Analyze and Underscore the Implications of Catharine MacKinnon’s - Law Assignment Help

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Abstract
The objective of this book review is to analyze and underscore the implications of Catharine MacKinnon’s fabled feminist legal scholarship collection- Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws. In pursuance of this, this brief study reveals the main ideas discussed in the book in an attempt to equitably critique her feminist theory and fix possible shortcomings in her literature.
Introduction
Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws, penned by the acclaimed feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon, is veritably a compelling and wide-ranging collection of more than two decades of her feminist legal scholarship. The greatest strength in this compilation is perhaps her methodology. She discusses a slew of pertinent issues ranging from pornography to equality theory to sexual harassment. She examines the success and setbacks of feminism, offers ingenious strategies to end the inequality of women to men, and opens the floodgates for a forthcoming companion volume- Women’s World, Men’s States. The persuasiveness and richness of her arguments can be credited to her unflinching connection to the multitude of women for whose welfare and upon whom her theory is based. Verily, her theory is built out of women’s practice, comprised of the immense diversity in the experiences of all women. Part preview, part defense, part update, Catharine MacKinnon’s compilation unequivocally defends the notion of women as a group.
MacKinnon, in earlier work, notably theorized law as an instrumental expression of the socially male state, tracing its deep-seated power along the precarious legal lines of public and private, difference and dominance, coercion and consent, and morality and politics. Much of this compilation unearths and interrogates the various places these notions of male power have sailed since their earliest articulation. For example, MacKinnon succinctly analyzes liberal feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment in terms of disparity and dominance, furnishes a structural privacy analysis of the demise of the Violence against Women Act and further develops necessary alternatives to current laws against sexual violence grounded lamentably in material harms in lieu of ethical objections. However, Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws does far more than just examining new issues with existing, unrealized theories. The compilation sheds light on two important aspects of feminism that have been implied to a significant extent in MacKinnon’s earlier published work: her pragmatic methodology and her acclaimed equality theory.
 

Part One
Much of Part One of this compilation offers indispensable insights into reimagining the concept of equality bearing in mind MacKinnon's incisive critique of conventional equality theory. The dominant theory of equality rests primarily on the premise that similar things should be subjected to similar treatment, and, in the same vein, dissimilar things should be subjected to dissimilar treatment. The current theory has been so deeply ingrained in legal doctrine that it is customarily accepted without batting an eyelid. MacKinnon is at loggerheads with the very concept of equality. According to MacKinnon’s insight, due to the application of dominant equality theory to gender, the concept of sexual equality has been rendered 'something of an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms’. The law has integrated this concept in both Title VII and Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence and sees to it that a woman is equal to a man in pursuance of attaining equality through law. Therefore, regrettably, a woman need not be treated equally to the extent that she is viewed as socially or biologically dissimilar from a man.
The dominant approach to equality, MacKinnon argues, has been used to perpetuate the subordinate social status of women. Additionally, it has also been used to conceal the fact that lack of reproductive control and sexual abuse are imperative to maintain this subordinate status. Although sexual abuse is an egregious transgression and abortion is a privacy right, much to our consternation, neither is adjudged an issue of sex discrimination. Perceivably, the current law turns a blind eye towards the internalized sex inequality that is the heart and soul of these specific harms to women. The law on sexual harassment is offered by MacKinnon as a counterexample to this undeniable trend. Women’s common law was the outcome of judicial engagement with the ordeals of sexually harassed women presented to the courts on an equality theory. Sexual harassment had not been viewed as harmful heretofore- both legally and culturally. Sexual harassment became subject to legal action and an object of societal scorn through the development and rapid escalation of sexual harassment law. The law’s innate power to alter and shape social mores, as well as the capacity of the equality theory to provide the impetus for positive reform is demonstrated by this legal and social change. The concept of equality can indeed be a powerful tool when it is not divorced from women's reality.
MacKinnon reveals Aristotelian formal equality as completely harmonious with Nazi and White supremacist ideology, concretized in Plessy v. Ferguson and played out unmistakably in the Holocaust. MacKinnon, against this theory, advocates a substantive notion of equality that is anti-hierarchal. This not only promotes equal status and treatment, but also apprehends that ‘‘differences’’ fall woefully short of legitimizing inequality and, contrarily, inequalities stem from ‘‘difference’’ itself. According to MacKinnon, inequality is never about similarity and dissimilarity. Instead, it is imperative that a new theory of equality and imposed hierarchy must do more than display the already discernible status quo and buttress social classifications that are preexisting. MacKinnon explores and explicates the concept of inequality through topics that traditionally do not raise equality questions, such as prostitution, pornography, abortion and the twentieth- century shift of the First Amendment from safeguarding the speech of the feeble and vulnerable to safeguarding the speech of the powerful.
Part Two
Once again, in Part Two, 'Sexuality, Inequality, and Speech,' MacKinnon compellingly employs her distinctive mix of abstraction and incontrovertible experience. She unveils the perniciousness to women lucidly- especially to those with the least choices - of the dominant legal doctrine of safeguarding pornography as a tool of expression and speech. Her analysis is filled with stories and statistics that unmask the extent of the harm caused to women resulting expressly or tacitly from pornography. The predominant view that pornography is a tool of expression and speech is predicated on the premise that pornography is a form of art that innately possesses an expressive value that must be sheltered. The Supreme Court believes that pornography’s expressive value warrants a considerable degree of protection. It affirmed the ruling of the Seventh Circuit that an anti-pornography ordinance in Indianapolis violated the First Amendment. This ordinance would have otherwise made four abhorrent practices that are linked to pornography legally actionable. It is important to recognize that pornography laws are indeed men’s laws. The tribulations that ensue from the creation and use of pornography are absolutely a real part of women’s lives.
The move to repudiate and disaffirm the reality of women as a group, MacKinnon analyzes, originates from the fact that women are stigmatized. The status of any group is raised with the inclusion of men and any consequent harm done to it is made more real. In our best interest, MacKinnon affirms and reiterates the importance of acknowledging the varied experiences of women and the ubiquitous but not exclusive significance of the gender hierarchy. In other words, antithetical to purely academic feminism, MacKinnon perpetuates her commitment to engage with genuine problems faced by women in the real world and refrains from liaising with theory built without practice. MacKinnon adopts this stance in response to those who fail to engage in the experiences and status of women that have been unerringly documented by social science and end up obscuring reality or retreating into extraneous abstraction spread wide and thin with no real depth.
Contrary to public opinion, it is abundantly clear that MacKinnon is not an essentialist, as some may have labelled her. MacKinnon is far from taking privileged white women who have it considerably better, or any particular woman for that matter, as the archetype of womanhood. She places her focus instead on those women who tragically have the fewest choices and who are most susceptible to injury from pornography and, concomitantly, the pornography industry. Many feminists refuse to engage with the women who are victims of pornography, and this approach adopted by MacKinnon indubitably sets her apart from those feminists. The substance and depth of Mackinnon’s ideas are constituted by the realities of the victimized woman of pornography. As a matter of fact, MacKinnon does not essentialize the experiences of women anywhere in Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws. Furthermore, even when MacKinnon theorizes about women as a class, she recognizes the diversity of women with commendable acuity. She also acknowledges that the diversity of women hardly changes the undeniable fact that women are discriminated against and are treated as unequal regardless of whatever other forms of injustice and bigotry they may routinely face.
Conclusion
Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws is a poignant reminder of the preposterously unfair and unequal world women find themselves in. While this collection is blessed with rich ideas drawn from the diversity of the experiences of women that perspicuously disseminate precious and irreplaceable information, the reader recognizes that MacKinnon does not treat women’s sexuality adequately. MacKinnon, while discussing sex, pivots her attention upon men’s sexuality and views female submissiveness resulting from male dominance as the static paradigm of sex. Her persuasive polemic does not provide her any room to accommodate and cognize any form of women's sexuality unsullied by female submission and male dominance. MacKinnon is of the view that, in social life, sexuality inscribes gender as unequal. Undoubtedly, gender inequality and sexuality are intertwined to a certain extent; having said that, MacKinnon perhaps over-eggs the pudding by confusing the linkage between sex and gender inequality as inextricable. This mistake definitely precludes her from attempting to understand whether female sexual oppression on women's own terms is plausible, but also whether it is valuable of its own accord. Although MacKinnon fails to concisely address these pertinent issues of women's sexuality in Women's Lives, Men's Laws, her collection is truly a valuable addition to feminist legal theory and cements her place in the world of exemplary feminist scholarship.

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