By 1981 the New Right had mounted a nationwide censorship campaign to purge schools and public libraries of sex education and other secular-humanist forms of 'pornography.' Sex education was 'filth and perversion,' Jerry Falwell announced in a fund-raising letter that included, under the label 'Adults Only. That period of innocence did not last long. This was in the early days of the feminist anti-porn movement, when legislative strategies against pornography were mere gleams in the eye of the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin, when it seemed possible to raise consciousness about pornography without arousing demands for censorship. With only a little less discomfort than resolve, they dutifully viewed the pornography. The women didn't exactly hold hands as they ventured down the street with me, but they did stick close together traveling en masse, they were not so conspicuous as individuals. In the late 1970s I led groups of suburban women on tours through Show World and other Forty-Second Street hot spots, exposing them, in the interests of consciousness-raising, to pornography's various genres: Nazi porn, nurse porn, lesbian porn, bondage porn-none of it terribly imaginative. But Peepland (MULTI-VIDEO BOOTHS! NUDE DANCING GIRLS!) still reigns, and Show World, a glitzy sex emporium, still anchors the west end of the block, right around the corner from The New York Times.

New sex businesses-yuppie topless bars and downscale lap-dancing joints (don't ask) -are prospering elsewhere in Manhattan. What city officials call 'sex-related uses'-triple-X video (formerly book) stores, peep shows, and topless bars-have declined in number since their heyday in the 1970s, and much of the block between Seventh and Eighth avenues is boarded up, a hostage to development. Despite efforts to redevelop it, New York's Forty-second Street retains its underground appeal, especially for consumers of pornography.

Right-Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin