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Historical Note
Women Against Violence in Pornography and the Media (WAVPM) was founded in 1977 following the 1976 Conference on Violence Against Women, sponsored by the San Francisco Women's Centers. Initially based in the Berkeley Women's Center, WAVPM moved to the Women's Building in San Francisco after its purchase in 1979. Perceiving a link between the debasement of women in mass media representations and reported increases in the number and severity of violent acts against women, members aimed to raise public awareness of these conditions. WAVPM, along with Women Against Pornography (WAP) in New York City and Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) in Los Angeles, led women's groups of the late-1970s/early-1980s in crusades against pornography and promoted public discussion of the relationship between media depictions and sexist violence, bringing pornography to the top of the feminist agenda and exacerbating a division among feminists (and among leftists in general) between proponents of free speech and opponents of degrading images.
Major projects of WAVPM include a 1978 National Feminist Conference on Pornography, regular feminist tours of pornography theaters, a slide show illustrating the connection between mass media images and attitudes toward women, a monthly newsletter, and sponsorship of annual Take Back the Night marches. During the group's most active period from 1978 to 1982, the group grew from 35 members to over 1000.
On International Women's Day in 1977, WAVPM executed its first political action, the picketing of Ultraroom, a live sex show in which women performers used whips and chains on each other. The group sought to bring attention to a sexual economy "in which women beat each other for men's sexual stimulation." On-going difficulties faced by the organization included: negotiation of free speech issues, definition of the group's position on non-violent pornography, and reconciliation with dissenting poor and working class women and S/M lesbians.
Ultimately an organization of women working in the sex industry formally protested WAVPM members' attitude against pornography. WAVPM general membership meeting records end in 1983 with the protest of a visiting group, the U.S. Prostitutes Collective, which demanded that WAVPM respect sex workers' decisions, stop opposing pornography, and discontinue interference with sex work, the livelihood of many poor women. Problems with debt closed the records of the steering committee, which was trying to salvage a floundering door-to-door fundraising campaign.
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