Catharine A. MacKinnon: Rape

“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 , Strong

“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)

Sex , Feeling

“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

Women , Sex

“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

“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

Women , Sex

“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

“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