Brooks implored the battlers of sexism to begin “in the male locker rooms of the country.”

Having allowed a dramatic pause of several months, a group of teachers at California State University, Northridge, who specialize in human sexuality, last week staged a postscript to the debate on pornography and censorship that ravaged the campus late last year.

The event was called a dialogue. It came off as more of an academic street fight.

It may be recalled that a group of feminist students tried to ban Playboy, Penthouse and other sexually oriented magazines from the Student Union bookstore on the ground that they depict violence against women.

The students got the trustees of the bookstore to go along, putting the university in the national spotlight for a few days as the place where Playboy was banned.

Later the trustees backed down. But the incident left a strong impression on those among the faculty who are associated with the Center for Sex Research.

The center generally keeps a low profile. But director Veronica Elias said its members take pride in the fact that in 1978 CSUN became the first American university to offer an undergraduate minor in human sexuality. They consider the campus a place of ferment for ideas in the field of sex.

“We were a little disturbed that the university was being made to look like Bob Jones U,” psychology instructor Donna Hardy said. “We decided we needed a dialogue.”

Last week they had it. About 200 students and teachers showed up to hear six activists and experts talk about pornography and free speech.

A social scientist named Neil Malamuth got things going uneventfully. He has conducted clinical research on whether violence against women on film causes violence against women in life.

Malamuth said laboratory subjects who watched pornography tended to show violent attitudes toward women, such as a willingness to poke them with cattle prods.

There was polite applause when he sat down.

Then came Catherine MacKinnon, the University of Minnesota law professor who has written a bill proposing to let the victims of pornography, meaning all who can prove they were adversely affected by it, sue its makers for damages. The bill, still under constitutional review, has been adopted in Indianapolis but rebuffed in other cities, including Los Angeles.

MacKinnon spoke in hostile, humorless and graphic language.

“Women are being humiliated, raped, bound, battered, beaten and killed. This is happening right now,” she said.

MacKinnon argued that men use the First Amendment to protect their interests in free speech over the interests of women.

“People who have speech have decided that there will continue to exist an entire class of people, who are women and children, who will be treated in these ways so that they can have access of speech,” she said, “meaning their free access to using us, meaning our bodies as the medium of their expression saying what they want to say. Now, I think at this point that our pain, our humiliation, our torture, our rape is what they want to say.”

That brought on William Simon, former senior researcher for the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research.

“I thought this was an occasion to enhance understanding, not a plea to the jurors,” Simon began, generating some uncomfortable laughter.

In a scholarly style, Simon belittled the current debate on pornography as nothing but “new rhetorical packaging” of a long-dead issue by a segment of the women’s movement and by what he called the “let’s pretend” school of the social sciences.

“The end product,” he said, “is an image of the male, and by implication all of humanity--we are, after all, not two species--that can comfortably join Pavlov’s dog and Skinner’s pigeon, a creature without a mind, a soul, but only organs, orifices and chemistry.”

If it wasn’t always clear what Simon meant, no one had trouble following Robert Smith, a constitutional lawyer who defends pornographers.

During a sly, courtroom-style attack of MacKinnon’s constitutional opinions, Smith let it slip seemingly by accident that MacKinnon gets some of her ideas from Linda Lovelace, star of “Deep Throat” who was MacKinnon’s star witness at hearings in Minnesota on her proposed law.

“Have you ever asked Linda Lovelace how she got in that movie?” MacKinnon interrupted angrily.

Taking the cue, Smith pulled a paper out of his pocket and began to read from a transcript of a hearing at which he did ask that question and Lovelace answered that she performed voluntarily, not by coercion, as MacKinnon asserted.

MacKinnon scowled. Smith scored points in the exchange. But he didn’t entirely win the audience.

The clear victor was Betty Brooks, leader of the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force.

Brooks, gray-haired and plump, sounded like a Baptist preacher. But what she said did not.

She said MacKinnon’s law would lead to the suppression of the images women have created to express their sexuality.

“Women do enjoy pornography,” she said.

Brooks implored the battlers of sexism to begin “in the male locker rooms of the country.”

“We’re not going to ban the stuff from you,” she assured men in the audience. “But we’re going to ask you to grow up a little.”

She said that, for example, means boys should stand up to their coaches who put them down by comparing them to the parts of women’s bodies.

“Say, ‘I resent that because that puts women down,’ ” she said.

That produced an unequivocal ovation.

During an hour of questions, MacKinnon managed to regain her dialectical momentum when asked why some women perform willingly in pornography.

Her answer was that economic reality denies women a free choice.

“Pornography is a woman’s best economic option,” she said. “What she is doing is making her most rational economic choice.”

There was a cold silence. The anti-smut dialectic didn’t play in Northridge.