Catharine A. MacKinnon Quotes (28 quotes)

Works

Only Words

Catharine A. MacKinnon

Toward a Feminist Theory of the State

Catharine A. MacKinnon

Catharine A. MacKinnon: 28 quotes 1 like

Famous Catharine A. MacKinnon Quotes

“Show me an abuse of women in society, I'll show it to you made sex in the pornography. If you want to know who is being hurt in this society, go see what is being done and to whom in pornography and then go look for them other places in the world. You will find them being hurt in just that way.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

"Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech" (1984), p. 188
Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987)

“So the idea that there is nothing essential, in the sense that there are no human universals, is dogma. Ask most anyone who is going to be shot at dawn.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

"Postmodernism and Human Rights" (2000), p. 53
Are Women Human?: and Other International Dialogues (2006)

“Women fake vaginal orgasms, the only 'mature' sexuality, because men demand that they enjoy vaginal penetration.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: "Pleasure under Patriarchy" (1989) Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 2 pp. 314-346

“What postmodernism gives us instead is a multicultural defense for male violence - a defense for it wherever it is, which in effect is a pretty universal defense.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

"Postmodernism and Human Rights" (2000), p. 54
Are Women Human?: and Other International Dialogues (2006)

“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?”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

"Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech" (1984), p. 193
Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987)

“Women are socially disadvantaged in controlling sexual access to their bodies through socialization to customs that define a woman's body as for sexual use by men. Sexual access is regularly forced or pressured or routinized beyond denial.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

Source: Reflections on Sex Equality under Law (1991) Yale Law Journal Vol.100 No. 5, p. 1212

Catharine A. MacKinnon Quotes about women

“Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

"Postmodernism and Human Rights" (2000), p. 62
Are Women Human?: and Other International Dialogues (2006)

“Male sexuality is apparently activated by violence against women and expresses itself in violence against women to a significant extent.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: "Pleasure under Patriarchy" (1989) Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 2 pp. 314-346

“In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

These words were quoted by the conservative writer Cal Thomas as coming from Professing Feminism, a book by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge which he mistakenly ascribed to Catharine MacKinnon.

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mackinno.htm

The actual passage in that book are the authors' characterization of MacKinnon's views rather than a direct quotation: And Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon have long argued that in a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not in a strong enough social position to give meaningful consent—an assault on individual female autonomy uncannily reminiscent of old arguments for why women should not have political rights.

Instead MacKinnon argues that heterosexuality "institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission" (1982) and that "Sexual access is regularly forced or pressured or routinized beyond denial" (1991).
Misattributed

“Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

Source: Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory (1982) Signs Vol. 7, No.3, p. 533

“Empirically, all pornography is made under conditions of inequality based on sex, overwhelmingly by poor, desperate, homeless, pimped women who were sexually abused as children.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon book Only Words

Source: Only Words (1993), p. 20

“Stopped as attribute of a person, sex inequality takes the form of gender; moving as a relation between people, it takes the form of sexuality. Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualization of inequaltiy between men and women.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

"Introduction - The Art of the Impossible", p. 6
Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987)

Catharine A. MacKinnon Quotes about sex

“In all these situations, there was not enough violence against them to take it beyond the category of "sex"; they were not coerced enough.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

"Sex and Violence: A Perspective" (1981), p. 88
Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987)

“Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

"A Rally Against Rape" (1981), p. 82
Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987)

“All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

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. Catharine MacKinnon has denied ever saying anything of the kind. http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mackinno.htm
Instead MacKinnon asserts that rape and intercourse are "difficult to distinguish" (1983), and that "the major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it" (1989).
Misattributed

“Some have argued that lesbian sexuality-meaning here simply women having sex with women not men-solves the problem of gender by eliminating men from women's voluntary sexual encounters. Yet women's sexuality remains constructed under conditions of male supremacy; women remain socially defined as women in relation to men; the definition of women as men's inferiors remains sexual even if not heterosexual, whether men are present at the time or not.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: "Pleasure under Patriarchy" (1989) Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 2 pp. 314-346

“Women are raped and coerced into sex.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

Source: Reflections on Sex Equality under Law (1991) Yale Law Journal Vol.100 No. 5, p. 1213

“Compare victims' reports of rape with women's reports of sex. They look a lot alike”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: "Pleasure under Patriarchy" (1989) Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 2 pp. 314-346

Catharine A. MacKinnon Quotes

“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.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

"Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech" (1984), p. 170
Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987)

Parting

“Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in [sic] the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of Feminism.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

Falsely attributed to Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (First Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 10 in "Waste, Fraud, and Abuse: Hearing Before the Committee on Ways and Means", US House of Representatives, , and spread on the Internet.
Probably based on the quotation opening Chapter 1: "Marxism and feminism are one, and that one is Marxism." — Heidi Hartmann and Amy Bridges, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism"
Misattributed

Communication

“Nor is homosexuality without stake in this gendered sexual system. Putting to one side the obviously gendered content of expressly adopted roles, clothing, and sexual mimicry, to the extent the gender of a sexual object is crucial to arousal, the structure of social power that stands behind and defines gender is hardly irrelevant, even if it is rearranged.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: "Pleasure under Patriarchy" (1989) Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 2 pp. 314-346

Clothes

“Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable — not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.… You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent — you learn, in a word, femininity.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon book Only Words

Source: Only Words (1993), pp. 3-7

Pain , Imagination , Literature , Suffering

“Perhaps the wrong of rape has proven so difficult to articulate because the unquestionable starting point has been that rape is definable as distinct from intercourse, when for women it is difficult to distinguish them under conditions of male dominance.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

Source: Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence (1983) Signs Vol. 8 No. 4, p. 647

Women

“In my opinion, no feminism worthy of the name is not methodologically post-marxist.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

"Desire and Power: A Feminist Perspective" (1983), p. 60
Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987)

“the major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: "Pleasure under Patriarchy" (1989) Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 2 pp. 314-346

“Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable?”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

"Postmodernism and Human Rights" (2000), p. 58
Are Women Human?: and Other International Dialogues (2006)

“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.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon

"The Prime of Miss Kitty MacKinnon" http://susiebright.blogs.com/Old_Static_Site_Files/Prime_Of_Kitty_MacKinnon.pdf, by Susie Bright, East Bay Express, October 1993.

Pain , Reading , Daughters , People

“Objectivity is the methodological stance of which objectification is the social process. Sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women. It unites act with word, construction with expression, perception with enforcement, myth with reality. Man fucks woman; subject verb object.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon book Toward a Feminist Theory of the State

Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1991)

Reality , Women