MacKinnon on Sexuality

Posted: Tue, Sep 17, 2024

Recap

Recent NPR story: “Domestic violence is now recognized as a leading cause of traumatic brain injury,” March 13, 2024

The situation:

  • The pervasiveness of sexual assault (& sexual harassment, domestic abuse, etc.): often cited data are that one in six or one in five women (compared to 1 in 71 men) in the U.S. experience rape or attempted rape in their lifetime
    • In eight in ten cases, the perpetrator is an acquaintance.
    • In nine in ten cases, the rape targets a woman.
  • The under-reporting of sexual assault: data are again tricky, but something like 37% of sexual assaults and 12% of child sexual abuse are reported.
    • Fear of retaliation, victim-blaming, “he said, she said,” etc.
    • Also (this is MacKinnon’s point): line between rape and “normal” sex can be thin in women’s experiences—the latter can involve quite a lot of force, coercion, non consent, etc. So, for all the wrong reasons, the men who find it hard to distinguish rape from rough sex are right about something.

The “violence, not sex” response:

  • Rape = forced penetration.
    • Gets around the line drawing: rape and sex are categorically distinct.
    • Gets around the victim-blaming: what you are wearing/doing/saying/etc. has nothing to do with whether something counts as rape.
    • Gives an explanation for both the pervasiveness and under-reporting: rape is a weapon of intimidation that men (as a group, not as individuals) use to put women (as a group, not as individuals) in their place.
      • The idea is that it’s a mass weapon: rape does not just concern the specific individuals involved; it does and means something to women as a gender.
  • But this explanation is incomplete: how come men get to use this weapon near exclusively?
    • Brownmiller’s answer: the penis is to blame.
    • Do the in-class activity we didn’t get to last time.
  • MacKinnon’s critique: This understands rape from the male perspective; it is what men think rape is and why it’s wrong.
    • The focus on penetration: physical intrusion vs. something more.
    • Rape is sex: raping the body vs. raping the sexuality; don’t assume that most sex is innocuous.
    • Rape is gendered: even when men are raped, they feel like—and are treated socially as—women; in a way, they are raped as women.
    • Rape is not biological: it concerns power of men over women; it’s why rape feels powerful and is used as a tool of asserting power (think rape in wars, prisons, etc.).
    • Rape is facilitated by society: it’s no accident that women find it hard to refuse sex (‘no’ is understood as ‘yes,’ women are taught not to refuse men, sexual attraction from men feels good, etc.).
    • In the end, the two types of rape that actually get taken seriously both serve ideological roles: rape of white women by Black men, and rape [of white women?] by strangers.

The other reform proposal: rape = nonconsensual penetration.

  • MacKinnon’s critique: same problem. What counts as consent is understood from the male perspective, which is then taken up as the law’s perspective.

MacKinnon’s Theory of Sexuality

Some useful observations to start with:

  • The term ‘sex’ refers to both sexuality and a system of categorization. Coincidence? No?
  • ‘Having sex’ means something different to men vs. women: ‘getting fucked’ is a bad thing, whereas ‘fuck you’ feels good; women are “soiled” by sex, whereas men are empowered by it.
  • What’s sexualized may not involve sex per se (e.g., non-sexual body parts, power/violence), whereas sex need not be sexualized (e.g., the lesbian sex that “doesn’t count”).
  • What feels beautiful/feminine for women is very much the same as what is sexually appealing to men: another coincidence?
    • This is particularly a problem for trans women with abusive partners: being abused by a man feels very gender-affirming.

MacKinnon’s theory: heterosexuality is the institution of eroticized dominance and submission, which creates the gender division as we know it.

Male sexual desire: eroticization of dominance and submission
↓
(Hetero)sexual objectification: men (who dominate), women (who submit)
↓
Gender: men (who “fuck”), women (who are “rapable”)

Key claims:

  • Masculinity and femininity are products of a male sexual desire to dominate: masculinity is dominance eroticized, and femininity submission eroticized.
    • E.g., you feel most feminine when you feel most sexy (to men).
  • Men and women are then created through heterosexuality in the model of masculinity/eroticized dominance and femininity/eroticized submission.
    • E.g., women are those who are desired as sexually usable (to men);
  • Sex is a political question: if women’s sexuality is created by male sexual desire, then sexual liberation is not about having more sex or even having less forced, more consensual sex; if working in a sweatshop is not good for you, making it less forced, more consensual does not make it better (if not impossible).
    • Heterosexual love also functions to control women? Domestic abuse cases.
  • The role of pornography: for MacKinnon, pornography is a primary mechanism of (hetero)sexual objectification.
    • We’ll come back to this soon.