COLUMN ONE : Chill Hits Canada’s Porn Law : Feminists cheered a ’92 high court ruling redefining obscenity. Now, amid a flurry of controversy and curious seizures, some wonder if it has increased sensitivity--or censorship.

It seemed a real leap forward for women: In a unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that materials “degrading” to women could be classified as obscene, and be banned.

“If true equality between male and female persons is to be achieved,” concluded the court, “we cannot ignore the threat to equality resulting from exposure . . . to certain types of violent and degrading material.”

That was in February, 1992, and across Canada, many women cheered. Feminists here had insisted long and loud that pornography menaces women; now, finally, the nation’s paramount court had agreed with them.

“It was a watershed event,” says Kathleen Mahoney, a University of Calgary law professor who argued the case of Crown vs. Butler before the high court.

In Ottawa, Parliament members rushed to embrace the ruling, which also broadened and defined what is obscene. The House of Commons and provincial legislatures could now with confidence write laws against kiddie porn and serial-killer trading cards. In the press, editorialists held out the hope that vice squads, armed with the court’s new guidelines on what was obscene, would go about their business more astutely--and stop seizing laughable “pornography,” such as the film version of Gunther Grass’ “The Tin Drum.”

South of the border, women looked on with great interest. Many American feminists have also been pressing for proscriptions against pornography. But in the United States, such efforts routinely fail, frustrated by free-speech champions and their well-tested constitutional arguments.

Now that enough time has passed to consider the effect of Canada’s celebrated court ruling, is the well-being of Canadian women today less compromised by the availability of “degrading” photos? Are women from the Yukon to Newfoundland any safer from porn-inspired assailants? Are there lessons here for America?

Alas, the goal of making Canada a safer place for women is still far from met--though it is unclear whether the court ruling has a fatal, built-in defect. Depending on whom you are talking to, the decision is either a paradigm shift that is only beginning to have an effect or a civil-liberties horror that has heightened intolerance in Canada while making life easier for some pornographers.

Defining pornography along feminist lines, as the Canadian situation shows, is no more elegant a task than setting boundaries the old-fashioned way, along moralistic lines.

The experience of Robert Lally, 69, a retired psychologist, supplies an example of the pitfalls authorities are encountering, even with the new, explicitly feminist language of the Butler ruling at their disposal.

Lally, an American who became a naturalized Canadian citizen, was the subject of one of the first pornography busts, post-Butler. Lally had worked with child molesters in his group-therapy practice and says he learned interesting things about the workings of pedophiles’ minds.

“At one of the (group-therapy) meetings, one (participant) said that he could walk past a school yard and within 30 seconds know which little girl he could get to come with him,” Lally says. “And all of the others said, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’ ”

That gave Lally what he believed was a sound idea: Write a novel explaining to lay readers how pedophiles think and operate. The main character would be a composite of his patients.

“It was supposed to disgust people and frighten the hell out of them, so they would say, ‘Let’s do something about pedophiles,’ ” Lally says. “It is estimated that by the time a pedophile is caught, he has committed a minimum of 300 assaults. They’re very clever.”

Lally’s project would, on its face, appear to be just the sort of undertaking the anti-pornography lobby would applaud: In his own way, he wanted to protect society from sex crimes. But the plan backfired. Under Butler, Lally’s opus itself was found to be obscene.

How so? Lally’s troubles began when he mailed his manuscript to a literary agent in Colorado from the town where he lives in rural Alberta. The agent told Lally that his novel looked intriguing but warned him that her specialty was screenplays and that it would take time before she could make it through a book-length work. Lally asked her to return his manuscript. She did--just after the Butler ruling.

*

Presto: Canada Customs, authorized to stop obscene materials at the border, intercepted Lally’s manuscript. Lally complained to his member of Parliament and the media. To little surprise, his efforts set off alarm bells at his local Royal Canadian Mounted Police post.

One February day, during a time when the grisly Jeffrey Dahmer mass killings were making global headlines, three Mounties and a Customs officer raided Lally’s house.

They seized Lally’s only other copy of the manuscript, took the file of rejection letters he had already amassed and even talked about impounding his computer, until Lally persuaded them that he had written the book on a typewriter.

Then they clapped their alleged porn kingpin into the back seat of their squad car. (Lally, it should be noted, had a clean police record until that point.)

“Aren’t you glad you became a Canadian citizen, Dad?” called out Lally’s son as the Mounties drove him away.

*

The problem for Lally, as for many writers and visual artists in Canada these days, lies in the high court’s definition of “obscene.”

Previously, Canadian law saw pornography as a violation of community moral standards. But now, the justices said materials could be considered obscene if they menaced certain people, thus depriving them of their role in an egalitarian Canadian society.

The court established three categories: It said that explicit sex involving violence was “almost always” obscene; that explicit sex involving children was obscene, and that explicit sex that is “degrading and dehumanizing” was obscene, if its risk of harm to society was substantial.

That regime may seem specifics-laden at first pass. But, in fact, it leaves room for endless debate when applied to real words and images.

“Terms like ‘degrading and dehumanizing’ are essentially undefinable,” says Robin Metcalfe, a gay author in Halifax whose published stories have also been seized by Customs. “What I may consider pleasurable and uplifting, someone else may consider degrading.”

Customs believed that Lally’s book fit the Butler standard because it involved sex with both women and children, and because in one scene the pedophile beat up a little girl--depictions specifically proscribed by the Butler court. But Lally took his case to the Alberta attorney general’s office and came away with a ruling that the child sex and violence in his book were not obscene, given the broader context of the novel.

So the Mounties freed their man, and Lally eventually got his manuscript back.

To Mahoney, all this proves the system is working. Certain post-Butler raids, she says, “show ignorance,” but “the system has its checks and balances so that those cases don’t go forward.”

“This is not totalitarian,” she adds. “The proof is in the kind of society we are. Canada has a well-deserved reputation for being a caring society, a democratic society. I don’t think we’re undermining our own principles. I think we’re advancing them.”

Lally, however, isn’t buying it. The Butler ruling “isn’t doing what it’s supposed to,” he says. “Women are still second-class citizens, and they’re still being abused. All the things (government officials) say they are doing for women--it isn’t true.”

Lally’s case, droll to some, was no fluke. Across Canada, officials emboldened by the new Supreme Court guidelines have censored works that seem to have little or no bearing on the well-being of women.

*

Consider:

* At Le Dernier Mot, a political bookstore in Montreal, censors seized two works by Andrea Dworkin, bar none the doyenne of America’s anti-porn sodality and a writer who herself advocates censorship. Customs claimed that the books “Woman Hating” and “Pornography: Men Possessing Women” illegally eroticized pain and bondage. (After a wave of hoo-hawing in the media, Customs said it had made a mistake.)

* At Pages Books and Magazines in Toronto, censors carted off some 1950s cheesecake trading cards, a scholarly tome on dominance and submission and a non-sexual punk magazine called “Piercing Fans International Quarterly,” even though Pages will not carry conventional soft pornography, such as “Playboy,” on the ground that it is sexist.

The body-piercing magazine and the dominance treatise evidently qualified as “degrading and dehumanizing” behavior under the Butler ruling, says Pages’ Lucinda Johnston, who spent two days on the phone with government offices, trying to find out what had happened to the shipment.

The trading cards were censored because one set--showing two laughing women in leather trousers, tying each other up--was titled “Betty in Bondage.” Under the Butler rules, “bondage in a sexual context” is taboo.

“Sexual context? There is not even a suggestion of sex in any of the photographs,” says Johnston with exasperation. “Censorship is flourishing in Toronto since the Butler decision.”

* At the Glad Day gay bookstore in Toronto, plainclothes officers bought a copy of “Bad Attitude,” an exuberant lesbian sex magazine, a few weeks after Butler was decided, then arrested the store owner and cashier on obscenity charges.

Glad Day went to trial and complained of a double standard: Its lawyers reminded the court that “Hustler” magazine and Madonna’s Mylar-wrapped extravaganza, “Sex,” treat the same themes as “Bad Attitude” and weren’t under ban in Canada. But the judge found “Bad Attitude” obscene all the same, and fined Glad Day the Canadian equivalent of about $160.

“There are only two lesbian sex magazines in existence, and there’s millions of sex magazines out there for men,” Glad Day manager Kimberly Mistyshyn complains. “If they really wanted to go after pornography, they would go after it from the top. They wouldn’t go after the little gay and lesbian bookstore that is there to help educate the community.

“It’s really sad that the Butler decision, which was supposed to be positive for women, has deeply affected the lesbian community,” she adds. “The lesbian community (consists of) women.”

*

Meanwhile, at least one pornographer claims that doing business has, for him, been easier since the celebrated anti-pornography ruling.

Randy Jorgensen is the owner of a chain of X-rated film and magazine stores that stretches across Canada. It would seem that his wares--he rents conventional X-rated films in hefty volume and sells skin magazines to heterosexual men--would be vastly affected by the Butler ruling.

In the pre-Butler days, Jorgensen had a tough time doing business in some Canadian jurisdictions, particularly Manitoba, a central province with overly broad obscenity statutes, based on the old-line thinking that pornography is immoral.

At one point, Jorgensen says, the police raided his eight Manitoba stores, seized more than 10,000 films and filed more than 1,700 charges--a provincial record--warning him that he would be convicted if he didn’t shut down. So he closed his business.

But soon after Butler, Jorgensen reopened. He says his reading of the new ruling persuaded him that the courts would tolerate much more in Manitoba than they had in the past.

Since the judges had jettisoned the old thinking about immorality and embraced modern feminist arguments, he says, “That indicated to me that they were going to be more tolerant of adult-oriented material; that they understand that we’ve advanced a little beyond the Victorian era; that wives don’t have to wear gowns with holes in them to bed at night any more, and that society is not going to come tumbling down around our ears because there are a few adult pictures floating around.”

*

So far, Jorgensen’s interpretation seems to be on target. These days, he says, when his shops are raided, the police take maybe a dozen films, instead of thousands as before.

And what about the harm done to women?

“Adult material has nothing to do with women and children,” Jorgensen argues. “It has to do with sex. The last time I checked, sex was still something that happened with couples.”