Catharine Alice MacKinnon is an American radical feminist legal scholar, activist, and author. She is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, where she has been tenured since 1990, and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. From 2008 to 2012, she was the special gender adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. As an expert on international law, constitutional law, political and legal theory, and jurisprudence, MacKinnon focuses on women's rights and sexual abuse and exploitation, including sexual harassment, rape, prostitution, sex trafficking and pornography.
“In prostitution, women have sex with men they would never otherwise have sex with. The money thus acts as a form of force, not as a measure of consent. It acts like physical force does in rape.”
“Every day the pornography industry gets bigger and penetrates more deeply and more broadly into social life, conditioning mass sexual responses to make fortunes for men and to end lives and life chances for women and children.”
“Women in prostitution are denied every imaginable civil right in every imaginable and unimaginable way, such that it makes sense to understand prostitution as consisting in the denial of women’s humanity, no matter how humanity is defined.”
