Are Women Human?: and Other International Dialogues (2006)

Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1991)

Reflections on Sex Equality under Law (1991) Yale Law Journal Vol.100 No. 5

Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: "Pleasure under Patriarchy" (1989) Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 2 pp. 314-346

Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987)

Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence (1983) Signs Vol. 8 No. 4

Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory (1982) Signs Vol. 7, No.3

I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated.

Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory (1982) Signs Vol. 7, No.3 Edit

Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission. p. 533



Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence (1983) Signs Vol. 8 No. 4 Edit

”Perhaps the wrong of rape has proven so difficult to articulate because the unquestionable starting point has been that rape is definable as distinct from intercourse, when for women it is difficult to distinguish them under conditions of male dominance.” p. 647



Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987) Edit

Stopped as attribute of a person, sex inequality takes the form of gender; moving as a relation between people, it takes the form of sexuality. Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualization of inequaltiy between men and women. "Introduction - The Art of the Impossible", p. 6



Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated. You might think that's too broad. I'm not talking about sending all of you men to jail for that. I'm talking about attempting to change the nature of the relations between women and men by having women ask ourselves: "Did I feel violated?" To me, part of the culture of sexual inequality that makes women not report rape is that the definition of rape is not based on our sense of our violation. "A Rally Against Rape" (1981), p. 82



Men who are in prison for rape think it's the dumbest thing that ever happened... It isn't just a miscarriage of justice; they were put in jail for something very little different from what most men do most of the time and call it sex. The only difference is they got caught. That view is nonremorseful and not rehabilitative. It may also be true. It seems to me we have here a convergence between the rapist's view of what he has done and the victim's perspective on what was done to her. That is, for both, their ordinary experiences of heterosexual intercourse and the act of rape have something in common. Now this gets us into intense trouble. because that's exactly how judges and juries see it who refuse to convict men accused of rape. A rape victim has to prove that it was not intercourse. She has to show that there was force and she resisted, because if there was sex, consent is inferred. Finders of fact look for "more force than usual during the preliminaries." Rape is defined by distinction from intercourse—not nonviolence, intercourse. They ask, does this even look more like fucking or like rape? But what is their standard for sex, and is this question asked from the woman's point of view? The level of force is not adjudicated at her point of violation; it is adjudicated at the standard of the normal level of force. Who sets this standard?" "Sex and Violence: A Perspective" (1981), p. 88



In all these situations, there was not enough violence against them to take it beyond the category of "sex"; they were not coerced enough. "Sex and Violence: A Perspective" (1981), p. 88



In my opinion, no feminism worthy of the name is not methodologically post-marxist. "Desire and Power: A Feminist Perspective" (1983), p. 60

methodologically post-marxist.

To be a prisoner means to be defined as a member of a group for whom the rules of what can be done to you, of what is seen as abuse of you, are reduced as part of the definition of your status. "Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech" (1984), p. 170



Show me an abuse of women in society, I'll show it to you made sex in the pornography. If you want to know who is being hurt in this society, go see what is being done and to whom in pornography and then go look for them other places in the world. You will find them being hurt in just that way. "Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech" (1984), p. 188



We are stripped of authority and reduced and devaluated and silenced. Silenced here means that the purposes of the First Amendment, premised upon conditions presumed and promoted by protecting free speech, do not pertain to women because they are not our conditions. Consider them: individual self-fulfillment – how does pornography promote our individual self-fulfillment? How does sexual inequality even permit it? Even if she can form words, who listens to a woman with a penis in her mouth? "Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech" (1984), p. 193



Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: "Pleasure under Patriarchy" (1989) Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 2 pp. 314-346 Edit

Compare victims' reports of rape with women's reports of sex. They look a lot alike

the major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it.

Male sexuality is apparently activated by violence against women and expresses itself in violence against women to a significant extent.

Women fake vaginal orgasms, the only 'mature' sexuality, because men demand that they enjoy vaginal penetration.

Nor is homosexuality without stake in this gendered sexual system. Putting to one side the obviously gendered content of expressly adopted roles, clothing, and sexual mimicry, to the extent the gender of a sexual object is crucial to arousal, the structure of social power that stands behind and defines gender is hardly irrelevant, even if it is rearranged.

Some have argued that lesbian sexuality-meaning here simply women having sex with women not men-solves the problem of gender by eliminating men from women's voluntary sexual encounters. Yet women's sexuality remains constructed under conditions of male supremacy; women remain socially defined as women in relation to men; the definition of women as men's inferiors remains sexual even if not heterosexual, whether men are present at the time or not.

Reflections on Sex Equality under Law (1991) Yale Law Journal Vol.100 No. 5 Edit

"Women are raped and coerced into sex." p. 1213



“Women are socially disadvantaged in controlling sexual access to their bodies through socialization to customs that define a woman's body as for sexual use by men. Sexual access is regularly forced or pressured or routinized beyond denial.” p. 1212



Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1991) Edit

Originally published in: (1982) "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory" Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7(3):515–44

Objectivity is the methodological stance of which objectification is the social process. Sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women. It unites act with word, construction with expression, perception with enforcement, myth with reality. Man fucks woman; subject verb object.

Only Words (1993) Edit

Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable — not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.… You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent — you learn, in a word, femininity. pp. 3-7



Empirically, all pornography is made under conditions of inequality based on sex, overwhelmingly by poor, desperate, homeless, pimped women who were sexually abused as children. p. 20



Are Women Human?: and Other International Dialogues (2006) Edit

So the idea that there is nothing essential, in the sense that there are no human universals, is dogma. Ask most anyone who is going to be shot at dawn. "Postmodernism and Human Rights" (2000), p. 53



What postmodernism gives us instead is a multicultural defense for male violence - a defense for it wherever it is, which in effect is a pretty universal defense. "Postmodernism and Human Rights" (2000), p. 54



Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable? "Postmodernism and Human Rights" (2000), p. 58



Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted. "Postmodernism and Human Rights" (2000), p. 62





