Notes about Sexuality and Religion

by John Heidenry.

Endowed with ferocious legal cunning, she [MacKinnon] was to play Robespierre to Dworkin’s pamphleteering, emotional Marat in the radical feminist Reign of Terror against men that was to wash over the country in the coming decade.

Chapter 5: Intimations of Immorality.

Page 111
From that beginning Dworkin embarked on an investigation of other pornography, as well as fairy tales and such refinements of male cruelty toward women as Chinese foot binding. During this period she also came to a deep realization of herself as a woman and established a new, healthier relationship with her mother. She also read the first seminal feminist tract of the decade, Kate Millett’s blockbuster Sexual Politics, published in the fall of 1970, which converted her fully to the feminist cause. Heavily indebted to Wilhelm Reich’s 1930 classic, The Sexual Revolution, and Simone de Beauoir’s The Second Sex-though she cited the French author only twice-Millett painted a nightmare vision of endless female subordination to and suffering at the hands of men. “Sexual dominion [is] perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides the most fundamental concept of
Power,” Millett wrote, claiming that the status of woman was that of “chattel” perpetuated through marriage-“an exchange of the female’s domestic service and (sexual) consortium in return for financial support.” Millett virtually coined the term “sex object” and the idea of sexism as applied by men to women. The way men kept women subordinate, Millett argued, echoing Friedan, was by making an elaborate pretense of placing them on a pedestal

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In 1977 Dworkin met a divorced young law professor named Catharine MacKinnon, who shared her notion that sexual intercourse was an “aggressive intrusion” into a woman’s body. Incorruptible, brimming with righteousness and limitless zeal, MacKinnon was an attractive blonde who wore tailored suits and gold jewelry, in sharp contrast with Dworkin’s studied dishevelment. Endowed with ferocious legal cunning, she was to play Robespierre to Dworkin’s pamphleteering, emotional Marat in the radical feminist Reign of Terror against men that was to wash over the country in the coming decade.

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If dominance was experienced as erotic, through pornography-induced orgasm, that made gender inequality appear natural and rendered it pleasurable not only to men, but also (though not equally) to women. Allegedly gender-neutral rights to freedom of speech affected men and women very differently because the sexes were not “similarly situated” in relation to pornography. As a result, “the free speech of men silences the free speech of women.” In the antipornography ordinances that she was later to coauthor, MacKinnon defined pornography as sex discrimination, made actionable through civil rights law. This difference in ideology was to become the driving wedge that split feminism and transformed pornography into the battleground of a feminist civil war throughout the eighties. Spoiling for a fight, MacKinnon taunted feminists who opposed censorship by comparing them to “house niggers who sided with the masters,” and organizations like the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force (FACT) to labor scabs and Uncle Toms.

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