Three passionate, intellectually fascinating essays, each arguing
an aspect of the case that sexual words and pictures may by their
nature be bannable, even though they may also be Constitutionally
protected speech - by University of Michigan law professor and
noted feminist legal scholar MacKinnon (Feminism Unmodified, 1987,
etc). In "Defamation and Discrimination," MacKinnon argues that
"pornography is sex" and that American law irrationally treats it
as a possible cause of individual injury - that is, purely as a
matter of true or false content - rather than as a sui generis act
of "sex discrimination based on conditions of sexual inequality";
and she holds that, like other kinds of action speech (saying
"You're fired," advertising "for whites only"), pornography should
be banned. In "Racial and Sexual Harassment," MacKinnon declares
that "if ever words have been understood as acts, it has been when
they are sexual harassment" in the workplace, but she regrets that,
recently, courts have weakened this confluence by overturning
universities' restraints of racial and sexual speech on campus and
by dismissing a sexual-harassment complaint made by a female
shipyard worker because the harassment consisted in having been
shown pornography, which is a form of speech protected by the First
Amendment. In "Equality and Speech," MacKinnon makes explicit many
of the contradictions she's been suggesting in the earlier essays;
she argues that "the law of equality and the law of freedom of
speech are on a collision course in this country" and must be
meshed - for example, by considering "group defamation" as "the
verbal form inequality [or group discrimination] takes." Although
MacKinnon's passionate conviction sometimes causes her ideas to
elide and her logic to blur, the ideas are original and gripping,
her references are wide-ranging, her legal logic is provocative -
and her latest is must reading for anyone interested in either
fairness or flee speech. (Kirkus Reviews)
When is rape not a crime? When it's pornography--or so First
Amendment law seems to say: in film, a rape becomes "free speech."
Pornography, Catharine MacKinnon contends, is neither speech nor
free. Pornography, racial and sexual harassment, and hate speech
are acts of intimidation, subordination, terrorism, and
discrimination, and should be legally treated as such. Only Words
is a powerful indictment of a legal system at odds with itself, its
First Amendment promoting the very inequalities its Fourteenth
Amendment is supposed to end. In the bold and compelling style that
has made her one of our most provocative legal critics, MacKinnon
depicts a society caught in a vicious hypocrisy. Words that offer
bribes or fix prices or segregate facilities are treated by law as
acts, but words and pictures that victimize and target on the basis
of race and sex are not. Pornography--an act of sexual domination
reproduced in the viewing--is protected by law in the name of "the
free and open exchange of ideas." But the proper concern of law,
MacKinnon says, is not what speech says, but what it does. What the
"speech" of pornography and of racial and sexual harassment and
hate propaganda does is promote and enact the power of one social
group over another. Cutting with surgical deftness through cases of
harassment in the workplace and on college campuses, through First
Amendment cases involving Nazis, Klansmen, and pornographers,
MacKinnon shows that as long as discriminatory practices are
protected as free speech, equality will be only a word.
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