Catharine MacKinnon Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Women are raped and coerced into sex.
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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.
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It's mainly a few elite women who benefit greatly from standing with the forces that keep women down.
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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.
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Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.