Catharine MacKinnon famous quotes

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

#Matter #Able #Nonsense

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

#Ideas #Dawn #Essentials

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

#Government #Goal #Feminist

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

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

#Betrayal #Home #People

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

#Color #People #Great Men

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

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

#Sex #Violence #Enough

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

#Names #Feminism #Opinion

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

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

#Men #Feminist #Academia

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

#Facts #Nonsense #Assault

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

Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable?
-- Catharine MacKinnon

#Genocide #Perpetrators #Postmodernism

Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.
-- Catharine MacKinnon

#Sex #Feels

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

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

All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman.
-- Catharine MacKinnon

#Sex #Couple #Feminist

Empirically, all ***** 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

Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism...
-- Catharine MacKinnon

#Feminist #Feminism #Sexuality

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

#Individuality #Groups #Alternatives

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

#Believe #Men #Abuse

If you want to know who is being hurt in this society, go see what is being done and to whom in ***** and then go look for them other places in the world.
-- Catharine MacKinnon

#Hurt #Looks #Done

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

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 #Use #Denial

Women are raped and coerced into sex.
-- Catharine MacKinnon

#Sex

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 #Males

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

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

#Benefits #Force #Standing

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

#People #Relation

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

#Genius #Able #Decent