Catharine MacKinnon Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Believe, Power, Utterance

  97 Copy quote

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

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Government, Goal, Feminist

  49 Copy quote

• 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

  Sex, Men, Dominance

  Catharine A. MacKinnon (1989). “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State”, p.113, Harvard University Press

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  Sex, Children, Homeless

  Catharine A. MacKinnon (1996). “Only Words”, p.20, Harvard University Press

  47 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Body, Use

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

  40 Copy quote

• Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism.

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Feminist, Feminism, Sexuality

  Catharine A. MacKinnon (1989). “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State”, p.3, Harvard University Press

  36 Copy quote

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

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Sex, Misandry, Man Hater

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

  33 Copy quote

• 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.

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Growing Up, Pain, Father

  "Only Words". Book by Catharine MacKinnon, 1993.

  43 Copy quote

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

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Sexuality, Pornography, Ifs

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

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Believe, Men, Radical Feminism

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

  41 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Mouths, Want

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

  36 Copy quote

• The unnamed should not be mistaken for the nonexistent.

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Reality, Should, Existence

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• 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 MacKinnon

  Grateful, Self, Survival

  Catharine A. MacKinnon (1987). “Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law”, p.61, Harvard University Press

  43 Copy quote

• 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

  Hurt, Looks, Done

  "Feminism unmodified: discourses on life and law". Book by Catharine MacKinnon, 1987.

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Christian, Men, Feminist

  23 Copy quote

• 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 MacKinnon

  Equality, Facts, Nonsense

  Catharine A. MacKinnon (1996). “Only Words”, p.109, Harvard University Press

  10 Copy quote

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

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Benefits, Force, Standing

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

  39 Copy quote

• 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

  Sex, Moving, Men

  "Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law". Book by Catharine MacKinnon, 1987.

  7 Copy quote

• Women are raped and coerced into sex.

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Sex

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

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• 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

  Giving, Males, Defense

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

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• 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

  Mean, Abuse, Groups

  Catharine A. MacKinnon (1987). “Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law”, p.170, Harvard University Press

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Aquariums, Ideas, Dawn

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

  29 Copy quote

• 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

  Growing Up, Pain, Father

  Catharine A. MacKinnon (1996). “Only Words”, p.3, Harvard University Press

  31 Copy quote

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

  Catharine MacKinnon

  People, Relation

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Life, Individuality, Groups

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

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