Left2Right Comments

Catherine MacKinnon may not have said that sex = rape, but you don't have to hate feminism or MacKinnon to make this understandable mistake.

MacKinnon has said the following: pornography is "graphic sexually explicit materials that subordinate women through pictures or words."

MacKinnon then describes what sexually explicit materials she thinks subordinate women, and it turns out to include almost all graphic depictions of sex: "from Playboy, in which women are objectified. . .; through the torture of women. . .; to snuff films, in which actual murder is the ultimate sexual act. . ."

Of course, MacKinnon then argues forcefully that pornography is harmful -- so harmful that it ought to be "actionable as a civil rights violation."

MacKinnon's readiness to define virtually any visual depiction of sex as harmful pornography means that her readers can be forgiven their all-too-common mistake of believing that MacKinnon is equating sex with rape.

This doesn't mean of course that what MacKinnon actually does say isn't valuable or even correct. My point is simply that attributing the sex = rape equation to Catherine MacKinnon is far from a "preposterous smear."

Carey