Catharine Mackinnon Quotes

#1. Male and female are created through the erotization of dominance and submission.

Catharine A. MacKinnon

#2. All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman.

Catharine MacKinnon

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

Catharine MacKinnon

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

Catharine MacKinnon

#5. Man fucks woman; subject verb object.

Catharine A. MacKinnon

#6. 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

#7. 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

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

Catharine MacKinnon

#9. In my opinion, no feminism worthy of the name is not methodologically post-marxist.

Catharine MacKinnon

#10. 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

#11. [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

#12. 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

#13. Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable?

Catharine MacKinnon

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. Women are raped and coerced into sex.

Catharine MacKinnon

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

Catharine A. MacKinnon

#19. 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

#20. 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

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

Catharine MacKinnon

#22. 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

#23. Division may be rational or irrational. Dominance either seems or is justified. Difference is.

Catharine A. MacKinnon

#24. All women live in objectification the way fish live in water. - Catharine A. MacKinnon WHEN

Jessica Valenti

#25. Law in the United States is at once a powerful medium and a medium for power.

Catharine MacKinnon

#26. 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

#27. If pornography is part of your sexuality, then you have no right to your sexuality.

Catharine MacKinnon

#28. 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

#29. People can find eroticism in relations with people whom they respect and whom they see as equals.

Catharine MacKinnon

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism ...

Catharine MacKinnon

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. We know things with our lives and we live that knowledge, beyond what any theory has yet theorized.

Catharine A. MacKinnon

#39. 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