Catharine MacKinnon Quotes & Sayings

Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism. — 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. — 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

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. — Catharine MacKinnon

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. — 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. — Catharine MacKinnon

In my opinion, no feminism worthy of the name is not methodologically post-marxist. — 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. — Catharine MacKinnon

Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated. — Catharine MacKinnon

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. — 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. — 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. — Catharine MacKinnon

Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism ... — 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. — Catharine MacKinnon

Feminism is built on believing women's accounts of sexual use and abuse by men. — Catharine MacKinnon

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. — Catharine MacKinnon

Law in the United States is at once a powerful medium and a medium for power. — Catharine MacKinnon

All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman. — Catharine MacKinnon

People can find eroticism in relations with people whom they respect and whom they see as equals. — Catharine MacKinnon

An individual's treatment and alternatives in life may depend as much on the reputation of the group to which that person belongs as on their own merit. — Catharine MacKinnon

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. — 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. — Catharine MacKinnon

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. — 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. — Catharine MacKinnon

Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable? — 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. — 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. — Catharine MacKinnon

If pornography is part of your sexuality, then you have no right to your sexuality. — Catharine MacKinnon

Women are raped and coerced into sex. — Catharine MacKinnon

It's mainly a few elite women who benefit greatly from standing with the forces that keep women down. — 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. — Catharine MacKinnon