Vol. 16 No. 9 · 12 May 1994
pages 9-10 | 3236 words
Drawing lines
Bernard Williams
- Only Words by Catharine MacKinnon
HarperCollins, 128 pp, £9.99, June 1994, ISBN 0 00 255497 6
Best known as an eloquent campaigner against pornography, Catharine MacKinnon is a lawyer – a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Not all of this book (based on talks given at Princeton) sounds much like legal argument, and particularly when she is talking about pornography she gives a rhetorical display which may well have been breathtaking in the lecture hall. But the book does in fact offer a legal argument, one which is interesting, and also deeply American, in the sense that MacKinnon discusses the problems raised by pornography and also by speech that constitutes sexual or racial harassment in terms of American law and the American Constitution. MacKinnon herself does not accept those terms as presently defined, and her book is an eloquent plea to Americans to move beyond what she sees as the prejudiced limitations of current doctrine, in particular of current liberal doctrine. As a plea to Americans, it takes for granted several aspects of American discussions. Some of this a British reader may find rather bewildering.
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 10 · 26 May 1994
From Charles Enquist
I’m astounded to learn from Bernard Williams’s restrained review of Catharine MacKinnon’s Only Words (LRB, 12 May) that, according to MacKinnon, when I sit and watch a gang rape being enacted in a hardcore porn movie, I am not to be distinguished ‘in terms of what [I am] doing sexually’ from someone watching a gang-rape happening for real in a city alleyway. Rather than merely misguided, this argument seems outrageous. It implies that if I’m accidentally present when a gang rape happens in the street, and so paralysed by the event as to neither go for help nor intervene in person, my reaction will be to remain and watch and do what men go to hardcore porn-movies in order to do: i.e. pleasure myself. We have yet to hear that our society has turned voyeur to this unhappy extreme. In refusing to recognise the distinction between the real and the represented, MacKinnon is playing her adversaries’ game, because this is the distinction which the makers of pornographic movies, along with the writers of pornographic books, must aspire to collapse, for their own sexual gratification maybe as they do their filming or writing, but certainly for the sexual gratification of their eventual clients, whose arousal may become momentarily so intense as to make it a matter of no importance at all that it has been achieved by remote control. Perversely, having suppressed this crucial distinction, MacKinnon introduces another, altogether unexpected one, by her intermediate – dare I say Post-Modernist? – category, cited by Williams, of ‘an audience watching a gang rape that is re-enacting a gang rape from a movie’. What, indeed, would our reaction be to this peculiar event if we chanced to see it? Would we hold back from treating it as a real gang rape if we recognised that it had been scripted or borrowed from a book or movie? And then judge it by its fidelity to the original? Either way, I can’t think we’d find it very arousing.
Charles Enquist
London NW5
