Top 33 Quotes & Sayings by Catharine MacKinnon

It's mainly a few elite women who benefit greatly from standing with the forces that keep women down.

Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted.

It's particularly hard to take being stabbed in the back close to home. There's always a feeling of betrayal when people of your own group oppose you.

In not having an appointment at Harvard, I'm in the company of a great many people whose work I admire tremendously, in particular women of color.

To be a prisoner means to be defined as a member of a group for whom the rules of what can be done to you, of what is seen as abuse of you, are reduced as part of the definition of your status.

Instead of being lionized and admired for her genius, instead of being able to earn a decent living as a writer, Andrea Dworkin was misrepresented and demonized.

So the idea that there is nothing essential, in the sense that there are no human universals, is dogma. Ask most anyone who is going to be shot at dawn.

What postmodernism gives us instead is a multicultural defense for male violence - a defense for it wherever it is, which in effect is a pretty universal defense.

Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable?

Women are socially disadvantaged in controlling sexual access to their bodies through socialization to customs that define a woman's body as for sexual use by men. Sexual access is regularly forced or pressured or routinized beyond denial.

Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism.

If pornography is part of your sexuality, then you have no right to your sexuality.

The arena of logic was made by men for men; it was expressly founded on the exclusion of what is not male, as well as what is not Greek, not Christian, nor Western, not Aryan.

Feminism is built on believing women's accounts of sexual use and abuse by men.

An individual's treatment and alternatives in life may depend as much on the reputation of the group to which that person belongs as on their own merit.

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.

In all these situations, there was not enough violence against them to take it beyond the category of sex; they were not coerced enough.

In my opinion, no feminism worthy of the name is not methodologically post-marxist.

Law in the United States is at once a powerful medium and a medium for power.

The unnamed should not be mistaken for the nonexistent.

Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism.

In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.

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.

Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable - not the basis of literature. 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.... You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent - you learn, in a word, femininity.

Women are raped and coerced into sex.

If you want to know who is being hurt in this society, go see what is being done and to whom in pornography and then go look for them other places in the world.

Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.

Stopped as attribute of a person, sex inequality takes the form of gender; moving as a relation between people, it takes the form of sexuality. Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualization of inequaltiy between men and women.

Power is being able to say complete and utter nonsense and have it be believed, powerlessness is where no matter how much cogent evidence and proof one has, to not be believed.

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

Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission.

Empirically, all pornography is made under conditions of inequality based on sex, overwhelmingly by poor, desperate, homeless, pimped women who were sexually abused as children.

Men, permitted to put words (and other things) in women's mouths, create scenes in which women desperately want to be bound, battered, tortured, humiliated, and killed.