Jeffrey Masson + Catharine MacKinnon
In Other Words: Putting Sex and Pornography in Context.
by Allan C. Hutchinson Osgoode Hall Law School of York University.
She has been involved in a much-publicized relationship with Jeffrey Masson who has made no secret of his younger years as a compulsive womanizer. Printed in popular magazines, photographs of MacKinnon and Masson in traditional romantic poses that represent the epitome of adoring lovers speak volumes about the obvious passion that radiates between the two. So besotted are the two that they are engaged to be married. For many critics and supporters of MacKinnon, this was the stuff of high dudgeon and low betrayal. She had become the very woman that she had chastised over the years in her writings: the deluded woman who believed that she had found happiness and contentment with an adoring man…
To do this, I will focus on the contribution of one particular and influential scholar whose writings and activities have provoked the most critical interest and had the most political effect – Catharine MacKinnon.
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All of this is nowhere better illustrated than in MacKinnon’s own personal life.
She has been involved in a much-publicized relationship with Jeffrey Masson who has made no secret of his younger years as a compulsive womanizer. Printed in popular magazines, photographs of MacKinnon and Masson in traditional romantic poses that represent the epitome of adoring lovers speak volumes about the obvious passion that radiates between the two. So besotted are the two that they are engaged to be married. For many critics and supporters of MacKinnon, this was the stuff of high dudgeon and low betrayal. She had become the very woman that she had chastised over the years in her writings: the deluded woman who believed that she had found happiness and contentment with an adoring man–It’s like living with God. She just sits and thinks deep thoughts.
She is the greatest mind at work in the world today.”‘ Although this is indeed an unexpected turn of events in the MacKinnon scheme of things, it does give credence to the postmodern belief that everything is up for grabs and that, while not everything will happen, anything just might happen.
More important than the fact of the relationship is MacKinnon’s own response to her romantic courtship. Asked about how she could justify marriage in a society in which she had characterised equal relations between men and women as impossible, her reply was succinct and to the postmodern point-“Does one not have relations simply because society is hierarchical? We do our best. He’s not not a man and I’m not not a woman.”
4
” And this is exactly the kind of interpretive indeterminacy, categorical non-essentialism and existential confusion to which a postmodem perspective draws attention. It does not do this as a theoretical ploy and even less as a political recommendation. It is simply part of its non-foundational and non-essentialist account of living and thinking about living. Social life is messy
and cannot be reduced to any simple or universal account of what it is to be a woman (or a man). Any attempt, including MacKinnon’s, to contain the history and practice of sexual relations within one overarching narrative is destined to fail.
As MacKinnon’s own life and writings so superbly illustrate, people change the social script as they live their lives through it and seek to challenge it. Life is a drama-sometimes a tragedy, sometimes a comedy, sometimes a farce, but always theatrical in its limiting parameters and its transformative possibilities.
40. R Rorty, “Feminism And Pragmatism” (1990) 30(2) Mich. Q. Rev. 231 at 249.
41. Feminisvn, supra note 3 at 218.
42. Frug, supra note 11 at 107. For a powerful and eloquent, if a little naiv, antidote to MacKinnon’s pessimism, see S. Tisdale, Talk Dirty to Me: A Personal Philosophy of Sex (Newv Yorla Doubleday, 1994).
43. It is with some obvious hesitation that I approach the personal aspects of MacKinnon’s life.
However, I refer only to facts and circumstances that she herself has put into the public forum through interviews and statements that she has made. After all, MacKinnon has done much to
popularise the feminist credo that “the personal is political:’ On the relation between the lives of writers and their writings, see Hutchinson, supra note 5.
44. Masson, as quoted in Smith, “Love Is Strange: The Crusading Feminist and The Repentant Womanizer” New York (22 March 1993).