought than act, more in the head than in the world, its effects also necessarily appear both insubstantial and unsubstantiated, more abstract than real. So both what pornography is and what it does have been seen to lie in the eye of the beholder, to be a matter of what one is thinking about when one looks at it, to be a question of point of view. And since the accepted solution for differing moral views has been mutual tolerance, one man’s harm has been seen as another’s social value as the pornography industry in the United States has doubled in the last ten years without effective interference from the courts.
The law has been wrong.