Only Words (book)
Only Words is a 1993 book by Catharine MacKinnon. In this work of feminist legal theory, MacKinnon contends that the U.S. legal system has used a First Amendment basis to protect intimidation, subordination, terrorism, and discrimination as enacted through pornography, violating the equal protection guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment. Overview Only Words was originally presented as the Christian Gauss Memorial Lectures in Criticism in April 1992 at Princeton University, and were later developed and clarified at the Columbia Legal Theory workshop and at the Owen Fiss Feminist Legal Theory class at Yale University. It is divided into three discussions: (1) Defamation and Discrimination, (2) Racial and Sexual Harassment, and (3) Equality and Speech. Defamation and discrimination MacKinnon argues that women's reality of systemic subordination is just that: real, not an abstract representation mediated through pornography or academic deconstruction. In support of this contention, she points out, "Thirty-eight percent of women are sexually molested as girls; twenty-four percent of women are raped in their marriages. Nearly half of women are raped or are the victims of attempted rape at some time during their lives. Eighty-five percent of women who work outside the home are sexually harassed by their employers." According to MacKinnon, however, pornography was categorized as protected speech "before its production required the use of real women's bodies." As a consequence, the law erases harm and renames it speech, an approach, she continues, which "relies centrally on putting it back into the context of the silenced and violated women: from real abuse back to an idea."." The effect is to treat pornography as defamation rather than discrimination; pornography becomes merely "offensive speech," only words that express something "metaphorical or magical, rhetorical or unreal, a literary hyperbole or propaganda device." MacKinnon rejects this approach, pointing out that bribery, price-fixing under anti-trust laws, and sexual harassment speech are all "only words," but they are not constitutionally protected and prohibited by law. Likewise, a "White Only" sign is "only words," but it not treated merely as offensive speech but as an act of segregation and discrimination. Pornography, MacKinnon contends, enacts discrimination in exactly the same way. MacKinnon insists that pornography is not what it says, but what it does: "What pornography does, it does in the real world, not only in the mind." She elaborates: MacKinnon proceeds to argue that abuse and coercion need not be present in the production of all pornography in order to restrict it, for all pornography is made under conditions of inequality based on sex. Based on this analysis, she proposes a law against pornography, developed with Andrea Dworkin, that defines it as "graphic sexually explicit materials that subordinate women through pictures or words." Illegality is necessary, MacKinnon continues, because "in the context of social inequality, so-called speech can be an exercise in power which constructs the social reality in which people live, from objectification to genocide." For instance, "requiring Jews to wear yellow stars" is symbolic expression, but because the idea is itself part of the discriminatory