Reading Dworkin and MacKinnon: A Memo
This article serves as my ninth-week theory round-up for GWS 444, taught by Dr. Kate (Katherine Phelps) at UW-Madison in 2025 Fall.
“Maybe feminists are considered castrating because equality is not sexy.”
Starts with Dworkin (1983) I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape. The title of her speech is so powerful that I want to take notes on it first. She stated that even in wars, there are days of truce (p. 24). However, the sexual assaults against women never stop. Every three minutes, a woman is being raped (p. 17). Hence, what she wants to say to those male feminists or men’s rights activists is simple: Go and organize a truce. Stop your side for one day. I want a twenty-four-hour truce during which there’s no rape (p. 24). In addition, I was impressed by her keen opinion on the “no-all-men claims.” She hits the point directly by saying, “Don’t tell me. Tell the pornographers. Tell the pimps. Tell the warmakers. Tell the rape apologists and the rape celebrationists and the pro-rape ideologues. Tell the novelists who think that rape is wonderful. Tell Larry Flynt. Tell Hugh Hefner. There’s no point in telling me. I’m only a woman. There’s nothing I can do about it. These men presume to speak for you. They are in the public arena, saying that they represent you. If they don’t, then you had better let them know.” Oh my god. These are sentences that I’ve been looking for so long. Why do those “not-all-men” claimers always tell this to feminists, especially those who are women, not those who are representing them? Finally, I want to highlight Dworkin’s emphasis on practices. She stated “if equality is what you want and what you care about, then you have to fight for the institutions that will make it socially real. It’s not just a matter of your attitude. You can’t think it and make it exist.” (p. 22) These sentences show how feminist theories are not the aggregation of thoughts, but practices. We build feminist theories not because we’re bored and have nothing to do in the afternoon, so we randomly choose some topics to think about. We think about feminism because we witness some unbearable inequality and we want to change. If social change is what we want, we must spend our time working to make it happen, not just sit on our couch and wait for miracles that change the world the way we want. We must have a basic agenda for political actions in our personal lives. That’s my other interpretation for understanding “personal is political.”
Let’s move on to Catherine MacKinnon, the advisor of my feminist enlightenment tutor, my professor in Taiwan. She is well-known for her anti-pornography position (for the latest update of her anti-pornography position, see her critiques on OnlyFans: OnlyFans Is Not a Safe Platform for ‘Sex Work.’ It’s a Pimp. This article is fantastic.) and her debates with Dworkin. In this week’s reading, she elaborated on her anti-pornography stance by discussing sexuality. The first thing that caught my eye was her opinion on what makes a theory feminist. She stated that a theory of sexuality becomes feminist methodologically, to the extent that it treats sexuality as a social construct of male power: defined by men, forced on women, and constitutive of the meaning of gender (p. 128). This is one of her fundamental assumptions about gender issues: a socially constructed hierarchical power relation defined by men, imposed on women, and constituting the meaning of gender. Maybe because I started my feminist journey with Mackinnon’s works, this way of viewing gender profoundly influenced my current understanding of feminism. Feminism is always about power, not only about oppression but also about constitution, as Foucault had said. So, in my opinion, if a discussion called itself feminist but didn’t address power analysis, it would miss a crucial point that would severely erode its persuasiveness.
Applying this definition to the analysis of sexuality, Mackinnon stated that this not only means that unequal gender relationships socially construct sexuality, but also means that sexuality’s fundamental motive force is the excitement at the reduction of a person to a thing, to less than a human being. Hence, sexual difference is a function of sexual dominance, the distribution of social power by gender (p. 130). Then, we got her second argument about sexuality: the social relations of dominance/submission. Hence, gender is a socially constructed relation centered on relations of dominance/submission. Based on this assumption, Mackinnon argued that those considered as female sexuality or a “woman” were defined by what male desire requires for arousal and satisfaction (p. 131). So, from this point of view, we will not agree with some feminists who regard rapes as violence, not sex. Mackinnon criticized this kind of position, which preserves the “sex is good” norm by simply distinguishing forced sex as “not sex.” She also disagreed with claims that equate sexuality with pleasure, as if women under male supremacy have the power to negotiate the pleasure, as if the negotiation is a form of freedom. In Mackinnon’s perspective, sexuality is about dominance and how to end it, not pleasure and how to get it (p. 135).
Viewing sexuality as a domination relationship, framing Mackinnon’s opinions on rape, battery, sexual harassment, incest, child sexual abuse, prostitution, and pornography. All these issues are related to sexuality, hence associated with how dominance and submission are sexualized, how gender inequality constitutes sexuality, and how these sexual mechanisms are attached to male and female (p. 136). In my opinion, it’s crucial to put her former discussion and assumptions of gender inequality and sexuality into consideration, or Mackinnon’s radical anti-sex opinion will be misunderstood as a simple, cheap rejection of sex, as if it is the meaning of personal agency. First, she discussed pornography. Why put pornography in the up front is because it is a means through which sexuality is socially constructed, a site of construction, a domain of exercise (p. 139). Pornography is a visual objectification of what men want. The violation of women is made sexual, made sexy, fun, and liberating of women’s true nature in pornography (p. 138). Here, Mackinnon cited Dworkin’s opinion on pornography, which I think is very useful to understand the thoughts of anti-pornography: The major theme of pornography as a genre is male power (p. 139). Again, Dworkin hit the nail on the head. Pornography is not harmless fantasy or a corrupt and confused misrepresentation of otherwise natural, healthy sex; it is not fundamentally a distortion, reflection, projection, expression, representation, fantasy, or symbol of it. Pornography is real: the sex that makes it is real and often abuse, and the sex that it makes is sex and is often abuse (p. 152). In addition, Mackinnon also thought that the capacity of gender reversals (dominatrices) and inversion (homosexuality) to stimulate sexual excitement is derived precisely from their mimicry or parody or negation or reversal of the standard arrangement (p. 144).
After discussing pornography, Mackinnon talked about rapes and incest. Her logic is consistent. We shouldn’t treat rapes as something abnormal that a rapist does, as if he were a separate species. We should see the whole system that rewards men to rape people. Under the dominance, the line between consensual intercourse and rapes is thin. If we see sexuality as pleasure, not a dominance relationship, women who felt loved, aroused, and comforted during incest, or orgasm during rape, will feel betrayed by their body and come to believe that they wanted the rape or the incest and interpret violation as their own sexuality (p. 148). However, the truth is that sexuality and sexual arousal are conditioned responses to a set of social cues.
Mackinnon thought, as she put it, that to seek an equal sexuality without political transformation is to seek equality under conditions of inequality. In this sense, macro-political transformation is more important and effective than personal autonomy, which may be the reason why this book was named “Toward a Feminist Theory of State.” We could find that the agency of a person under this definition is limited; that’s one of the common criticisms of Mackinnon. However, I always think the teaching of Mackinnon is not a simple rejection of anything related to sex, even though she explicitly stated, “reject this”, but that we should be sensitive to the social process of how a power relation is sexualized. As Ti-Grace Atkinson said, “ (if forced to choose between freedom and sex,) She (feminists) would choose freedom every time.”
Reference
Dworkin, Andrea, 1983, I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape. A Speech given at the Midwest Regional Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men in the fall of 1983 at St. Paul, Minnesota.
MacKinnon, Catherine, 1989, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
