Catharine MacKinnon Quotes
-
Law in the United States is at once a powerful medium and a medium for power.
-
Power is being able to say complete and utter nonsense and have it be believed, powerlessness is where no matter how much cogent evidence and proof one has, to not be believed.
-
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.
-
In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.
-
In my opinion, no feminism worthy of the name is not methodologically post-marxist.
-
Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism.
-
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.
-
Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism.
-
The arena of logic was made by men for men; it was expressly founded on the exclusion of what is not male, as well as what is not Greek, not Christian, nor Western, not Aryan.
-
The unnamed should not be mistaken for the nonexistent.
-
Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable?
-
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.
-
If pornography is part of your sexuality, then you have no right to your sexuality.
-
Marxism teaches that exploitation and degradation somehow produce resistance and revolution. It's been hard to say why. What I've learned from women's experience with sexuality is that exploitation and degradation produce grateful complicity in exchange for survival. They produce self-loathing to the point of extinction of self, and it is respect for self that makes resistance conceivable.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Men, permitted to put words (and other things) in women's mouths, create scenes in which women desperately want to be bound, battered, tortured, humiliated, and killed.
-
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.
-
In all these situations, there was not enough violence against them to take it beyond the category of sex; they were not coerced enough.
-
Feminism is built on believing women's accounts of sexual use and abuse by men.
-
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.