Quotes from Catharine MacKinnon

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.

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.

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

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

Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

We know things with our lives and we live that knowledge, beyond what any theory has yet theorized.

Male and female are created through the erotization of dominance and submission.

Man fucks woman, subject verb object.

Division may be rational or irrational. Dominance either seems or is justified. Difference is.

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

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

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.

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.

Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism.

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.

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.