" That harm is found when you look closely at the First Amendment's application and meaning, she continues. The person who argues that the First Amendment protection for pornography is justified, she suggests, is actually authorizing males and the establishment of laws to have power over sexuality, and as a result, to basically allow a woman's sexuality to be manipulated and abused. The abuses that MacKinnon talks about are "unspeakable abuses...the rape, the battery, the sexual harassment, the prostitution and the sexual abuse of children"; only in pornography is "it called something else," she continues. "Sex, sex, sex, sex and sex," respectively. In other words she is angry that rape and battery are just referred to as "sexual" issues, and harassment and prostitution and the abuse of children fall under that broad category too.

This next section from MacKinnon is a bit harsh, and perhaps oversimplified, but she goes on to say that pornography "celebrates, promotes, authorizes and legitimizes" those crimes mentioned in the paragraph above. Pornography, she continues basically shows men what a woman wants from men sexually, and so in their twisted minds, men want to believe that women desire "dispossession and cruelty." She carries her argument, as in the beginning, with cryptic narrative very effectively; "We desperately want to be bound, battered, tortured, humiliated and killed," she states on page 190.

Then for the first time in her essay, she mentions the soft core; "Or, to be fair to the soft core," women want to be "merely taken and used." Women exist to be "isolated and possessed," MacKinnon continues, and men exist "to violate and possess us either on screen or by camera or pen on behalf of the consumer."

Her argument gets more into the intellectual and away from the wild accusations when she says that pornography goes "beyond its content." It "eroticizes hierarchy" and it "sexualizes inequality," she insists. There is an...

By "freedom" she means the "victim" (woman being shown undressed) must appear to be free, and appear to be freely acting; "choice is how she got there," MacKinnon asserts, and "willing is what she is..."
And even though much of pornography shows women who appear to be free, "it is equally important that then and there she actually be forced..." To do something provocative and sexy, or just to be there. Even when a woman is shown in a posture of "receptivity and access" and she is "available for penetration," this is actually a form of "forced sex" because it is part of a larger institution of "gender inequality," she goes on.

It is here that MacKinnon asserts that pornography "...is neither harmless fantasy nor a corrupt and confused misrepresentation of an otherwise natural and healthy sexual experience."

Because, in the feminist view, male supremacy is always lurking in the background, and since men tend to treat women the way they see women as being, and in MacKinnon's view, Pornography constructs who that is."

Part of the problem in the legal approach to pornography, MacKinnon expresses on page 191, is that the word "obscenity" is just a "moral idea" about what is right and wrong, what is good and bad. But pornography is "a political practice, a practice of power and powerlessness." Obscenity is "abstract" and pornography is "concrete and substantive."

In conclusion, MacKinnon has some powerful thoughts about the exploitation of women through pornography. She is right on many points. But to suggest that because men watch soft core pornography they are somehow indoctrinated to the point of wanting to run out and rape women, is really carrying the argument to extreme.

Works Cited

MacKinnon, Catharine. (1985). Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech. Harvard Civil Rights/

Civil Liberties law Review.