Catharine MacKinnon Quotes

Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.