the colossus

BY ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE

Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues, by Catharine MacKinnon, Harvard University Press

To refer to Catharine A. MacKinnon, author of eleven brilliant and theoretically rigorous books, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford, as a feminist scholar is something like describing her as a bookish blonde: accurate, but also a little ridiculous. Mackinnon is a towering figure on the world stage, Bellovian in stature, and far beyond categorizations that in application, trigger nervous derision or marginalization. The leitmotif of her work is the correction of social injustice, and her role in shaping perception of quotidian iniquities, incalculable.

MacKinnon's latest offering, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues , is an unforgettable anthology of essays and speeches. Originally part of Women's Lives, Men's Laws (2005), these luminous dialogues are presented in chronological order and within themes, and call for social reform and “legal teeth”.

“Women,” she states, “are half the human race … all around the world, women are … prostituted, and increasingly live pornographic lives in contexts saturated more or less with pornography. Women do two-thirds of the world's work, earn one-tenth of the world's income, and own less than one-hundredth of the world's property. Women are more likely to be property than to own any.”

Becoming human in both the legal and lived senses, she argues, is a social, legal, and political process, and our understanding of human rights precludes legal equality for women. “A simple double standard is at work here,” she observes. “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 … When the abuse is sexual or intimate … it is gendered, hence not considered a human rights violation.”

Prostitution and especially pornography – resonantly described by her as an eroticization of hatred and, in practice, also an instrument of fear – can only ever be an impediment to women being understood as human. Those who employ words such as censor/shrill/strident etc. in impugning her have always missed the point: obscenity is of no interest to MacKinnon. Her concern is the harm in elisions of gender.

The traditional obscenity approach, she explains, takes the view that the harm of pornography is in its power to “deprave and corrupt” - in other words, it takes the same hoary view of pornography that pornography takes of sex.

“It is designed to suppress, not eradicate,” she writes, “does nothing to hold pornographers accountable for promoting aggression, bigotry, and discrimination; and cannot empower pornography's victims. Virtue and vice are its concerns; women and children are not … Actual harm is strictly irrelevant to the standard obscenity approach, making it intrinsically unable to remedy the real harms of pornography.”

Obscenity, MacKinnon concludes, is about what is thought of sex, and never about harm done. She asks: “If spreading your legs for a camera is a woman's autonomous choice, as the myth goes, wouldn't you think that [it would be] the women with the most choices rather than the fewest … doing it?”

MacKinnon has always lobbied against practices based on concepts of inferiority or subordination, and her wins are spectacular.

Co-counsel for violated Bosnian and Croat women against Radovan Karadzic (Kadic v. Karadzic), McKinnon won US$745 million in a jury verdict. It was a landmark case, and established rape as an act of genocide. “Torture is widely recognized as a fundamental violation of human rights,” she notes. “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? … anything less implicitly assumes women are not human.”

If MacKinnon has a flaw, it is her idealistic assumption that everyone thinks. Spiritually removed from spheres in which people are held hostage by frozen infantile needs, she has dedicated her life to creating a world in which we are all accept, or are made to accept, responsibility for the dignity and wellbeing of our fellows. Are Women Human? only furthers her success. Make no mistake, MacKinnon is a colossus.

*Originally published in The South China Morning Post

© 2007 Antonella Gambotto-Burke