It would be nice if more people would actually read MacKinnon as an ethical preface to criticizing her, so they would stop writing things like this :
Anyway, in case there’s any doubt, I agree with R. that the Sex Police are, though god knows they don’t mean to, reinstating patriarchal values. If there’s any doubt that this is the general tendency of the Sex Police, let me remind you that radical feminists in the 80s actually found themselves aligning themselves with the Ed Meeses of the world, and that is fucked up. On a fundamental level, opting out of every interaction that the patriarchy has laid claim to and declared”degrading to women”means that you have no chance at living because the patriarchy has basically marked being female as degrading.
Where to even start. As the petty academic pedant, by pointing out that it is technically erroneous to refer to the 1986 Commission as the Meese Commission, given that the Commission was appointed by Attorney General William French Smith and merely delivered its report during the tenure of Attorney General Meese? Probably not, though it is always useful to remember that anyone who calls it the Meese Commission Report almost certainly hasn’t read it for the purpose of understanding MacKinnon’s role, but hey, why let that be a barrier to castigating her for it! Just shout “Sex Police” and wait for the amen chorus!
Maybe I should ask whether it supported or undermined free speech when the Playboy Foundation obtained an injunction, in the name of freedom of expression, to prevent the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography from publishing information about which retailers sell pornography? See Playboy Enters. v. Meese, 639 F. Supp. 581 (D.D.C. 1986). Should I point out, as this case does, that pornographers care only about the First Amendment when it helps their businesses? Or should I sink to the level of suggesting that those who are pro-porn have allied themselves with sleazy censors, “and that is fucked up”? Also note that while MacKinnon had a dialogue with Smith and Meese, the common ground they found was small. And MacKinnon never took money from Meese, while many pro-porn “feminist” organizations are lavishly funded by pornographers, so maybe a little nuance is called for on this topic? At least MacKinnon was open and straightforward about her agenda, does being principled count for anything?
I’m too angry to be at all diplomatic right now. Maybe better to defer to some of the other feminists who have read and considered her work. Below is an excerpt from a review of Feminism, Ummodified by Frances Olsen that appeared at 89 Colum. L. Rev. 1147 (1989):
A useful way to understand what MacKinnon is saying about sexuality might be to compare it with the debate about rape. It is through MacKinnon’s intervention into the rape debate that some people came mistakenly to believe that she considers all men, even those who have seemingly loving and fully mutual sexual relations with their wives, rapists.
Women went to great effort to establish the principle that rape was a crime about violence, not about sex. As long as significant numbers of men considered rape a crime of sexual passion, rape was not being taken seriously. In all too many law school classes, rape would be the area in which even the dullest professor would expect to be able to get the class to laugh appreciatively at his “humor.” The notion that rape expressed sexual passion was used as part of an apologetic, antifeminist argument.
The move to argue that rape was violence not sex was generally successful, and most rape jokes became as taboo as the racist jokes of an earlier era. Now, MacKinnon and other radical feminists have begun to demonstrate the ways in which rape, while a crime of and about violence, is also a crime of and about sex (p. 88). To understand this argument, it is important to recognize sex as a social construct, not some kind of pre-social, unchanging given. Sex is universal, but it is also historically specific, and our society has constructed a sexuality that can be and often is linked to violence. If, as MacKinnon argues, the relationship of domination and subordination is sexual, the eroticization of violence becomes just a special case of the eroticization of domination and subordination.
To say that rape is not just violence but is also sex is not, however, the same thing as saying that all sex is rape. MacKinnon does not say that all intercourse is rape; she has never said that, and she does not believe that. She does question the effort by some to draw a neat, sharp line between what is rape and what is not. Conservatives and liberals alike have noted the same difficulty, though perhaps as often to narrow the legal definition of rape as to question our society’s definition of sexuality. As long as women are thought to falsely or ambiguously deny wanting sex, men may be confused regarding consent. From MacKinnon’s perspective, “consent” is meaningless as long as society fails to hear or believe a woman’s refusal of sex. Women are socially denied the right to refuse sex; when they say “no,” all too often they are not taken seriously. Even if society comes to accept the simple, liberal-feminist argument that “‘no’ means ‘no’,” everyone can recognize occasions on which a woman has neither the ability nor opportunity to say “no.” MacKinnon generalizes from that recognition to question whether women as a group are not systematically denied the ability and opportunity to say “no.”
This change in awareness — from the idea that rape is violence, not sex, to the idea that rape is (also) sex — has enabled people to begin to take seriously date rape and marital rape, both of which are usually seen to have a sexual dimension in spite of their violent dimension. The change would probably not have been as possible before the public became aware of the serious harm rape causes, an awareness that was facilitated by the assertions of rape being a crime of violence, not of sex. There is still some risk, one must suppose, that the policy of re-establishing the recognition that rape is a crime of sex will backfire and once again the public that can afford to do so may cease to take rape seriously as a crime. But the greater likelihood is that women will be able to consolidate the gains they made in public awareness and launch a more broadly based campaign against sexual aggression.
For a much more recent, and similarly informed (for a nice change of pace) critique of MacKinnon’s work by someone who probably doesn’t identify as a feminist, see Charles King’s review of Are Woman Human? available here. He’s not thrilled with the work, and I agree with him in some instances, especially about the use of passive voice, and some of the generalizing. He is, however, despite his unfavorable views, fairminded enough to articulate something important, the reason that I will continue to read and learn from MacKinnon, and to defend her from unfair and uninformed attacks by people who are smart and talented enough to offer better:
It would be difficult to gainsay the central assumption in MacKinnon’s work, which she has expressed elegantly in her other volumes: that the State and law are universal constructs built on a very particular base. Men’s concerns are so fundamental to the way that institutions and legal frameworks are organized that we have become accustomed to believing in the universality of concepts that are plainly gender-specific. The way we think about fairness, peace, justice, rights, power and just about every other concept at the heart of the modern legal order can be shown to be based on and uniquely to benefit a particular category – men, certainly, but in different societies, men of certain castes, races, ethnic groups or religions. Erase these other category markers and there is a near universal preference for the gender-particular. Men both make the legal order and, usually, make it just as they please.
Given the slander and worse that routinely gets thrown at her, I wonder sometimes how MacKinnon manages to remain so passionately and relentlessly committed to feminism. I don’t ask anyone to agree with her about anything, goodness knows I take exception to aspects of her work, but out of a basic sense of fairness and decency, which are core aspirational feminist values in my book, could we not stop with the namecalling, and actually engage with her scholarship before critiquing her, rather than repeating charges made by people who would rather vilify her personally than have to repond to her arguments? What’s feminist about personal attacks, especially those that seek to insult people and silence debate?
See also this post.
Cf. Ms. Jared at Sinister Girl.
–Ann Bartow
Update: I received a nice e-mail from someone who made some additional points I think are worth adding:
1. Many feminists seek and sometimes find common ground with anti-abortion folks who support good, comprehensive sex education and vastly improved access to contraceptives. This does not mean those feminists are “aligned” with anti-abortionists in any substantive way on any other issue.
2. Some feminists find common ground with Christian Fundamentalists on domestic violence. While the mechanisms the Fundamentalists use to try to persuade someone to stop beating his wife or kids are sometimes appalling, such as pointing out how weak and helpless their victims are, they can far more effectively intervene in some situations in which a liberal feminist will be ignored at best.
The point of these observations, obviously, is that it is possible and sometimes productive to work with “the enemy” if you believe you have a worthy goal. Which, by the way, is exactly how some free speech organizations justify the money they take from pornographers.
