The editors of the Oxford Political Review recently sat down with Professor Catharine MacKinnon, one of the foremothers of feminist legal theory. Her seminal book, The Sexual Harassment of Working Women, published in 1979, cleared the path for the legal recognition of harassment in the workplace as a case of sex discrimination. We discussed a wide range of topics including feminism, the MeToo movement, student faculty relationships, pornography, free speech, and the pandemic.
Many feminists have a particular story rooted in their own personal experience that led them to the study of feminism. What was your journey to feminism, and what brought you to study the specific aspects of feminism – sexual harassment and pornography – that you did?
Typically, experts on the heart are not asked what “in their own personal experience” led them to the study of matters coronary. Nor is it supposed that some biographical detail made liberals into liberals, when they are interrogated in political interviews. I also can’t say that I have noticed that there is a particular story that has led feminists, among the many I know and have read about, to what you call “the study of feminism,” an incredibly passive distortion of the lived engagement that those of us practice who do what I do. Nothing appears to distinguish the lived experiences of feminists from those of other women who do not become feminists. Indeed, that is a big part of the feminist point. I do know that most of the feminists I know, including me, will never get over our mothers’ lives.
I don’t “study feminism;” never have, although some people do. When I began my work for women in the early 1970s, there was little to study. We – the movement for the liberation of women — created the feminism of opposition to sexual abuse through practice and theory, through confrontation with the realities of subordination in women’s lives, including its institutionalized forms. There was nothing to “study” as to sexual harassment, because until I shaped the concept as I did, together with other activists, and created the legal theory for its recognition in the form the courts ultimately accepted, there was no term, no concept, no law, no experience as such. What an incredible ahistorical privileged presumption that all one had to do was choose a pre-existing political philosophy and topic, already out there and waiting for us, to “study.” As if.
Similarly pornography. The work against it, when Andrea Dworkin and I began ours together, was overwhelmingly moralistic, based on the critique of obscenity, not political, about power. It still is. Until we created the approach to it we did, based on the experiences of women being concretely harmed by it, no such work existed for us to “study.” It had to be created. So we created it. It was called feminist because it exposed male dominance for what it is, and aimed to end the subordination of women, all women, through this particular practice.
My work on these subjects originated in other women’s experiences of abuse. I don’t know why they had not been taken seriously before, but they essentially had not been, until those of us who created those issues built them piece of evidence by material atrocity, concept by concept. The empirical work of Diana E.H. Russell was formative. We have always been dogged by salivating interrogators looking to out and finger the weird pain that must have been inflicted on us to lead us to take these issues seriously. What is actually our expertise is implicitly attributed to quirks in our lives rather than to our abilities. How strange, that the most common crimes against the humanity of over half the human race by the other half would be the topic of focused outrage and demands for change. Individualism appears to be such that biographical tropes assume that other people are not as real, their experiences not as shattering, as one’s own self’s experiences, one’s “particular story,” is. This is not true for some of us.
Finally, sexual harassment and pornography are not “aspects of feminism.” They are aspects of misogyny. And, for avoidance of doubt, my work with these outrages does not exist in the past tense, and extends to the abolition of prostitution through the Nordic/Equality model, which you do not ask about.
In 2018, you wrote an op-ed in the NYTimes titled “the MeToo movement has done what the law could not”. Expanding on that, could you explain how you understand the relationship between social movements and the law as forces for structural change?
That was not my title, and it is not what the article itself said. The article, which people can read, said that the #MeToo movement, in giving credibility and value to women who had experienced sexual violation by men who had more power than they did, was doing what the law against sexual harassment so far had not accomplished. Men had, amazingly, decided they could no longer be tainted by association with exposed perpetrators. Up to that point, they had fired the women who reported. Now they were firing the men who had been reported. But without the sexual harassment law, that movement would not have been able to exist. And now that it did exist, the law could, and would, change with it.
In a nod to your work on sexual harassment in the workplace, many universities now proscribe student-faculty relationships even in non-coercive situations. How do you compare your views of relationships between workers and bosses in the workplace with relationships in the university? Do you think that a blanket ban on teacher-student relationships is the right policy?
Schools ban such relationships not out of valuing students, or out of an understanding of the power imbalance between teachers and students, which even a nod to my work would call for. They have these rules principally to make their institutional lives easier. That way, they don’t have to figure out if a faculty person exploited and manipulated a student sexually, when a student is saying that this occurred. They don’t have to choose between a violated student and a violating faculty member, take responsibility for figuring out what actually happened, whether the faculty member is lying, whether the student will have to be valued above the teacher in the result. How awkward. That other students would perceive a conflict of interest in the relationship is also precluded, if the rules actually work.
I don’t compare worker-boss with teacher-student. The situations are different. The student becoming themself is the “product” of education. It is this process that sexual harassment can destroy. Many workers can continue to produce work product, despite sexual abuse, making the harm more elusive for viewing authorities. Also, many sexually abused students are children, with the distinctive powerlessness of children relative to adults.
My own view is that people should be able to have sexual relationships that they affirmatively mutually want to have, free of pressure. Students are in a structurally vulnerable, disempowered, unequal position relative to faculty, and that power imbalance shapes the relationship in many, even most, if not all instances. What these blanket prohibitions mainly do is raise the price of the compliant woman, so far as I can tell. It makes her, and her ongoing silence, more valuable. That said, given how appallingly poorly schools, in general, adjudicate these situations – that they would adjudicate them was my idea in the first place – a blanket rule may be the best they can do. Real relationships can wait a bit.
You are perhaps best known by some for your criticisms of pornography. But in the ordinance you co-wrote with Andrea Dworkin in 1983, pornography is defined as the “graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures/or words”. This captures a big portion of pornography, but not all. For example, it doesn’t seem to include pornography involving only men or gender non-binary people, nor does it seem to include videos where women hold dominating roles over men. Have your thoughts on what constitutes pornography changed over the years?
Read the ordinance, not press on it, and you will find that it covers everyone who is violated by pornography on the basis of their sex. My analysis of pornography is as informed now by the realities of the people abused in and through it as it was in 1983. The causes of action of force, assault, coercion, and trafficking, followed subsequently by defamation, still delineate its concrete practices. And the pornography industry has not changed, it has only metastasized.
Recently, apps such as Instagram, Snapchat, OnlyFans, etc. have enabled many users, most of them ordinary women, to garner popularity and money through the exhibition of their bodies. This is not pornography of course, but it shares many of the underlying social and psychological mechanisms. How do you view the social media culture of female body “exhibitionism”?
I would need to see what you are referring to. You obviously have seen these materials; I have not.
Among the lessons of the #MeToo movement is the sheer ubiquity of people in the public eye that have been the perpetrator of sexual misconduct, some egregious and others perhaps less so. What are your views on redemption in politics? Should people be forgiven (socially) for their misconduct and what should that path look like?
I am not going to participate in your gradation of abuse, given that it is abstract.
First, real accountability. Ask the surviving victims what, as to the perpetrator, justice for the violations inflicted on them — both by the perpetrators and the institutions whose responses are so routinely inadequate and worse — would look like. Consider who else the perpetrator has or may endanger.
What is the relation between your first and second sentence, the ubiquity of perpetrators and their redemption? Do tell how the fact there are a lot of them leads to a discussion of forgiveness. Is serious accountability only for the few, exceptional “egregious” violations, by those violators society is accustomed to stigmatizing as inhuman monsters so that simply normal men can be exonerated? Are we now to have a discussion about forgiveness for systemic white racism as well, before any real change or reparations occur?
If perpetrators were to take the real weight of responsibility for their violations, which they virtually never authentically do, and actually change – this has to be possible, but it is more believed in than practiced – a conversation about forgiveness would begin to make sense in ways it seldom does now. Basically, femininity is a set-up to trivialize abuse to women, as women are considered worthless and sexual abuse is regarded as our natural state, and to value men, their futures, their reputations, as women’s are not valued. It is so easy to manipulate any good will available here. Count me out.
Many prominent thinkers on race such as Kimberlé Crenshaw have been very vocal during the pandemic, highlighting the disproportionate impact the virus has had on communities of color. I was wondering if you had thoughts about the pandemic from the perspective of your work within both legal and feminist theories. Does feminism provide us with a constructive lens to understand global disasters?
Misogyny is a global disaster. White supremacy is a global disaster. Their intersection multiplies the disaster. I have been working with the UN and other entities during the pandemic on the disproportionate impact of the virus on women, including prominently women of color, who reside in the hardest-hit communities, are disproportionately “essential” workers in care services often exposed without adequate protections, with many locked into their homes with their abusers, subjected to domestic violence. The specific focus of this work has been sexual harassment, which has been going on since prior to the latest global disaster that is recognized as such, but that investigation exposes all these multiple vulnerabilities.
Professor Crenshaw and I have worked together for decades. Our recent publication can be found here.
Since Sen. Tom Cotton’s piece was published in the NYT to great controversy, journalism has been embroiled in a debate on the role of the media in society, between the media as a bastion of liberalism and a more progressive ideal of equality. This tension between liberty and equality pervades your work. What are your opinions on this debate in the media and do they coincide at all with your views on the role of the law?
Discussion of the role of media in society predates Cotton’s piece by at least a century. My fuller analysis on “weaponizing” freedom of speech is forthcoming in the Virginia Law Review.
No tension between liberty and equality pervades my work. I do not theorize liberty. Liberals tend to think first achieve liberty, then consider equality. My view, despite the last couple hundred years of white male political theorizing to the contrary, is that this is backwards: first achieve substantive equality, then liberty will be meaningful. I don’t understand why liberal theory isn’t obsessed with how liberty is possible under conditions of inequality. Whole libraries exist on what they call freedom. Why isn’t that a crucial question?