Catharine A. MacKinnon: Quotes about women

Catharine A. MacKinnon is American feminist and legal activist. Explore interesting quotes on women.

Catharine A. MacKinnon: 56 quotes1 like

“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)

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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)

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

“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)

“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)