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by Catharine A. MacKinnon
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006
Reviewed April 5 2006
In this book, law professor Catharine MacKinnon ventures into Canada, Sweden, Bosnia and India. For that reason our hopes were raised and then dashed. That is more than we can say about many Euro-Amerikan pseudo-feminist projects which we know can never raise our hopes in the first place.
Still lacking a vehicle for change
In 2006, we should now make it official that MacKinnon is badly missing a revolutionary vehicle in her work. The Liberals would say she presents no "hero," the post-modernists no "agents" and we would say she simply mistakes the gender aristocracy for a group pushing for change.
The reviewer has not had a stomach-turning book-read in a long while. The details that MacKinnon presents are pornographic and sickening with regard to atrocities against Bosnian wimmin and Holocaust-era Jews. Yet as she herself tells us, the Bosnia genocide followed on a World War II genocide of Serbs by the people that MacKinnon is legally representing today. That makes for a depressing story, and MacKinnon's fine legal points do not make it any less depressing.
It seems to be MacKinnon's style to issue books with repetitive essays on fine legal and moral distinctions. Over and over she tells us that she and Dworkin passed a law. She also tells us about a civil case she brought against a Serbian war criminal from inside u.$. courts.
It's been many years, but MacKinnon offers us no convincing study of the impact of her own work. She is still talking about fine legal distinctions, but where is the final product, the outcome? And no, even Supreme Court victories are not the final outcome. What happened with the law in Kanada? What did it produce other than the banning of Dworkin's own work as pornographic? What was the overall effect?
Another tactic that MacKinnon employs to avoid discussion of political and social outcomes and the social vehicles that create them is the use of rhetoric. She sharpens her words. In this particular book we see a new set of tricks. Without prostitution there would be no pornography she says and anyway pornography is prostitution. We're sorry, but we see hints of post-modernism in these word games, a sense that MacKinnon plays with words for effect.
The tell-tale sign of MacKinnon's post-modernism is her treatment of sex slave trafficking: "Through its production, pornography is a traffic in female sexual slavery."(p. 88) The current reviewer had seen this same tactic a few times in the past year, but finally reading this book, the reviewer realized why MacKinnon says that pornography leads to sex slave trafficking and vice-versa.
MacKinnon makes it clear that there is male demand for pornography and that is the problem, not the wimmin in the pornography. At first this just sounds like MacKinnon being MacKinnon, until we realize what MacKinnon sidestepped throughout the book.
The formulation that demand for pornography leads to sex slave trafficking aside from being an indirect word game evades that closed borders make sex slave trafficking possible. It is the threat of imprisonment, torture and deportation that makes sex slave trafficking work, just as sub-minimum wages go to Mexican migrant workers who face deportation if they complain.
MacKinnon leaves the border out and we cannot help thinking that this is a conscious elision on her part. Rather than face the border question, MacKinnon backs up a step further to look at demand for pornography on one side of the border and then covers up her step backward with a word game.
Even by her own explanation, the battle against pornography pits one half of society against the other. In that situation, how is it wise for wimmin not to ally with migrant men who also want to cross the border, legally? For that matter there is even a potentially vacillating ally there in the employers who want greater choice in hiring. An even better ally will be the Latino community already inside u.$. borders. It would seem that with wimmin plus these allies, and others wanting to see increased immigration, MacKinnon should be building up a pretty hefty majority to eliminate sex slave trafficking and therefore prostitution and pornography according to her own analysis.
Instead, MacKinnon punts the border question and retreats to the formulation that pornography causes sex slave trafficking. This formulation is safe to the all-Amerikkkan female's identity as it blames the problem on biological males. The problem is--when is MacKinnon's attack going to win?
The chapters about Bosnian wimmin raped by Serbs raise another problem with MacKinnon's perception of social vehicle. She knows well the drawbacks of international courts in handling wimmin's rights. So she finds nothing wrong with going to U.$. court to stop Serbian genocide and rape. Then she wonders why people say that feminism means putting gender issues first: she sided with the biggest war criminal in the world to prosecute the crimes of lesser imitations. And she claims she "does not do hierarchy"(p. 51)?
The implicit vehicle of progressive change for MacKinnon is the U.S. Government then. In her essay on 9/11, MacKinnon correctly points out how few deaths there were compared with other causes of death that receive no such response, but she also leaves no doubt that she is only a few steps away from Phyllis Chesler in seeing calling in the Marines (p. 272) as necessary for global equality for wimmin. (We do not mind telling MacKinnon that second-hand smoke kills more wimmin inside u.$. borders than domestic violence. So she really needs to expand on her list of things that 9/11 did not surpass.)
If any of the big-name Amerikan theoreticians were going to come clean on feminism, we would have guessed Robin Morgan or Catharine MacKinnon. With MacKinnon attaching herself to U.$. imperial power, we can write off the entirety of Euro-Amerikan pseudo-feminism: It just is that bad. There are wimmin who are Marxists and there are big name people like MacKinnon and Morgan who are ultimately working on nationalism refinement projects. MacKinnon is the exception that proves the rule.
MacKinnon has read enough theory and Marxism that we at MIM suspect the following: MacKinnon knows she has no vehicle of social change among Euro-Amerikan females. Correspondingly, she places her faith in male-dominated courts and now even the Marines instead. That is also why she does not take on the border struggle head-on despite her rhetoric connecting sex slave trafficking to pornography. She connects issues that way precisely to avoid confronting the issue at the border, where she knows that Euro-Amerikan females won't even support dating visas, never mind opening the borders to wimmin as workers; even though that is what wimmin need to be less vulnerable to sexual slavery.
What MacKinnon and others are likely to refer to as the "left" or "male left" have an historical experience with the question of revolutionary vehicle for social change. Trotsky rode around on a horse in civil war. If troops did not show up, if proletarians were not ready for change, he was going to die outnumbered in battle. Likewise, when Zinoviev and John Reed rode around in an armored train, there either was or was not an oppressed nation that was going to back their calls for armed struggle against imperialism. If not for sufficient support, their train would be intercepted and they would die.
Later in World War II, Trotsky made the prediction that German workers would fraternize with their victims of conquest and unleash the socialist revolution that would end capitalism. That had big implications for being wrong about the revolutionary vehicle. It did not happen and now Trotskyism stands that much more in disgrace for pointing us toward the German so-called workers at that time. Being right about the nature of social reality matters.
Catharine MacKinnon has not really accepted the political implications of her analysis. That's why when she attacks post-modernists and stands for a positivist view, she should know how we regard her own attitude toward finding a revolutionary vehicle. MacKinnon says, "doctrines of racial supremacy are based on the lie of the superiority of some races over others. . . . But on the level of express principle, CEDAW [a statement "Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women"--ed.] never says that sexism is a lie."(p. 11) MacKinnon rightly points out that that sort of approach leaves the struggle at a purely moral level, but that is how we see her leaving the question of revolutionary vehicle.
Part of the point of defining a group "wimmin" is to determine which people are going to fight gender hierarchy. Agree or disagree, Zinoviev spoke to oppressed nations in his train venture with John Reed. Without the support of oppressed nations escaping tsarism, the Bolshevik Revolution and Zinoviev himself would have died if not in 1917, surely by 1921.
There is a sort of evil going on here where MacKinnon says that states and wars are men's business. Then she feels no obligation to name a revolutionary vehicle, since that would be to smash the state anyway--men's business. Yet even if we accept her reformist tactics, what can we say about her ignoring the border question in sex slave trafficking?
Naming the organization of states and wars men's business is also an example of segregating wimmin from power. How many times has MacKinnon told the world that the wimmin in the pornography are being forced off-stage and off-camera? How many times did she tell us not to take them as representative of real wimmin--powerless, but wanting sex? Then why like the porno model does MacKinnon tell us that state power is men's business and why does she repeat the false factoid that wimmin have 10% of the world's income and 1% of its assets?(p. 21) In fact, inside u.$. borders, females own the majority of assets, and that by itself is more than 1% of the world's assets.
MacKinnon's politics are on the edge between pornographic invocation of male power and feminism. The porno model tells us that she likes to be conquered and with the exception of a couple demagogic stories about mobs of wimmin attacking their oppressors MacKinnon tells us that her vehicle for change is conquered. MacKinnon can sometimes be the political and theoretical symbol of Amerikan pornography. Yes, she "doth protest too much."
As we have said before, her failure on the revolutionary vehicle question is why MIM cannot in full faith criticize the Liberal lawyers opposing her in court in the name of feminism. Without a revolutionary vehicle to implement them, her words become inviting excuses for fascism.
We agree with any exceedingly rare Amerikan willing to admit as MacKinnon does that the media do play a role in the oppression of people by gender and nationality. Speech is not just speech if it has implications in action, which it almost always does in this imperfect world. The "Media Case" in Rwanda convicted three media people for inciting genocide against Tutsis.(p. 12) For a leader of the Rwandan proletariat to point that out at the time would have been a great thing. For an Amerikan who will at best spur on a U.$. military intervention in a Rwanda or similar countries, the ledger balance is negative. If MacKinnon's words will spur no revolutionary activity that will stop the genocide and may in fact whitewash the world's number one oppressor --and even as she admits--number one exporter of pornography, then maybe it is better to be quiet and do some investigation on the social vehicle that could have done something about the problem.
What MacKinnon did not gather from Bosnia: the gender aristocracy
The hundreds of thousands of rapes connected to the collapse of the "local control" oriented Yugoslavia so beloved by social-democrats and pseudo-anarchists up into the 1980s are the subject of some of the essays in MacKinnon's book. Leaving aside that MacKinnon ended up leading a cheering section for U.$. bombing of Kosova, we also disagree with her interpretation of the Bosnian rape situation.
Together we surely agree that the factual situation in Bosnia points to a heightened level of oppression for wimmin. This is oppression that goes beyond peace-time to a whole genocidal level. First the Serbians killed the men and then they raped so many wimmin so long that they created 30,000 children with Serbian fathers. It is a classic "in group" versus "out group" conflict. The Serbs treated Croats, Muslims and Albanians as "out groups."
In MIM theory, in-group versus out-group struggles gather their primary character from imperialism. Where imperialism has placed the seal of parasitism as Lenin called it, it becomes possible to organize wimmin as wimmin for a gender aristocracy and succeed in creating a new social group of oppressors. In the case of ex-Yugoslavia, there was no dominance of finance capital in any nationality. Hence, the violent repression and rape had a circular character. As Lenin pointed out in World War I, this type of violence is called intra-proletarian bloodletting. The World War I model remains relevant for eastern Europe, where no nationality located between Germany and Russia has achieved the finance capital stage of capitalism.
Again and again, MacKinnon reports that the wimmin involved in Bosnian violence want to "disappear." The wimmin that did not die do not want to fight the battle to the extent of clarifying fake pornography videos. When videos showed Muslim wimmin raped by Serbs, and called it Serbs raped by Muslims, the wimmin in the videos themselves did not want to fight the question. We're sure that in the situation of tables turned in ex-Yugoslavia, the situation was the same. We can fault the cowardice of wimmin left surviving only to set an example to others, but we cannot deny the social fact that "disappear" is what these wimmin wanted. That was the intention of the rapes videotaped anyway--to intimidate people into leaving a country.
So then as MacKinnon admits, how is it that the united $tate is the leading exporter of pornography? Are wimmin being ejected from the country? No, quite the contrary, Hollywood and the like are importing pornographic icons from Latin America and the rest of the world as racial tokens for re-export.
In fact, at this time, the dominance of Amerikan/Hollywood pornography is tied up with the exclusion of the Third World oppressed gender people from inside u.$. borders. That is the difference with Bosnian pornography. U.$. pornography drives people out of the united $tates by raising up a gender aristocracy to aspire to. This gender aristocracy then allies with imperialists to close the borders, and won't be found advocating freedom to cross borders to date. Bosnian pornography drove people out of the country directly with images of the people being driven out. The difference of the effect of the pornography on migration points to the underlying structural difference: U.$. pornography glorifies a gender oppressor group while Bosnian pornography degrades a target for "ethnic cleansing."
Britney Spears does not want to disappear. She wants to be on every gas station window selling Pepsi and she was. Brandi Chastain did not want to disappear when at an international sports tournament, so she tore off her clothes. It is men comfortable appearing naked in the world. Even many biological men will be more embarrassed in some naked situations than professional Britney Spears or Madonna. Despite their biology, Britney Spears and Brandi Chastain are men. They make no sense to the vast majority of the world's people who can much more relate to what happened in Bosnia and wanting to disappear from pornography.
To say that Britney Spears does not like her pornographic role the same way men do is tantamount to saying that capitalists do not enjoy exploiting people either. It may be a twisted sense of happiness, but that is what it is in imperialist society right now. We should distinguish between Liberal happiness for the privileged and the unhappiness of the people of Bosnia.
India
After getting her credentials defending Muslims in Bosnia, we are not surprised to see MacKinnon move over to discuss India. Inevitably the topic became Muslim polygamy.
The real answer to Muslim patriarchy is Stalin and maybe Sultan-Galiev--change from within Islam. Today it seems that Phyllis Chesler and the like are trying to stir up outsiders to attack Islamic patriarchy. Hence, the united $tates went to war on Afghanistan.
MacKinnon proposes that Indian wimmin have the choice between signing up for Muslim culture and law or Indian state law.(p. 136) In general, MIM concurs that is a progressive solution.
By awarding wimmin some payment to end a marriage that would be otherwise polygamous, we get into the territory where the state is paying people to leave a culture. There will also be resistance at the parental level when the state comes to tell the Islamic minority that it must now hand over daughters for education in mainstream culture and values.
Ultimately, the sort of "choice" MacKinnon opted for for India ends up favoring rich cultures. MacKinnon pointed this out in the midst of avoiding the closed borders question and how it creates sex slavery. Wimmin from poor cultures will leave those cultures to join cultures of rich men, if those wimmin are so allowed.
This is the evil of today's class society. The intertwining of class with national oppression will tend to make gender struggles more bitter. We should be for choice for all the world's wimmin, choice of where to live. The oppressed nationalities should intensify their struggle against imperialism, because choice comes with many terrible contradictions. On the one hand, we want choice. On the other hand, in Belarus, we have to admit that the decision to restrict wimmin from leaving the country also makes sense--only because of the destinations many such wimmin may end up in. "Choice" is a weak approach to feminism, even in semi-feudal countries. The moving of wimmin from one culture to another through mostly unconscious and conscious economic means is Brain-Drain-lite.
One thing MacKinnon claims not to see in connection to India is how Western feminism benefits the West in India.(p. 130) By 2006 she should have known that India was the only Third World country to favor the attack on Afghanistan by the united $tates, according to public opinion polls. In today's geopolitics, the most relevant fact population-wise is that Hindu fundamentalists are locked in battle with Muslim fundamentalists. For Bush's "War on Terror" focussing mostly on Muslim groups and a handful of communist ones, Western feminism is helpful in lining up India.
Dialectical materialism
We most agree with MacKinnon's essay blasting post-modernism. Most of what she says in "Postmodernism and human rights" is correct--a bright spot in the book.
Where she goes wrong is her own relationship to postmodernism. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State was MacKinnon falling into postmodernism. She almost admits the point in giving a short explanation before launching at postmodernism. Nor were these ideas stolen by postmodernism. (p. 49) The idea of objectivity being the outlook of the oppressor is very old and a central tenet of postmodernism.
More importantly, probably MIM is the only organization or group of writers that is going to credit MacKinnon enough to understand the point when she says she was not subsumed by postmodernism and hence feminism was not subsumed. The arrogant implication that there are no other feminist theorists of stature is something that only a MIM would back up. There are countless pseudo-feminist writers who might disagree. MacKinnon is often speaking of eliding voices, but here it is MacKinnon in trouble with democracy.
Like it or not, most people calling themselves feminist and generating papers in academia are also postmodernist. To write them off as not having achieved any scientific thought yet, MIM is willing, but how will MacKinnon pull it off? Many years after joining her call for feminist theory, MIM is still justified in singling out MacKinnon out of Euro-Amerikan attempts at feminism, as evidenced by the essay "Postmodernism and human rights."
In Marxism, we also have a kind of democracy where MIM may be the most-read in the united $tates, but the activists are a hodgepodge of ideas. There are in fact more postmodernists calling themselves Marxist at the activist level than there are scientific communists. We thrash wildly to keep our own heads above the swirling waters of identity politics threatening to drown every last scientist in Liberalism. When scientific communism became co-opted for the creation of "political correctness" it was only a matter of time before culture washed back up on the shores of the Marxist movement. Communist activists subsumed by Christian and postmodernist currents are the proof that we are all products of our culture and can only get so far ahead of it. If that is true in such movements so marginal as communism in the united $tates, it is true generally.
When MacKinnon said "if to privilege gender means that feminism arranges gender at the top of some hierarchy of oppressions, the allegation is false, at least as to me,"(p. 51) we could have asked for more. For example, we do not understand how she jumped on a u.$. bandwagon to sue Bosnian war criminals in u.$. courts. Did that not privilege gender above the fight against imperialism, imperialist militarism and even imperialist export of pornography?
Fighting the Bosnian mass rape crimes from inside the u.$. state is not something MIM would have done if it had the resources to do it. This brings us to dialectical materialism via another route.
It all has to go back to a Trotsky on horseback. Who is going to show up to fight and how hard and in what conscious and unconscious directions? Hinging our anti-fascist movement on waiting for Germans to fraternize with their victims and go Bolshevik in the midst of World War II could have been disastrous.
Likewise, though Phyllis Chesler says Dworkin was not Zionist enough, a virtual atheist, we still do not see how it is that Zionism or Amerikan nationalism can possibly benefit the world's wimmin and toilers. Most of the world's wimmin are toilers and most of the world's wimmin are anti-Amerikkkan. Phyllis Chesler, the late Dworkin and Robin Morgan are trying to break that unity. How can we possibly conclude that the patriarchy does not benefit from that?
Again, if wimmin are actually a group of females restricted inside u.$. borders, then we understand that MIM's discussion of dialectics makes no sense. If on the other hand, as MacKinnon herself says, that sex slave trafficking is underlying the whole patriarchy, then we cannot see bourgeois politics uniting wimmin, because most wimmin are not bourgeois. We also cannot see Amerikan or Zionist politics uniting wimmin, because most wimmin are actually opposed to both Amerikanism and Zionism. To open borders requires internationalism.
Struggles have to be prioritized according to what forces they are going to deliver toward the goal. If ending patriarchy is the goal, then using feminism as an excuse to project u.$. power into the world is counterproductive, because most of the world's wimmin are anti-Amerikkkan and have no interests in projecting u.$. power.
If we are in a country where the females will not fight, will not show up in battle to open the borders to end sexual slavery in its own right, then we better prioritize another battle. That is the substance of dialectical materialism. It means prioritizing battles not strictly for ideological reasons but on account of the nature of the social vehicles for change available.
Mexicans, Latinos generally, some capitalists, the rare communists--these are the people fighting hard to open the borders and bring an end to sexual slavery, even if they do not know that is what they are doing. On a daily basis Mexicans are dying in the desert, ending up in federal prison and crossing with success. When we correctly prioritize the oppressed nation fight against u.$. borders, we do more for feminism than claiming that Amerikan females are going to tear down the borders. Amerikan females are not even stopping the united $tates from being the world's number one pornography exporter. Amerikan females consume vastly larger quantities of pornography than the males of many isolated countries. What did MacKinnon herself conclude from the Swedish subway incident where 100 people passively watched a rape in progress as if it were another porn video?(p. 104) Abu Ghraib was Euro-Amerikan feminism's moment parallel to Germans-in-World-War-II not becoming socialist insurgents as predicted by Trotsky.
Mistakes are not the property of any particular scientific endeavor. So we throw back at MacKinnon, is it not prefeminist or postmodernist to go on relying on the Euro-Amerikan female for feminist battle when she is just not there? On the basis of what historical evidence can MacKinnon say that socialist revolution is not more likely to end sexual slavery than Euro-Amerikan feminism? Is it pragmatic to be reformist if there is no record for success? That sounds like ideological dogma to us, "useless moralism."(p. 87) The one thing we agree with though--the Bosnian wimmin are a vehicle for change. Did MacKinnon adopt the correct relationship to the vehicle of change or did she contribute to their political quandary? We see no positive role for U.$. power for Bosnian wimmin--other than granting green cards en masse.
In this book, we see MacKinnon respond slightly more to outside concerns than some of her previous books. In "On Sex and Violence," MacKinnon gives us another reason why we chose her as the place to check on the Euro-Amerikan feminist struggle: "Pornography is a slave trade produced by the coercion of poverty as well as by physical force, drug addiction, and homelessness (where states do not provide homes) and by employment discrimination based on sex and race. So long as women are discriminated against in the paid workforce and kept poor as women, as they are in most places---women of color and foreign-born and noncitizen women in particular--women will be in pornography and prostitution, pornographized and prostituted. As long as some countries are impoverished while other countries are rich, women from poorer countries will be sexually preyed upon by men in richer countries."(p. 98) In this quote she finally ties nation, class and gender together. The dialectical aspect comes from tugging on the various pieces tied together.
There was a recent newspaper article about strippers being paid $400 an hour. That's not $400 a week or a year, but per hour. Yes, they do exist in ordinary neighborhoods, though these wimmin may set a goal of buying a house, yacht and retirement by 30.
MacKinnon has admitted that females make more money than men in entertainment related to sex. How far did she go in incorporating that fact in her work? Ending poverty is not going to stop strippers who make $400 an hour. Liberalism is more resilient than that. Nonetheless, poverty may be most responsible for the greatest amount of sexual hierarchy and it may be best tackled by mobilizing the oppressed nations against the imperialists super-exploiting them. That's what we mean by principal contradiction, a dialectical term from Stalin and Mao. Even if we eliminate poverty we may have $400 an hour strippers. Yet we still say we get at most of the problem by eliminating poverty. That is either true factually or it is not; hence the materialism. Moreover, it is either true or not within the social facts and corresponding strategies possible that some strategies work better than others. That's where dialectics intervenes.
In fact, there are many aspects of MacKinnon's work that point in the direction of driving wimmin into the upper reaches of sexual service. Closing the borders and focusing on how rich men prey on poor ones is the wrong way to go. This only results in the creation of a group of highly-paid wimmin removed from reproduction and marriage and put into sexual service. At the same time, it divides wimmin internationally and creates the pre-conditions for sexual slavery.
That phrase from MacKinnon "women from poorer countries will be sexually preyed upon by men in richer countries" is tantalizingly close to the viewpoint of the gender aristocracy. Is it saying that rich men should prefer rich wimmin? Or is it saying rich men should prefer wimmin provided strictly for sexual services in a closed-borders situation? Either way, it divides wimmin. Eliminating sexual slavery will mean processing this question correctly. When it comes to dating, there is no way to restrict man's choice without restricting womyn's choice. We could decide we do not care, but both MIM and MacKinnon do care, because of sexual slavery. The strength of workers and wimmin both is in their cross-border unity. Getting international dating to a universal Liberal stage is still unfortunately progressive.
In "Pornography's Empire," MacKinnon owns up for the u.$. role in pornography in the world, though she could have done more with the u.$. military's role in distributing pornography. Yet while she admits the U.$. role, she makes an argument that easily backfires: "If spreading your legs for a camera is a woman's autonomous choice, as the myth goes, wouldn't you think that the women with the most choices rather than the fewest, with the most preconditions for autonomy rather the least, would be the women doing it?"(p. 115) This is something we cannot have both ways: either Hollywood is dominating the world or it isn't.
From the perspective of most people in the world, Amerikan pornography is the example and quantity available. It is not pornography of Tutsi wimmin before the slaughter that dominates the world scene. The example MacKinnon gives of Yugoslavian pornography being led by wimmin calling themselves "feminist" is actually quite typical on a global scale. The call to follow the Amerikan example privileges a gender aristocracy. That is the real difference MacKinnon's Bosnia research should have made. People dominating pornography are in fact more autonomous than most of the world's people. It is Madonna, Britney Spears, Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton etc. The division of the world's wimmin has made the struggle a little more difficult and the need for a dialectical materialist analysis more urgent.