Quotes by Catharine A. MacKinnon

This defines the task of feminism not only because male dominance is perhaps the most pervasive and tenacious system of power in history, but because it is metaphysically near perfect. Its point of view is the standard for point-of-viewlessness, its particularity the meaning of universality. Its force is exercised as consent, its authority as participation, its supremacy as the paradigm of order, its control as the definition of legitimacy. In the face of this, feminism claims the voice of womens silence, the sexuality of womens eroticized desexualization, the fullness of lack, the centrality of womens marginality and exclusion, the public nature of privacy, the presence of womens absence. This approach is more complex than transgression, more transformative than transvaluation, deeper than mirror-imaged resistance, more affirmative than the negation of negativity. It is neither materialist nor idealist; it is feminist. Neither the transcendence of liberalism nor the determination of materialism works for women. Idealism is too unreal; womens inequality is enforced, so it cannot simply be thought out of existence, certainly not by women. Materialism is too real; womens inequality has never not existed, so womens equality never has. That is, the equality of women to men will not be scientifically provable until it is no longer necessary to do so... If feminism is revolutionary, this is why.

Women, it is said, possess corresponding power. Through consciousness-raising, women found that womens so-called power was the other side of female powerlessness. A womens supposed power to deny sex is the underside of her actual lack of power to stop it. Womens 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.

To be rapable, a position that is social not biological, defines what a woman is.

Men who are in prison for rape think its the dumbest thing that ever happened... its isnt just a miscarriage of justice; they were put in jail for something very little different from what most men do most of the time and call it sex. The only difference is they got caught. That view is nonremorseful and not rehabilitative. It may also be true. It seems to me that we have here a convergence between the rapistss view of what he has done and the victims perspective on what was done to her. That is, for both, their ordinary experiences of heterosexual intercourse and the act of rape have something in common. Now this gets us into immense trouble, because thats exactly how judges and juries see it who refuse to convict men accused of rape. A rape victim has to prove that it was not intercourse. She has to show that there was force and that she resisted, because if there was sex, consent is inferred. Finders of fact look for more force than usual during the preliminaries. Rape is defined by distinction from intercourse - not nonviolence, intercourse. They ask, does this event look more like fucking or like rape? But what is their standard for sex, and is this question asked from the womens point of view? The level of force is not adjudicated at her point of violation; it is adjudicated at the standard for the normal level of force. Who sets this standard?

Marxism teaches that exploitation and degradation somehow produce resistance and revolution. Its been hard to say why. What Ive learned from womens 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.

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.