Catharine MacKinnon quotes

Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable? (Catharine MacKinnon)
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. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
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. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
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. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
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. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
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. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
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. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
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. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
Women are raped and coerced into sex. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
In my opinion, no feminism worthy of the name is not methodologically post-marxist. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
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 MacKinnon)
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. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
In all these situations, there was not enough violence against them to take it beyond the category of "sex"; they were not coerced enough. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
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. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
Women fake vaginal orgasms, the only 'mature' sexuality, because men demand that they enjoy vaginal penetration. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
Compare victims' reports of rape with women's reports of sex. They look a lot alike. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
Instead of being lionized and admired for her genius, instead of being able to earn a decent living as a writer, Andrea Dworkin was misrepresented and demonized. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
It's particularly hard to take being stabbed in the back close to home. There's always a feeling of betrayal when people of your own group oppose you. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
In not having an appointment at Harvard, I'm in the company of a great many people whose work I admire tremendously, in particular women of color. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman. (Catharine MacKinnon)
Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in [sic] the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of Feminism. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
Male sexuality is apparently activated by violence against women and expresses itself in violence against women to a significant extent. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
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? View quote
Catharine MacKinnon
”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.”. View quote
Catharine MacKinnon