PORNOGRAPHY IS ABUSE AGAINST WOMEN

PORNOGRAPHY IS ABUSE AGAINST WOMEN

1. PORNOGRAPHY IS A FORM OF SEXUAL ABUSE

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School, ONLY WORDS, 1993,

p. 9.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School, TOWARD A FEMINIST THEORY OF THE STATE, 1989, p. 207-8.

The dominant view is that pornography must cause harm just as car accidents cause harm, or its effects are not cognizable as harm. The trouble with this individuated, atomistic, linear, exclusive, isolated narrowly tortlike—in a word, positivistic—concept of injust is that the way pornography targets and defines women for abuse and discrimination does not work like this. It does hurt individuals, just not as individuals in a one-at-a-time sense, but as members of the group women.
3. ABUSE IS PERPETRATED AGAINST WOMEN FOR PORNOGRAPHY

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School, ONLY WORDS, 1993, p. 15.

It is for pornography, and not by the ideas in it that women are hurt and penetrated, tied and gagged, undressed and gentially spread and sprayed with lacquer and water so sex pictures can be made. Only for pornography are women killed to make a sex movie, and it is not the idea of a sex killing that kills them. It is unnecessary to do any of these things to express, as ideas, the ideas pornography expresses. It is essential to do them to make pornography.

GOVERNMENT POLICIES AND LAWS ARE MALE-ORIENTED

1. THE STATE IS CREATED FROM A MALE PERSPECTIVE

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School, , TOWARD A FEMINIST THEORY OF THE STATE, 1989, p. 16 1-2.

The state is male in the feminist sense: the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women. The liberal state coercively and authoritatively constitutes the social order in the interest of men as a gender—through its legitimating norms, forms, relation to society, and substantive policies. The state’s formal norms recapitulate the male point of view on the level of design.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School, , TOWARD A FEMINIST THEORY OF THE STATE, 1989, p. 163.

The state is male jurisprudentially, meaning that it adopts the standpoint of male power on the relation between law and society. This stance is especially vivid in constitutional adjudication, though legitimate to the degree it is neutral on the policy content of legislation. The foundation for its neutrality is the pervasive assumption that conditions that pertain among men on the basis of gender apply to women as well—that is, the assumption that sex inequality does not really exist in society.
3. MALE POINT OF VIEW FRAMES STATE POLICY

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School, , TOWARD A FEMINIST THEORY OF THE STATE, 1989, p. 165.

The way the male point of view frames an experience is the way it is framed by state policy. Over and over again, the state protects male power through embodying and ensuring existing male control over women at every level—cushioning, qualifying, or de jure appearing to prohibit its excesses when necessary to its normalization. De jure relations stabilize de facto relations.

ABORTION LAWS MAINTAIN MAN’S CONTROL OVER WOMEN

1. ABORTION POLICIES EXIST TO MAINTAIN MAN’S CONTROL OVER WOMEN

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School, , TOWARD A FEMINIST THEORY OF THE STATE, 1989, p. 168.

To the extent that abortion exists to control the reproductive consequences of intercourse, hence to facilitate male sexual access to women, access to abortion will be controlled by “a man or The Man.” So long as this is effectively done socially, it is unnecessary to do it by law. Law need merely stand passively by, reflecting the passing scene. The law of sex equality stays as far away as possible from issues of sexuality.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School, , TOWARD A

FEMINIST THEORY OF THE STATE, 1989, p. 188.

So why was abortion legalized? Why were women given even that much control? It is not an accusation of

bad faith to answer that the interests of men as a social group converge with the definition of justice embodied in law through the male point of view. The abortion right frames the ways men arrange among

themselves to control the reproductive consequences of intercourse. The availability of abortion enhances

the availability to intercourse.
3. ABORTION RIGHTS ARE DEVELOPED TO ENHANCE CONTROL OF MEN OVER WOMEN Catharine A. MacKinnon, Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School, , TOWARD A FEMINIST THEORY OF THE STATE, 1989, p. 189.

But if one’s concern is not how more people can get more sex, but who defines sexuality—both pleasure and violation—and therefore who defines women, the abortion right is situated within a very different problematic: the social and political inequality of the sexes. This repositioning of the issue requires reformulating the problem of sexuality from the repression of drives by civilization to the oppression of women by men.