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Women's Lives, Men's Laws
In the past twenty-five years, no one has been more instrumental than Catharine MacKinnon in making equal rights real for women. As Peter Jennings once put it, more than anyone else in legal studies, she "has made it easier for other women to seek justice." This collection, the first since MacKinnon's celebrated Feminism Unmodified appeared in 1987, brings together previously uncollected and unpublished work in the national arena from 1980 to the present, defining her clear, coherent, consistent approach to reframing the law of men on the basis of the lives of women.
By making visible the deep gender bias of existing law, MacKinnon has recast legal debate and action on issues of sex discrimination, sexual abuse, prostitution, pornography, and racism. The essays in this volume document and illuminate some of the momentous and ongoing changes to which this work contributes; the recognition of sexual harassment, rape, and battering as claims for sexual discrimination; the redefinition of rape in terms of women's actual experience of sexual violation; and the reframing of the pornography debate around harm rather than morality. The perspectives in these essays have played an essential part in changing American law and remain fundamental to the project of building a sex-equal future.
By making visible the deep gender bias of existing law, MacKinnon has recast legal debate and action on issues of sex discrimination, sexual abuse, prostitution, pornography, and racism. The essays in this volume document and illuminate some of the momentous and ongoing changes to which this work contributes; the recognition of sexual harassment, rape, and battering as claims for sexual discrimination; the redefinition of rape in terms of women's actual experience of sexual violation; and the reframing of the pornography debate around harm rather than morality. The perspectives in these essays have played an essential part in changing American law and remain fundamental to the project of building a sex-equal future.
568 pages, Paperback
First published February 28, 2005
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About the author
Catharine A. MacKinnon
39 books287 followersCatharine A. MacKinnon is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (long-term). She holds a BA from Smith College, a JD from Yale Law School, and a PhD in political science from Yale, and specializes in sex equality issues under international and domestic (including comparative and constitutional) law.
Prof. MacKinnon pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment and, with Andrea Dworkin, created ordinances recognizing pornography as a civil rights violation and the Swedish model for abolishing prostitution. The Supreme Court of Canada has largely accepted her approaches to equality, pornography, and hate speech, which have been influential internationally as well. Representing Bosnian women survivors of Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities, she won with co-counsel a damage award of $745 million in August 2000 in Kadic v. Karadzic under the Alien Tort Act, the first recognition of rape as an act of genocide.
(source: law.umich.edu)
Prof. MacKinnon pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment and, with Andrea Dworkin, created ordinances recognizing pornography as a civil rights violation and the Swedish model for abolishing prostitution. The Supreme Court of Canada has largely accepted her approaches to equality, pornography, and hate speech, which have been influential internationally as well. Representing Bosnian women survivors of Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities, she won with co-counsel a damage award of $745 million in August 2000 in Kadic v. Karadzic under the Alien Tort Act, the first recognition of rape as an act of genocide.
(source: law.umich.edu)
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June 19, 2024This book is thought-provoking and informative, what I read of it, and I hope one day to finish it. However, the author is a lawyer and writes like one. I just don’t have the mental energy to push through it now.
April 21, 2023
I’ve just finished reading yet another MacKinnon book, Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws, and as usual, it’s absolutely brilliant. The book is well worth a complete read; I paste below some perfect gems.
(My used copy is marked DISCARD by the Porter County Library system. In itself, telling. Sigh.)
Reading this now. It’s heavy-going, but well worth it. MacKinnon is absolutely brilliant. Her ideas, her articulation of those ideas, … Read all her books. As for this one, I’ll post outstanding bits as I go along.
“If something were done about male sexual aggression and intrusion on women as the paradigm of sex, there would be no abortion problem as we know it, if only because dramatically fewer abortions would likely be needed.” p19
“… it is the way society punishes women for reproduction that creates women’s problem with reproduction, not reproduction itself.” p26
“Men rise and fall. … In the lives of women, men are served, children are cared for, home is made, work is done, the sun goes down.” p32
“The allegedly forbidden quality of pornography sexualizes it by surrounding it with power and taboo and makes defending and using it appear to be an act of daring and danger … ” p37
“All the sexual abuses of women’s everyday lives that are not recognized by the law are there in the pornography: the humiliation, the objectification, the forced access, the torture, the use of children, the sexualized racial hatred, the misogyny. As Andrea Dworkin has said, ‘Pornography is the law for women.'” p37
“In goin from everyday life to law, sexual harassment went from a grip to a grievance, from a shameful story about a woman to actionable testimony about a man.” p40
“It is clear that men do not want to restrict pornography very much or they would treat it seriously, as they treat air traffic control, for instance.” p40
“Like other inequalities, but in its own way, the subjection of women is institutionalized, including in law, cumulatively and systematically shaping access to human dignity, respect, resources, physical security, credibility, membership in community, speech, and power. Composed of all its variations, the group women has a collective social history of disempowerment, exploitation, and subordination …” p52
Read pretty much all of chapter 9, “Of Mice and Men” wherein MacKinnon compares humans’ treatment of animals with men’s treatment of women …
“Both animals and women have been socially configured as property … specifically for possession and use. … status objects to be acquired and paraded by men … Men have also appointed themselvs women’s and animals’ representatives without asking …”(p93
“When your name is used to degrade others by attribution, it locates your relative standing as well, such as when ‘gir’l is used as an insult among boys.” p94
“Both women and animals are seen as needing to be subdued and controlled.” p94
[There are laws against ‘crush videos’ … ] There is no such law against depicting cruelty to women …” p96
“The notion of consent …, the law’s line between intercourse and rape, is so passive that a dead body could satisfy it.” p129
“Men may identify more readily with the fetus more than with the pregnant woman if only because all have been fetuses and none will ever be a pregnant woman.” p135
“Men, as a group, are not comparably disempowered by their reproductive capacities. Nobody forces them to impregnate women. They are not generally required by society to spend their lives caring for children to the comparative preclusion of other life pursuits.” p137
“… it shows how powerless women are that it takes a fetus to make a woman look powerful by comparison.” p141
“If states wanted to protect the fetus, rather than discriminate against women, they would help the woman, not make her a criminal.” p143
“Some states quarantine arrested women prostitutes but not arrested male customers … because the women are more likely to communicate venereal diseases than the men are. Where the women got the venereal diseases is not discussed …” p154
“In light of the evidence, human sexual aggression is best understood as social—attitudinal and ideological, role-bound and identity-defined—not natural. Causally speaking, nothing makes inevitable its high prevalence and incidence in everyday life, or in wars or genocides, except social rank orderings, advantage-seeking, inculcation, conformity (including to peer behavior and pressure, standards of prior generations, orders, media representations, and the like).” p240
“… consent to sex is not the same as wanting it.” p244
“You feel you have come upon a secret codebook that you were not meant to see but that has both obscured and determined your life.” p251
“Women should study these medical articles [Jeffrey Masson’s A Dark Science] for the same reasons they should study pornography: to see what is behind how they are seen and treated and to find out what men really think of them.” p251
“In the nineteenth century, men were looking at pornography, writing theology; looking at pornography, writing literature; looking at pornography, writing laws and designing our political institutions. Who is to say they were not also looking at pornography and writing and practicing science and medicine?” p255
“Men are very different with women than they are with men.” p283
“Women learned, or relearned, that powerlessness means not being believed no matter how much sense you make or how much evidence you have.” p288
“Whether Bill Clinton should resign depends on whether his ability to govern can survive being made into sex in public. Welcome to women’s lives, Bill … Now that you are sex, do you have any authority left?” p295
“It tells us how much women are worth that something few people have much good to say about [pornography] is more important than we are.” p308
“Many spoke of … the shattered self, and the shame, anger, anguish, outrage, and despair they felt at living in a country where their torture is enjoyed …” p314
“Through its consumption, it further institutionalizes a subhuman, victimized, second-class status for women by conditioning men’s orgasm to sexual inequality.” p316
“Most cities do not offer businesses where one can go and pay to abuse a Jew[ish man] or a Black [man] …” p317
[re protecting pornography as freedom of speech] “… women are now men’s ‘speech’ because our pain, humiliation, torture, use, and second-class status is something they want to say.” p325-6
“One [social belief about women and sexuality common on the Right] is that men have a stronger sex drive than women. That sex is a drive is assumed; that pleasure and reproduction drive men’s drivenness is treated as a natural fact. Socially compulsive and compulsory masculinity is not considered as a competing explanation.” p333
[In response to men being by nature predisposed to rape] “No one suggests that since men are evolutionarily more aggressive, they are hard-wired to murder, and that laws against murder should therefore be eliminated.” p336
“Each new communication technology—the printing press, the camera, the moving picture, the tape recorder, the telephone, the television, the video recorder, the VCR, cable, and, now, the computer—has brought more pornography with it.” p352
“Ever more women have had to live out ever more of their lives in environments pornography has made.” p352 [Consider ‘merely’ the increasing prevalence of being called a cunt.]
“As pornography saturates social life, it becomes more visible and legitmate, hence less visible as pornography.” p352
“Most pornography, if circulated in a working environment, would be actionable as sexual harassment. The damage done would be clear if the materials were nonsexual libel or the people involved were understood to be people rather than prostitutes or sex or ‘some women’ who are ‘like that’.” p353
“… what is done to women in pornography is not a fact of nature or an act of liberation or a private peccadillo to be respectfully skirted but an ongoing social atrocity.” p356
“Public available, effectively legal, pornography has stature: it is visible, credible, and legitimated. At the same time, its influence and damaging effects are denied as nonexistent, indeterminate, or merely academic, contrary to all the evidence. Its victims have had no stature at all.” p359
(My used copy is marked DISCARD by the Porter County Library system. In itself, telling. Sigh.)
Reading this now. It’s heavy-going, but well worth it. MacKinnon is absolutely brilliant. Her ideas, her articulation of those ideas, … Read all her books. As for this one, I’ll post outstanding bits as I go along.
“If something were done about male sexual aggression and intrusion on women as the paradigm of sex, there would be no abortion problem as we know it, if only because dramatically fewer abortions would likely be needed.” p19
“… it is the way society punishes women for reproduction that creates women’s problem with reproduction, not reproduction itself.” p26
“Men rise and fall. … In the lives of women, men are served, children are cared for, home is made, work is done, the sun goes down.” p32
“The allegedly forbidden quality of pornography sexualizes it by surrounding it with power and taboo and makes defending and using it appear to be an act of daring and danger … ” p37
“All the sexual abuses of women’s everyday lives that are not recognized by the law are there in the pornography: the humiliation, the objectification, the forced access, the torture, the use of children, the sexualized racial hatred, the misogyny. As Andrea Dworkin has said, ‘Pornography is the law for women.'” p37
“In goin from everyday life to law, sexual harassment went from a grip to a grievance, from a shameful story about a woman to actionable testimony about a man.” p40
“It is clear that men do not want to restrict pornography very much or they would treat it seriously, as they treat air traffic control, for instance.” p40
“Like other inequalities, but in its own way, the subjection of women is institutionalized, including in law, cumulatively and systematically shaping access to human dignity, respect, resources, physical security, credibility, membership in community, speech, and power. Composed of all its variations, the group women has a collective social history of disempowerment, exploitation, and subordination …” p52
Read pretty much all of chapter 9, “Of Mice and Men” wherein MacKinnon compares humans’ treatment of animals with men’s treatment of women …
“Both animals and women have been socially configured as property … specifically for possession and use. … status objects to be acquired and paraded by men … Men have also appointed themselvs women’s and animals’ representatives without asking …”(p93
“When your name is used to degrade others by attribution, it locates your relative standing as well, such as when ‘gir’l is used as an insult among boys.” p94
“Both women and animals are seen as needing to be subdued and controlled.” p94
[There are laws against ‘crush videos’ … ] There is no such law against depicting cruelty to women …” p96
“The notion of consent …, the law’s line between intercourse and rape, is so passive that a dead body could satisfy it.” p129
“Men may identify more readily with the fetus more than with the pregnant woman if only because all have been fetuses and none will ever be a pregnant woman.” p135
“Men, as a group, are not comparably disempowered by their reproductive capacities. Nobody forces them to impregnate women. They are not generally required by society to spend their lives caring for children to the comparative preclusion of other life pursuits.” p137
“… it shows how powerless women are that it takes a fetus to make a woman look powerful by comparison.” p141
“If states wanted to protect the fetus, rather than discriminate against women, they would help the woman, not make her a criminal.” p143
“Some states quarantine arrested women prostitutes but not arrested male customers … because the women are more likely to communicate venereal diseases than the men are. Where the women got the venereal diseases is not discussed …” p154
“In light of the evidence, human sexual aggression is best understood as social—attitudinal and ideological, role-bound and identity-defined—not natural. Causally speaking, nothing makes inevitable its high prevalence and incidence in everyday life, or in wars or genocides, except social rank orderings, advantage-seeking, inculcation, conformity (including to peer behavior and pressure, standards of prior generations, orders, media representations, and the like).” p240
“… consent to sex is not the same as wanting it.” p244
“You feel you have come upon a secret codebook that you were not meant to see but that has both obscured and determined your life.” p251
“Women should study these medical articles [Jeffrey Masson’s A Dark Science] for the same reasons they should study pornography: to see what is behind how they are seen and treated and to find out what men really think of them.” p251
“In the nineteenth century, men were looking at pornography, writing theology; looking at pornography, writing literature; looking at pornography, writing laws and designing our political institutions. Who is to say they were not also looking at pornography and writing and practicing science and medicine?” p255
“Men are very different with women than they are with men.” p283
“Women learned, or relearned, that powerlessness means not being believed no matter how much sense you make or how much evidence you have.” p288
“Whether Bill Clinton should resign depends on whether his ability to govern can survive being made into sex in public. Welcome to women’s lives, Bill … Now that you are sex, do you have any authority left?” p295
“It tells us how much women are worth that something few people have much good to say about [pornography] is more important than we are.” p308
“Many spoke of … the shattered self, and the shame, anger, anguish, outrage, and despair they felt at living in a country where their torture is enjoyed …” p314
“Through its consumption, it further institutionalizes a subhuman, victimized, second-class status for women by conditioning men’s orgasm to sexual inequality.” p316
“Most cities do not offer businesses where one can go and pay to abuse a Jew[ish man] or a Black [man] …” p317
[re protecting pornography as freedom of speech] “… women are now men’s ‘speech’ because our pain, humiliation, torture, use, and second-class status is something they want to say.” p325-6
“One [social belief about women and sexuality common on the Right] is that men have a stronger sex drive than women. That sex is a drive is assumed; that pleasure and reproduction drive men’s drivenness is treated as a natural fact. Socially compulsive and compulsory masculinity is not considered as a competing explanation.” p333
[In response to men being by nature predisposed to rape] “No one suggests that since men are evolutionarily more aggressive, they are hard-wired to murder, and that laws against murder should therefore be eliminated.” p336
“Each new communication technology—the printing press, the camera, the moving picture, the tape recorder, the telephone, the television, the video recorder, the VCR, cable, and, now, the computer—has brought more pornography with it.” p352
“Ever more women have had to live out ever more of their lives in environments pornography has made.” p352 [Consider ‘merely’ the increasing prevalence of being called a cunt.]
“As pornography saturates social life, it becomes more visible and legitmate, hence less visible as pornography.” p352
“Most pornography, if circulated in a working environment, would be actionable as sexual harassment. The damage done would be clear if the materials were nonsexual libel or the people involved were understood to be people rather than prostitutes or sex or ‘some women’ who are ‘like that’.” p353
“… what is done to women in pornography is not a fact of nature or an act of liberation or a private peccadillo to be respectfully skirted but an ongoing social atrocity.” p356
“Public available, effectively legal, pornography has stature: it is visible, credible, and legitimated. At the same time, its influence and damaging effects are denied as nonexistent, indeterminate, or merely academic, contrary to all the evidence. Its victims have had no stature at all.” p359
August 5, 2019
Although I am not from the USA or any Common law nation for that matter, MacKinnon's collection of speeches and articles were of greatest value. The particulars would, of course, be of more interest if they had more direct connotations to the juridical system in use in Sweden, where I live, but its over-all usefulness, regardless, should only prove how well-versed MacKinnon is. From prostitution, pornography, rape laws, sex discrimination, and work-place harassment, she delivers well-written texts and speeches; cementing her material feminist agenda of proving how sexuality (and sex) is monolithic in a male-dominated society. I do not concur with all of her points, nonetheless, the over-all stylistics of the texts is an excellent contribution to MacKinnon's oeuvre. It aptly shows how liberal notions such as universality, neutrality, equality, consent, contract, etc., are as a matter of fact interlaced and saturated with patriarchal flavour. "Liberal" thinkers from Aristotle to Foucault are criticised, psychoanalytic thinkers, postmodernism, liberalism, right- and left-wing politics and philosophy, are all debunked (if one accepts MacKinnon's conclusions). Even if one strongly disagrees with radical feminism (as I do), it is hard not to appreciate her contribution to a field which has been substantially dominated by poststructuralist feminists, from hooks, to Spivak, to Spelman, to Butler; MacKinnon shows the importance of feminist epistemology, consciousness-raising, and women's (uniform) realities.
April 26, 2025
3.5. Interesting but the last half of the book is not terribly convincing, especially her arguments about pornography as a civil rights issue. She's justifiably angry about being labeled an anti-sex kook, but a lot of her suggestions are just not workable. There SHOULD be remedies for women and children who have been coerced into making porn (and by now there are), legal means by which they can compel distributors to remove their unlicensed images, ability to sue for defamation, etc. but trying to establish that male consumption of porn (and women's inadvertent exposure to porn) leads to tangible harm to women is a lot more nebulous. How are you going to quantify the harm that someone feels because they have been exposed to porn? How do you calculate damages for inadvertent consumption of porn? How do you establish that it was porn that caused a man to move from fantasizing about raping women into actually raping them? Would you treat possession of porn by an assailant as an aggravating factor, like committing an assault with a deadly weapon? I commend her willingness to think outside the box and try to find a solution for women being abused and her dedication to protecting women, but this approach isn't a winner. I'm interested to see what she thinks now that gender and queer studies and the sexual landscape in general has changed so much since this was published.
June 2, 2020
"The Roar on the Other Side of Silence" makes me so goddamn mad and sad. I believe I've read it before, but the essay REALLY pops and the smear campaign and defamation she and Dworkin were subject to even more sinister after engaging with more of her legal scholarship and theorizing. There are several men I wish I could have the legal apparatus to sue the shit out of.
August 28, 2021
I don't agree with MacKinnon about everything, but her views are informed and compelling. This book would be a good primer for anyone interested in civil rights law pertaining to gender.
August 31, 2024
en shock que en la facultad me hicieron hacer tal librazo
August 1, 2012
This book was extremely difficult to read--many times I had to go back a reread a sentence several time because it made no sense to me, or seemed contradictory to the points she was trying to make, which seemed to me to be that women are oppressed because men make the laws, society (Men) allows women to be marginalized legally by stacking the deck legally. She is especially interested in rape and in pornography and the way society deals with them.
Only for the dedicated.
Only for the dedicated.
August 4, 2007
haven't finished it
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews