Feminism Unmodified Quotes

“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 A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

“In other words, for purposes of sex discrimination law, to be a woman means either to be like a man or like a lady. We have to meet either the male standard for males or the male standard for females.”
― Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law

“I think that sexual desire in women, at least in this culture, is socially constructed as that by which we come to want our own self-annihilation. That is, our subordination is eroticized in and as female; in fact, we get off on it to a degree. I'm saying femininity as we know it is how we come to want male dominance, which most emphatically is not in our interest.”
― Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law