It's not a so-called "moral" issue.
Here is a interview with Catherine Mackinnan by Stuart Jeffries about her book "Are Women Human?" Dude can't QUITE make the cut, he sound fascinated in spite of himself, but you can tell he's doing some mental squirming by the way he writes (He doesn't really try to hide it). He does pretty good though all things considered. She is a formidable woman to say the least, I admire her a lot.
From the interview;
"Pornographers have even more control of the public space than they did before. And popular culture is increasingly adapting itself to the fact that more and more people are pornography consumers. So everything in culture has to change to respond to that or it won't succeed - it's the way capitalism works."
Snip---
MacKinnon's book ends with a wonderful rhetorical essay called Women's September 11. It points out that roughly the same number of women are murdered by men in the US each year as were killed in the Twin Towers (between 2,800 and 3,000). But those killings provoked no parallel war on terror.
So what does MacKinnon think should be done? She writes that violence against women "qualifies as a casus belli and a form of terrorism every bit as much as the events of September 11 do". Is she serious that violence against women should be treated as a war? "I think only because it's men doing it against women that it isn't seen as a war." I feel another twinge of vertigo.
It only occurs to me when I'm back on the ground that the war on terror may not be a good blueprint - it having been, you know, demonstrably counterproductive. Just before the interview ended, she said to me: "I have to say I have some sympathy for governments trying to address something as hard as terrorism, having attempted to address something as hard as violence against women for a long time." It would be good if MacKinnon had more success in her war than Bush and Blair have had in theirs."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gender/story/0,,1751983,00.html