Legal Affairs “Reviews” Catharine MacKinnon

The piece, accessible here, is vaguely styled as a book review, but really only mentions Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws and Are Women Human? briefly and without any substantive detail or analysis. Titled “A Firebrand Flickers” and subtitled: “The legendary feminist Catharine MacKinnon spurred the law to protect women, but the next wave is tired of feeling sheltered,” the article gives a stilted, overly negative overview of MacKinnon’s career, chock full of little jabs like this sentence: “The New York Times has described the collaboration among MacKinnon and other feminist attorneys as leaving “some disagreement about who deserves credit for each new insight.” It seems to me that the author, Deborah Dinner, should have either attempted to ascertain who these “other feminist attorneys” referenced by the NYT actually were, and interviewed them, or left this snide aside out altogether. If she wanted to be fair, that is. But fairness clearly is not the agenda. Here are two paragraphs in which Dinner “explains” MacKinnon’s scholarship on pornography:

“The argument that MacKinnon constructs against pornography is powerful. For most visual pornographic images that exist, she reminds readers, a woman was actually the victim of the act depicted. MacKinnon’s rhetorical power increases with each of the shocking pornographic images she describes.

“But what her thinking on the issue lacks is nuance or degree. She fails to explain, for example, whether pictures of fellatio subordinate women in the same way as those in which, as she writes, “a woman actually had to be tied or cut or burned or gagged or whipped or chained, hung from a meat hook or from trees by ropes. . . .” Similarly, her tendency to refute First Amendment objections by describing the violence involved in making pornography does not answer why sex equality should trump free speech in judging pornographic images that aren’t violent.”

I know many smart, thoughtful people who disagree with MacKinnon about pornography to various degrees and from a range of perspectives, but I can’t imagine any of them oversimplifying, distorting, and dismissing her arguments quite that glibly. And then there are Dinner’s astounding generalizations about what “young feminists” think and feel, and why MacKinnon’s work is not relevant to them. Dinner wrote:

“Despite the continued relevance of MacKinnon’s theories, her voice may not be the best-suited to a feminist movement that has, in her own words, gone “at once mainstream and underground.” MacKinnon’s tendency to characterize men as oppressors and women as victims is unlikely to appeal to young feminists with a proliferation of political commitments and with identities that include more than gender. She has been taken to task for not sufficiently considering how women’s social positions are also shaped by race and sexual orientation. MacKinnon’s tone misses the pitch of today’s young feminists in other ways as well. The women whom MacKinnon writes about are victims. They are abused and battered, raped and humiliated, and murdered. Without denying the persistence and scale of sexual violence against women, today’s feminists may tire of MacKinnon’s relentless fulmination about women’s place in society. MacKinnon envisions gender equality as the removal of power relations from sexuality and, to that end, seeks to use the law to protect women from coercion:whether into the porn industry or into unwanted sex. But to young feminists, there is a difference between making the law sensitive to power structures and turning it into a paternalistic tool that associates femininity with victimhood in its efforts to protect.

“Third-wavers’ most substantive point of contention centers on MacKinnon’s view of pornography. Some feminists who agree with MacKinnon that pornography contributes to women’s subordination oppose her antipornography stance out of a commitment to free speech and a belief that a specific criminal law could successfully address coercion, assault, and injury that occurs in the production of pornography. In the 1980s, MacKinnon and Dworkin’s antipornography campaign instigated a heated contest within the feminist movement about whether the previous two decades’ sexual revolution had deepened women’s exploitation, or whether women’s equality depended on finally triumphing over the sexual double standard through such means as achieving greater access to pornography that women find pleasurable. The controversy contributed to the unraveling of second-wave feminist coalitions. From today’s perspective, the advocates of further sexual liberation seem to have won, at least in the pornography debate. Many women, including self-identified feminists, enjoy pornography made for heterosexual women and lesbians, as well as some forms of conventional porn. They discriminate between porn they find offensive and porn they find erotic, and they are able to play with the idea that submission can be sexy, without giving up their own demands for empowerment in real-life sex. MacKinnon believes that women who enjoy pornography do so only because society teaches them to associate sexual objectification with arousal; she regards feminist support for or tolerance of pornography as elitist academic posturing. Dismissing women’s sexuality as a form of false consciousness seems petty, and MacKinnon’s categorical opposition to pornography appears out of touch with today’s culture.”

In those two relatively short paragraphs alone Dinner managed to accuse MacKinnon of all sorts of perfidity, including being a relentless fulminator in the service of the patriarchy, petty, and out of touch with “today’s culture.” I’m not sure who elected Dinner the authoritative spokesperson of the third-wavers, but I am cautiously optimistic that most are intelligent and motivated enough to actually read MacKinnon’s words and make up their own minds about what she is saying, and whether it is relevant or important. I certainly hope so, anyway.

–Ann Bartow