Catharine MacKinnon

From Wikiquote

Jump to: navigation, search

Catharine Alice MacKinnon (born 1946-10-07) is an American feminist, scholar, lawyer, teacher, and activist.

Contents

[edit] Sourced

[edit] Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

  • Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.
    • "A Rally Against Rape" (1981), in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987), p. 82
  • Men who are in prison for rape think it's the dumbest thing that ever happened... It isn't just a miscarriage of justice; they were put in jail for something very little different from what most men do most of the time and call it sex. The only difference is they got caught. That view is nonremorseful and not rehabilitative. It may also be true.
    • "Sex and Violence: A Perspective" (1981), in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987), p. 88
  • In all these situations, there was not enough violence against them to take it beyond the category of "sex"; they were not coerced enough.
    • "Sex and Violence: A Perspective" (1981), in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987), p. 88
  • In my opinion, no feminism worthy of the name is not methodologically post-marxist.
    • "Desire and Power: A Feminist Perspective" (1983), Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987), p 60
  • 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.
    • "Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech" (1984), Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987), p 170
  • 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.
    • "Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech" (1984), Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987), p 188
  • 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?
    • "Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech" (1984), Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987), p 193

[edit] Only Words

  • 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.
    • Only Words (1993), p 20

[edit] Are Women Human?: and Other International Dialogues

  • 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.
    • "Postmodernism and Human Rights" (2000) in Are Women Human?: and Other International Dialogues (2006), p 53
  • 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.
    • "Postmodernism and Human Rights" (2000) in Are Women Human?: and Other International Dialogues (2006), p 54
  • Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable?
    • "Postmodernism and Human Rights" (2000) in Are Women Human?: and Other International Dialogues (2006), p 58
  • 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.
    • "Postmodernism and Human Rights" (2000) in Are Women Human?: and Other International Dialogues (2006), p 62

[edit] Misattributions

  • All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman.
    • 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. [1]
  • In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent.
    • These words were quoted by the conservative writer Cal Thomas as coming from Professing Feminism, a book which he mistakenly ascribed to Catharine MacKinnon. [2]

[edit] Criticisms

  • "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."
  • "Sexual speech, not MacKinnon's speech, is the most repressed and disdained kind of expression in our world, and MacKinnon is no rebel or radical to attack it."
  • "She ends her letter, characteristically, by picturing me and her other critics as indifferent to the suffering of women. But many feminists, including several who wrote or spoke to me about my review, regret her single-minded concentration on lurid sex. They think that though it has predictably attracted much publicity, it tends to stereotype women as victims, and takes attention from still urgent questions of economic, political, and professional equality."
  • "Perhaps MacKinnon should reflect on these suggestions that the censorship issue is not so simple-minded, so transparently gender-against-gender, as she insists. She should stop calling names long enough to ask whether personal sensationalism, hyperbole, and bad arguments are really what the cause of sexual equality now needs."
  • "Don’t even get me started on MacKinnon... Now I’d just look at her and shake my head and go, “tsk tsk tsk,” and say, “You know what, I’m really sorry you are that bitter and angry,” cuz that’s what it is. It’s her fuel. It’s what drives her. It’s not that she is not smart, but I do believe she is deluded, and I do believe anger and fear and jealousy and resentment and frustration and out-and-out prudery are what drive her, are her motivating forces... MacKinnon really does feel like she is helping women, while at the same time, she and Dworkin and their ilk silence women. They won’t listen to our stories, our truths."
    • Nina Hartley, interviewed in Bust Guide to the New Girl Order (1999)

[edit] External links

Wikipedia
Wikipedia has an article about:
Retrieved from "http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Catharine_MacKinnon"