Interview With Catharine MacKinnon

The interviewer, Stuart Jeffries, doesn’t seem to like her much, but it’s still an interesting read, especially when she talks about her new book, “Are Women Human?” Here’s an excerpt:

…Why does MacKinnon matter? She is undeniably one of feminism’s most significant figures, a ferociously tough-minded lawyer and academic who has sought to use the law to clamp down on sexual harassment and pornography. She’s a bracing woman, who calls her philosophy “feminism unmodified” and thinks wimpish guff such as post-feminism does women no good at all….

…MacKinnon thinks consent in rape cases should be irrelevant. Women are so unfree that even if a woman is shown to have given consent to sex, that should never be enough to secure an acquittal. Why? “My view is that when there is force or substantially coercive circumstances between the parties, individual consent is beside the point; that if someone is forced into sex, that ought to be enough. The British common law approach has tended to be that you need both force and absence of consent. If we didn’t have so much pornography in society and people actually believed women when they said they didn’t consent, that would be one thing. But that isn’t what we’ve got.”

What does she mean – how does pornography affect this? “Pornography affects people’s belief in rape myths. So for example if a woman says ‘I didn’t consent’ and people have been viewing pornography, they believe rape myths and believe the woman did consent no matter what she said. That when she said no, she meant yes. When she said she didn’t want to, that meant more beer. When she said she would prefer to go home, that means she’s a lesbian who needs to be given a good corrective experience. Pornography promotes these rape myths and desensitises people to violence against women so that you need more violence to become sexually aroused if you’re a pornography consumer. This is very well documented.” …

…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….

The entire article is available here.