Chapter Ten of Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Catharine MacKinnon’s 1989 book, is now available to read here:
Abortion: On Public and Private (also available as an RTF)
The chapter opens with these words:
Most women who seek abortions became pregnant while having sexual intercourse with men. Most did not mean or wish to conceive. In women’s experience, sexuality and reproduction are inseparable from each other and from gender. The abortion debate, by contrast, has centered on separating control over sexuality from control over reproduction, and on separating both from gender. Liberals have supported the availability of the abortion choice as if the woman just happened on the fetus, usually on the implicit view that reproductive control is essential to sexual freedom and economic independence. The political right imagines that the intercourse that precedes conception is usually voluntary, only to urge abstinence, as if sex were up to women. At the same time, the right defends male authority, specifically including a wife’s duty to submit to sex. Continuing this logic, many opponents of state funding of abortions would permit funding of abortions when pregnancy results from rape of incest. They make exceptions for those special occasions on which they presume women did not control sex. Abortion’s proponents and opponents share a tacit assumption that women significantly control sex.
Feminist investigations suggest otherwise. Sexual intercourse, still the most common cause of pregnancy, cannot simply be presumed coequally determined. Women feel compelled to preserve the appearance – which, acted upon, becomes the reality – of male direction of sexual expression, as if it were male initiative itself that women want, as if it were that which women find arousing. Men enforce this. It is much of what men want in a woman, what pornography eroticizes and prostitutes provide. Rape – that is, intercourse with force that is recognized as force – is adjudicated not according to the power or force that the man wields, but according to indices of intimacy between the parties. The more intimate one is with one’s accused rapist, the less likely a court is to find that what happened was rape. Often indices of intimacy include intercourse itself. If “no” can be taken as “yes,” how free can “yes” be? (pp. 184-5)
Abortion Rights Demonstration, 1973
7 October 2012 at 10:55 am
‘Women feel compelled to preserve the appearance – which, acted upon, becomes the reality – of male direction of sexual expression, as if it were male initiative itself that women want, as if it were that which women find arousing. Men enforce this. ‘ Exactly – Catharine MacKinnon dares to state the obvious and that is phallocentric sexuality is supposedly the default ‘human sexuality!’
Women exist to serve men sexually and because women become pregnant due to men’s demand for penis in vagina/penis in anus, this means resulting pregnancy must also be controlled and policed by men for men’s benefit. Men own women’s and girls’ bodies and this male enslavement is sacrosanct in men’s laws and men’s legal system.
Men’s laws state that if and when a male owns property, presumption is such property is his, whereas men’s laws presume women’s and girls’ bodies are owned by males unless female victim/victims can prove 110% otherwise. That is why ‘consent’ is meaningless to women and girls in our Male Supremacist Society because we cannot ‘consent’ to something we do not own. ‘Consent’ means agreement and given men continue to be the ones who demand/force/expect women and girls to ‘consent’ (sic) to unwanted male sexual predatory behaviour, then such ‘consent’ is meaningless. Men’s laws do not question male ownership of property rather men’s laws seek to prove alleged male burglar did rob male victim of his property not did ‘male victim consent to male burglar taking his property!’
In this way male sexual violence against women is expression of men’s eroticised expression of male sexual power and male sexual pleasure but stating the obvious must not happen because that would disrupt what passes for supposedly normal male sexual aggression and male sexual entitlement/rights over all women and girls.
7 October 2012 at 11:41 am
Thank you! and happy birthday to Catherine MacKinnon.