Catharine MacKinnon Quotes

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All quotes by Catharine MacKinnon: Abuse Feminism Postmodernism Sexuality more...
  • 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.

    "Only Words". Book by Catharine MacKinnon, 1993.
  • The unnamed should not be mistaken for the nonexistent.

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

    Catharine A. MacKinnon (1987). “Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law”, p.5, Harvard University Press
  • 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.

  • Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.

    Catharine A. MacKinnon (1987). “Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law”, p.82, Harvard University Press
  • 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.

    Aquariums   Ideas   Dawn  
    Catharine A. MacKinnon (2007). “Are Women Human?”, p.53, Harvard University Press
  • 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.

    Men   Mouths   Want  
    Catharine A. MacKinnon (1987). “Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law”, p.148, Harvard University Press
  • 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.

    Men   Body   Use  
    "Reflections on Sex Equality under Law". "The Yale Law Journal", 1991.
  • Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism.

  • 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 A. MacKinnon (1987). “Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law”, p.192, Harvard University Press
  • 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.

    Sex   Men   Dominance  
    Catharine A. MacKinnon (1989). “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State”, p.113, Harvard University Press
  • People can find eroticism in relations with people whom they respect and whom they see as equals.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    Betrayal   Home   People  
    "Are women human?" by Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. April 12, 2006.
  • 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.

    Giving   Males   Defense  
    Catharine A. MacKinnon (2007). “Are Women Human?”, p.54, Harvard University Press
  • 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.

    Genius   Able   Decent  
  • 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 (1987). “Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law”, p.61, Harvard University Press
  • 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.

  • 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.

    Sex   Moving   Men  
    "Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law". Book by Catharine MacKinnon, 1987.
  • If pornography is part of your sexuality, then you have no right to your sexuality.

  • Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism.

    Catharine A. MacKinnon (1989). “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State”, p.3, Harvard University Press
  • 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   Feminist   Academia  
    Catharine A. MacKinnon (2007). “Are Women Human?”, p.62, Harvard University Press
  • Law in the United States is at once a powerful medium and a medium for power.

  • 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.

    Sex   Children   Homeless  
    Catharine A. MacKinnon (1996). “Only Words”, p.20, Harvard University Press
  • It's mainly a few elite women who benefit greatly from standing with the forces that keep women down.

    "Are women human?" by Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. April 12, 2006.
  • Women are raped and coerced into sex.

    Sex  
    "Reflections on Sex Equality under Law". "The Yale Law Journal", 1991.
  • 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.

    Mean   Abuse   Groups  
    Catharine A. MacKinnon (1987). “Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law”, p.170, Harvard University Press
  • 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 (1996). “Only Words”, p.109, Harvard University Press
  • Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable?

    Catharine A. MacKinnon (2007). “Are Women Human?”, p.58, Harvard University Press
  • 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.

    Hurt   Looks   Done  
    "Feminism unmodified: discourses on life and law". Book by Catharine MacKinnon, 1987.
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 33 quotes from the Lawyer Catharine MacKinnon, starting from October 7, 1946! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    Catharine MacKinnon quotes about: Abuse Feminism Postmodernism Sexuality