Catharine A. MacKinnon Quotes & Sayings

[W]hat is this state, from women's point of view? The state is male in the feminist sense: the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women ... The state's formal norms recapitulate the male point of view on the level of design. — Catharine A. MacKinnon

To be rapable, a position that is social not biological, defines what a woman is. — Catharine A. MacKinnon

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. — Catharine A. MacKinnon

Male and female are created through the erotization of dominance and submission. — Catharine A. MacKinnon

Man fucks woman; subject verb object. — Catharine A. MacKinnon

In other words, for purposes of sex discrimination law, to be a woman means either to be like a man or like a lady. We have to meet either the male standard for males or the male standard for females. — Catharine A. MacKinnon

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. — Catharine A. MacKinnon

Division may be rational or irrational. Dominance either seems or is justified. Difference is. — Catharine A. MacKinnon

Women, it is said, possess corresponding power. Through consciousness-raising, women found that women's so-called power was the other side of female powerlessness. A women's supposed power to deny sex is the underside of her actual lack of power to stop it. Women's supposed power to get men to do things for them by nagging or manipulating is the other side of the power they lack to have their every need anticipated, to carry out the task themselves, or to invoke physical fear to gain compliance with their desires without even having to mention it. Once the veil is lifted, once relations between the sexes are seen as power relations, it becomes impossible to see as simply unintented, well-intentioned, or innocent the actions through which women are told every day what is expected and when they have crossed some line. — Catharine A. MacKinnon

We know things with our lives and we live that knowledge, beyond what any theory has yet theorized. — Catharine A. MacKinnon