Catharine MacKinnon

Sourced

• Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.
  • Feminism Unmodified (1987) p. 82

• In my opinion, no feminism worthy of the name is not methodologically post-marxist.
  • "Desire and Power: A Feminist Perspective", in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988) p. 115

• In all these situations, there was not enough violence against them to take it beyond the category of 'sex'; they were not coerced enough.
  • Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987) p. 88

• To be a prisoner means to be defined as a member of a group for whom the rules of what can be done to you, of what is seen as abuse of you, are reduced as part of the definition of your status.
  • "Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech", in Laura L O'Toole and Jessica R Schiffman (eds.) Gender Violence:Interdisciplinary Perspectives (1997) p. 401. (Reprint from Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 20 (1985))

• We are stripped of authority and reduced and devaluated and silenced. Silenced here means that the purposes of the First Amendment, premised upon conditions presumed and promoted by protecting free speech, do not pertain to women because they are not our conditions. Consider them: individual self-fulfillment – how does pornography promote our individual self-fulfillment? How does sexual inequality even permit it? Even if she can form words, who listens to a woman with a penis in her mouth?
  • "Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech", in Laura L O'Toole and Jessica R Schiffman (eds.) Gender Violence:Interdisciplinary Perspectives (1997) p. 411. (Reprint from Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 20 (1985))

Misattributions

• All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman.
  • The allegation that Catharine MacKinnon equated sex with rape, or suggested that all sex is hostile, seems to have been first made in the October 1986 issue of Playboy. Such statements were actually made by Andrea Dworkin http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/IntercourseI.html. Catharine MacKinnon has denied ever saying anything of the kind. http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mackinno.htm

• In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent.
  • These words were quoted by the conservative writer Cal Thomas as coming from Professing Feminism, a book which he mistakenly ascribed to Catharine MacKinnon. http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mackinno.htm

Criticisms

• "Sometimes I wonder if MacKinnon has simply been driven mad by all the sick things people do to one another. I, too, recoil in pain and incomprehension whenever I hear about the latest psychopath who has shot his mother, machine-gunned his coworkers, raped his daughter, or slashed a prostitute. I notice that such men are more likely to have read the bible than pornography, but I do not hold either script responsible for their actions."
  • "The Prime of Miss Kitty MacKinnon", by Susie Bright, East Bay Express, October 1993.

• "Sexual speech, not MacKinnon's speech, is the most repressed and disdained kind of expression in our world, and MacKinnon is no rebel or radical to attack it."
  • "The Prime of Miss Kitty MacKinnon", by Susie Bright, East Bay Express, October 1993.

• "She ends her letter, characteristically, by picturing me and her other critics as indifferent to the suffering of women. But many feminists, including several who wrote or spoke to me about my review, regret her single-minded concentration on lurid sex. They think that though it has predictably attracted much publicity, it tends to stereotype women as victims, and takes attention from still urgent questions of economic, political, and professional equality."
  • "Pornography: An Exchange", response by Ronald Dworkin to Catherine Mackinnon, New York Review of Books 41(5), March 3, 1994.

• "Perhaps MacKinnon should reflect on these suggestions that the censorship issue is not so simple-minded, so transparently gender-against-gender, as she insists. She should stop calling names long enough to ask whether personal sensationalism, hyperbole, and bad arguments are really what the cause of sexual equality now needs."
  • "Pornography: An Exchange", response by Ronald Dworkin to Catherine Mackinnon, New York Review of Books 41(5), March 3, 1994.

• "Don’t even get me started on MacKinnon... Now I’d just look at her and shake my head and go, “tsk tsk tsk,” and say, “You know what, I’m really sorry you are that bitter and angry,” cuz that’s what it is. It’s her fuel. It’s what drives her. It’s not that she is not smart, but I do believe she is deluded, and I do believe anger and fear and jealousy and resentment and frustration and out-and-out prudery are what drive her, are her motivating forces... MacKinnon really does feel like she is helping women, while at the same time, she and Dworkin and their ilk silence women. They won’t listen to our stories, our truths."
  • Nina Hartley, interviewed in Bust Guide to the New Girl Order (1999)