More MacKinnon-bashing, interrupted

I'm glad there are a few people out there correcting the anti-feminist foolishness going on all over Yahoo!Answers.

KD

Question

What is it with radical feminists, why are they so hateful and delusional?

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

Right, so reproduction is an act of violence and women are always the victims?

"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." -- Catherine MacKinnon

How many of you girl feel this way about your father?

Answer:

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

If you see quotes with her name spelled "Catherine" not Catharine, they probably aren't even by her! Can you cite where those quotes are from--from which chapters in which books of hers? If not, how do you know the quotes are even accurate? Why write off someone with misquotes?

See "Snopes.com": they explain that the MacKinnon statements you quote above, with variations, that "all sex is rape/all intercourse is harmful to women" are a myth, and you can find out where it all started--in Playboy magazine because Hugh Hefner didn't like her. Geez--maybe because he's made a fortune selling one narrow idea of feminine beauty, for men's pleasure, not women's?

MacKinnon helped craft sexual harassment law, which has helped thousands of women fend off men's misogyny--the real stuff--in the workplace, such as women being fired if they don't have sex with their male bosses. See the movie North Country, for more. (Based on a true story.) She's helped identify, as fully human, the women serially raped in prostitution and pornography, and if you don't know those women, check out Rebecca Mott's blog (link below), for personal accounting of the pain--the human pain, that, if you have a heart, you'd feel as well.

It's so much easier to write off an important human rights activist than to focus on the harm men actually do to women, isn't it? Most women I know have experienced some form of rape, most of it in dating and marriage. Isn't that more of a social problem than two misquotes?

I recommend you read her books carefully and take what is valuable from them, rather than trying to discredit her with a couple of misquotes. Please show her the same respect and regard afforded to anti-feminist writers to feminist writers. Here's what some, including men, say about her important work.

[MacKinnon] is undeniably one of feminism's most significant figures, a ferociously tough-minded lawyer and academic who has sought to use the law to clamp down on sexual harassment and pornography.
--Stuart Jeffries (The Guardian )

Catharine A. MacKinnon is the world's leading feminist legal theorist, and her work over the past three decades has helped create an entire field of theorizing about gender, the State, and law. Along with the late Andrea Dworkin, MacKinnon has also become one of the major thinkers and activists on the issue of women's rights in the global arena, particularly regarding the way in which enduring distinctions between the public and the private spheres (in areas such as pornography, for example) sustain a matrix of inequality and exploitation. In this collection of previously published essays and public lectures, MacKinnon focuses on the international legal dimensions of feminist theory. She asks how international law, specifically international human rights protections, might be structured to take account of the uniqueness of crimes against women.
--Charles King (Times Literary Supplement )

Ms. MacKinnon provides numerous vivid and intensely disturbing examples of governments, through overt action or callous indifference, treating women as less than human and, thus, denying women their human rights...She is seeking to effect legal change on a global scale.
--Kay E. Wilde (New York Law Journal Magazine )

Source(s):

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mackinnon.a…

http://www.amazon.com/Are-Women-Human-In…

http://www.amazon.com/Catharine-A.-MacKi…

http://rmott62.wordpress.com/2008/02/21/…

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0395972/