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Catharine MacKinnon

Catharine MacKinnon Quotes

Lawyer

Catharine MacKinnon is a distinguished lawyer and feminist scholar recognized for her work on women's rights and sexual harassment law. Born on October 7, 1946, she has made significant contributions to the legal and academic fields, particularly in advocating for gender equality and challenging patriarchal norms.

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Famous Catharine MacKinnon Quotes

“we know things with our lives and we live that knowledge, beyond what any theory has theorized.”

Knowing Ineffable

Author:Catharine MacKinnon

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

Force Benefits Standing Elites

Author: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.”

Able Genius Decent Andrea

Author: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.”

Men Want Scene Mouths Bounds Humiliated Battered

Book:Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

Source: Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

“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.”

Knows Men Made Social Sex Men And Women Female Males Gender Divided Requirements Submission Dominance Heterosexuality Heterosexuality Is

Book:Toward a Feminist Theory of the State

Source: Toward a Feminist Theory of the State

“Women are raped and coerced into sex.”

Author: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.”

Men Use Body Access Denial Customs Women's Bodies Pressured Socialization Disadvantaged

Author: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.”

“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.”

Children Made Sex Poor Conditions Inequality Desperate Homeless Pornography Sexually

Book:Only Words

Source: Only Words

“The unnamed should not be mistaken for the nonexistent.”

Should Reality Existence Mistaken

Author:Catharine MacKinnon

“Law in the United States is at once a powerful medium and a medium for power.”

States Law United Powerful United States Mediums

Author:Catharine MacKinnon

“If pornography is part of your sexuality, then you have no right to your sexuality.”

Ifs Sexuality Pornography

Author: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.”

People Hard Feelings Home Groups Betrayal

Author:Catharine MacKinnon

“Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable?”

Genocide Postmodernism Perpetrators Postmodern Post Modernism

Book:Are Women Human?

Source: Are Women Human?

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

Feels Sex Misandry Man Hater

Book:Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

Source: Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

“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.”

Self Hard Teach Produce Revolution Survival Grateful Sexuality Resistance I've Learned Exploitation Extinction Marxism Degradation Loathing Self Loathing Complicity

Book:Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

Source: Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

“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.”

Men Pain Father Grows Growing Up Mouths Down And Feminist Legs Horrible Another Man Covering Misandry Radical Feminist

Book:Only Words

Source: Only Words

“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.”

Men Wells Made Christian Feminism Logic Western Males Feminist Greek Arena Exclusion

Author:Catharine MacKinnon

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

Men Believe Use Feminism Built Abuse Accounts Radical Radical Feminism Misandry Use And Abuse

Book:Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

Source: Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

“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.”

Life May Persons Individual Groups Depends Individuality Reputation Alternatives Merit Treatment

Book:Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

Source: Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

“Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism.”

Feminism Feminist Sexuality Marxism

Book:Toward a Feminist Theory of the State

Source: Toward a Feminist Theory of the State

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

Government Goal Feminism Feminist Socialism Communism Communist Socialist Radical Feminist

Author: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.”

Mean Done Groups Members Abuse Definitions Defined Prisoner

Book:Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

Source: Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

“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.”

Facts Equality Nonsense Assault Humiliation Sexual Assault Syllables

Book:Only Words

Source: Only Words

“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.”

People Company Particular Color Admire Great Men Harvard Appointments

Author: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.”

People Men Persons Moving Form Sex Men And Women Relation Gender Sexuality Inequality Attributes

Author: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.”

Enough Sex Situation Violence Categories

Book:Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

Source: Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

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

Names Opinion Feminism Worthy Posts Marxist

Book:Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

Source: Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

“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 Violence Effects Universal Males Defense Postmodernism Multicultural

Book:Are Women Human?

Source: Are Women Human?

“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 World Theory Men And Women Feminist Academic Elites Rooted Academia Postmodernism Postmodern Feminist Theory

Book:Are Women Human?

Source: Are Women Human?

“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.”

Humans Ideas Asks Essentials Shots Dawn Dogma Aquariums

Book:Are Women Human?

Source: Are Women Human?

“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.”

Ifs Knows World Want Looks Done Hurt Pornography Places In The World This Society Being Done Being Hurt

Author: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.”

Believe Matter Able Power Evidence Proof Nonsense Utterance Powerlessness Completeness Nonsensical

Author:Catharine MacKinnon

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

People Relation

Author:Catharine MacKinnon

About the Author

Born: October 7, 1946
Known for: Lawyer
Quotes: 34

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Books & Sources

Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and LawRelated source material

Are Women Human?Related source material

Only WordsRelated source material

Toward a Feminist Theory of the StateRelated source material

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