Piecework

Oddly enough, that is precisely the way MacKinnon, Dworkin and most of the New Victorians see human beings: as abstractions. They speak of generalized women who are given names and faces only when they are victims. And over and over again, MacKinnon speaks about men as if they all behaved in the same way and were sexually excited by the same imagery. But which men are they talking about? Read this chilly prose and you are asked to believe that Seamus Heaney and Michael Jordan, Sean Connery and François Mitterrand, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Arnold Schwarzenegger, along with auto mechanics, bread-truck drivers, carpenters and guitar players, are all fully covered by the same word, respond to the same stimuli and are equally dedicated to the subordination of women. That is absurd.

But this sectarian narrowness does help define their vision of human life in this world. That vision is descended from a basic Victorian assumption: All men are beasts and all women are innocents. Women fall into vice or degradation only at the hands of cruel, unscrupulous, power-obsessed men. They have no free will and never choose their own loss of grace. Men only see women the way they are presented in pornography and use pornography as a kind of male instruction manual to maintain all forms of supremacy. Women are never brutal, corrupt or evil and they never truly choose to make porno films, dance topless, pose for centerfolds, work as secretaries or, worst of all, get married. Original sin was the fault of men. Eve was framed.

These women claim to know what billions of other women were never smart enough, or enlightened enough, to understand: Sexual intercourse is the essential act of male domination, created by a sinister male cabal to hurt and humiliate all women and thus maintain power over them forever. As Maureen Mullarkey has written in The Nation: “In the Dworkin-MacKinnon pornotopia, there are only the fuckers and the fuckees. The sooner the fuckers’ books are burned, the better.” She doesn’t exaggerate. According to Dworkin, all women are “force-fucked,” either directly through the crime of rape or by the male power of mass media, by male economic power or by the male version of the law.

It doesn’t matter to the New Victorians that the vast majority of women, even many proud feminists, don’t see the world the way they do. With the same amazing knowledge of the entire human race that allows her to speak so glibly about men, MacKinnon dismisses their viewpoints as well.

At a 1987 conference organized by Women Against Pornography, MacKinnon was blunt about the pro-sex feminists who had formed the Feminists Against Censorship Taskforce. That group included such women as Betty Friedan, Adrienne Rich and Rita Mae Brown. “The labor movement had its scabs, the slavery movement had its Uncle Toms,” MacKinnon said, “and we have FACT.” In another enlightening speech she simply dismissed her feminist opponents as “house niggers who sided with the masters.”

Today, absolutely certain of their rectitude, totally free of doubt, equipped with an understanding of human beings that has eluded all previous generations, MacKinnon, Dworkin and their allies have been shaping a Victorian solution to their Victorian nightmares. That solution is, pardon the expression, paternalistic. As MacKinnon writes: “Some of the same reasons children are granted some specific legal avenues for redress …also hold true for the social position of women compared to men.” Since women are, in the MacKinnon view, essentially children, they must be shielded from harm, corruption and filthy thoughts. The savage impulses of the male must be caged. And women must be alerted to the true nature of the beast.

“If we live in a world that pornography creates through the power of men in a male-dominated situation,” MacKinnon writes, “the issue is not what the harm of pornography is but how that harm is to become visible.”

That’s it: Simply make harm visible and we shall live happily ever after. Common sense and wide experience count for nothing. They know that men are loathsome and are clear about how to tame them. Once tamed, they can be subverted, their powers over women will vanish and the grand Utopia of complete equality will arrive for all. That bleak vision of human nature has its own escalating logic, just as Lenin’s sentimental abstraction of the proletariat led inevitably to the gulag. In her bizarre 257-page book Intercourse, Dworkin repeats the theory that MacKinnon and other academic feminists accept as proven: Gender is a mere “social construct,” enforced, in Dworkin’s elegant phrase, by “vagina-specific fucking.”