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[hysterikas]

By including what violates women under civil and human rights law, the meaning of “citizen” and “human” begins to have a woman’s face. As women’s actual conditions are recognized as inhuman, those conditions are being changed by requiring that they meet a standard of citizenship and humanity that previously did not apply because they were women. In other words, women both change the standard as we come under it and change the reality it governs by having it applied to us. This democratic process describes not only the common law when it works but also a cardinal tenet of feminist analysis: women are entitled to access to things as they are and also to change them into something worth our having.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues; Postmodernism and Human Rights (2000)

[hysterikas]

Neither did feminism precisely lay claim to the territory that women had been assigned under this system. More, it was its claim to us that we sought to disclaim. We were not looking for a plusher cell or a more dignified stereotype. We were not looking to elaborate the feminine particularity as if it was ours; we had been living inside its walls for centuries. We were not looking to claim the subjectivity or subject position to which we had been relegated any more than we sought to oppress others by gaining access to the power to objectify and dominate that we had revealed as such. All this would have left what we were trying to challenge squarely in place; by comparison with our agenda, it was playing with, or within, blocks. Identity as such was not our issue. Inside, we knew who we were to a considerable extent. Gender identity—the term introduced by Robert Stoller in 1964 to refer to the mental representation of the self as masculine or feminine—situates women’s problem in the wrong place. Our priority was gaining access to the reality of our collective experience in order to understand and change it for all of us in our own lifetimes.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues; Postmodernism and Human Rights (2000)

[hysterikas]

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues; On Torture (1990)

[hysterikas]

What fundamentally distinguishes torture, understood in human rights terms, from the events these women have described is that torture is done to men as well as to women. Or, more precisely, when what usually happens to women as these women have described it happens to men, which it sometimes does, women’s experience is the template for it, so those men, too, are ignored as women are. When the abuse is sexual or intimate, especially when it is sexual and inflicted by an intimate, it is gendered, hence not considered a human rights violation. Torture is regarded as politically motivated; states are generally required to be involved in it. What needs asking is why the torture of women by men is not seen as torture, specifically why it is not seen as political, and just what the involvement of the state in it is.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues; On Torture (1990)

[hysterikas]

It would seem that something is not considered political if it is done to women by men, especially if it is considered to be sex. Then it is not considered political because what is political is when men control and hurt and use other men, meaning persons who are deserving of dignity and power, on some basis men have decided is deserving of dignity and a measure of power, like conventional political ideology, because that is a basis on which they have been deprived of dignity and power. So their suffering has the dignity of politics and is called torture.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues; On Torture (1990)

[hysterikas]

Torture is widely recognized as a fundamental violation of human rights. Inequality on the basis of sex is also widely condemned, and sex equality affirmed as a basic human rights value and legal guarantee in many nations and internationally. So why is torture on the basis of sex—for example, in the form of rape, battering, and pornography—not seen as a violation of human rights? When women are abused, human rights are violated; anything less implicitly assumes women are not human. When torture is sex-based, human rights standards should be recognized as violated, just as much as when the torture is based on anything else.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues; On Torture (1990)

[hysterikas]

Women are men’s unequals as a group. Real equality rights are collective in the sense of being group-based in their essential nature. Individuals may suffer discrimination one at a time, but the basis for the injury is group membership.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues

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Men violently dominating other men for control of states is called war; men violently dominating women within states is relegated to peace.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues; Women’s Status, Men’s States

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Are you saying that we shouldn’t talk about women being disproportionately harmed by abortion bans if they have fewer resources? No.

But it’s important that some of the best rhetorical ratfucking of abortion rights has focused on ignoring (or even temporarily ceding ground) women in desperate circumstances seeking abortions to focus on the “wrong” kind of woman who needs an abortion. She’s the kind who uses it instead of birth control or because she doesn’t want to mess up her figure or career or coed party lifestyle.

And we should be aware at how much the bourgeois coed party girl is being conjured in this language v being used about the women with forever access to abortion. How often do see people talking about “mistresses” and how rarely do you hear people use that word normally? Why does brunch come up? Why are we talking about this hypothetical Republican’s underage daughter like she’s a slut whose getting away with something? How fast do people jump into this kind of language after the conversation about access starts? Why do we like clarifying that we don’t like those kinds of abortion-seekers?

[hysterikas]

Another discernible theme, explicit in some, subtext in others, is the “there is no common theme” theme: the diversity of women’s experience leading to the disruption of categories, the complexity and instability of concepts and world. Here, women’s situation defies ordered generalization, reduction to rule, and codification. This notion can resist imposed forms of thinking and being, but it can also deny reality’s rigidities and imposed patterns. It is almost as if there is no such thing as the status and treatment of women. You will find me in tension with this latter view.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues; Theory Is Not a Luxury (1993)

[hysterikas]

Some people say that pornography is only fantasy. What part of it is fantasy? Women are beaten and raped and forced and whipped and held captive. The violence depicted is true. The acts of violence depicted in pornography are real acts committed against real women and real female children. The fantasy is that women want to be abused.

Andrea Dworkin, Letters From a War Zone; The Lie (1979)

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Here, as usual, women’s particularity is not in conflict with our commonalities; the deeper the particulars go, the more commonality we find.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues; Theory Is Not a Luxury (1993)

[hysterikas]

In the Burnham case, the conviction for marital rape that the wife won at trial was overturned on appeal because of the failure of the judge below sua sponte to instruct the jury that the husband might have believed that Ms. Burnham consented. There was no standard beyond which it was regarded as obvious that a human being was violated hence true consent was inconceivable. No recognition that people break under torture. No realization that anyone will say anything to a torturer to try to make it stop. When women break under torture, we are said to have consented, or the torturer could have thought we did. Pictures of our “confessions” in the form of pornography follow us around for the rest of our lives. Few say, that isn’t who she really is, everybody breaks under torture. Many do say, he could have believed it; besides, some women like it.      This is the law of pornography, the law of battered women’s self-defense, the law of rape.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues; On Torture (1990)

[hysterikas]

Women are a global group in the sense that the distinctive social definition, treatment, and status of women as a sex relative to men is recognizable in diverse forms all over the world. Both women’s subordination and their resistance to it have been global all along, predating what is now called globalization—a moment of perception catching up to women’s longtime reality (similar to the phrase “the feminization of poverty”). Gender inequality is a global system. National particularities give some of its forms the exemption of culture, casting the rest as natural, rendering every form of oppression known to woman either culturally universal (so we “can’t” do anything about it) or culturally specific (so we “shouldn’t” do anything about it). Nowhere is sexuality not central to keeping women down. Nowhere are the universal and the culturally particular, in their versions of “sameness” to and “difference” from men, not vaunted as reasons why that lesser place is woman’s rightful place and as reasons to do nothing about it.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues

[hysterikas]

Becoming human in both the legal and the lived senses is a social, legal, and political process. It requires prohibiting or otherwise delegitimating all acts by which human beings as such are violated, guaranteeing people what they need for a fully human existence, and then officially upholding those standards and delivering on those entitlements. But, in circular epistemic fashion, seeing what subordinated groups are distinctively deprived of, subjected to, and delegitimated by, requires first that they be real to power, that they first be see as human.     Put another way, human rights can be observed to be a response to atrocity denied. Before atrocities are recognized as such, they are authoritatively regarded as either too extraordinary to be believable or too ordinary to be atrocious. If the events are socially considered unusual, the fact that they happened is denied in specific instances; if they are regarded as usual, the fact they are violating is denied; if it’s happening, it’s not so bad, and if it’s really bad, it isn’t happening.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues

[hysterikas]

Studies estimate that between 2 and 8 percent of rape claims are deemed to be either false or baseless. But we must ask what that means, exactly. These determinations are most often made by the detectives to whom a rape has been reported. Many police departments use categories of “exceptionally cleared” and “unfounded” to dismiss rape allegations. “Exceptionally cleared” indicates that a case was investigated but cleared by certain standards—for example, because of an uncooperative witness or the death of the offender. But this category may also be used when district attorneys decide they cannot successfully prosecute or when officers don’t believe they have a strong case—before an investigation even moves forward. The term “unfounded” in rape cases is supposed to be used when officers find a case is false or baseless. This label is often applied before an investigation commences at all and makes law enforcement’s “solve rates” artificially higher than they actually are. In 2019 the city of Pittsburgh deemed almost a third of its rape cases unfounded. In both Scottsdale, Arizona, and Oxnard, California, almost half of rapes reported between 2009 and 2014 were classified as unfounded.

Michelle Bowdler, Is Rape a Crime? A Memoir, an Investigation, and a Manifesto

[hysterikas]

Q: Can you explain why you are so opposed to pornography? A: I find it strange that it requires an explanation. The men have made quite an industry of pictures, moving and still, that depict the torture of women. I am a woman. I don’t like to see the virtual worship of sadism against women because I am a woman, and it’s me. It has happened to me. It’s going to happen to me. I have to fight an industry that encourages men to act out their aggression on women—their “fantasies,” as those aspirations are so euphemistically named. And I hate it that everywhere I turn, people seem to accept without question this false notion of freedom. Freedom to do what to whom? Freedom to torture me? That’s not freedom for me. I hate the romanticization of brutality towards women wherever I find it, not just in pornography, but in artsy fartsy movies, in artsy fartsy books, by sexologists and philosophies. It doesn’t matter where it is. I simply refuse to pretend that it doesn’t have anything to do with me. And that leads to a terrible recognition: if pornography is part of male freedom, then that freedom is not reconcilable with my freedom. If his freedom is to torture, then in those terms my freedom must be to be tortured. That’s insane.

Andrea Dworkin, Letters From a War Zone; Nervous Interview (1980)