Basic Info
Catharine A. MacKinnon (born October 7, 1946, in Minneapolis) is an American radical feminist legal scholar known for her work on sexual harassment, pornography, and gender inequality. Alongside Andrea Dworkin, she co-authored anti-pornography ordinances treating pornography as a civil rights violation, though they were struck down on the grounds of the First Amendment. Her key works include Sexual Harassment of Working Women and Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.
Known Connections
MacKinnon was co-author to Andrea Dworkin, on an anti-porn civil ordinance.
Contradictions
MacKinnon’s most consistent claim is that law is an instrument of male supremacy. In Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, she argues that legal norms naturalise male power, defining objectivity, reason, and harm in ways that exclude or misrepresent women’s experience. Yet despite this damning diagnosis, her proposed solution is to expand the reach of the same legal system she claims is irredeemably biased.
Nowhere is this contradiction more obvious than in her anti-pornography campaigns, where she attempted to codify a new civil right: the right of women to be free from “pornographic harm.”
If pornography is violence, why is it not subject to criminal prosecution like other forms of assault? And if it’s not literally violence, why redefine it as such? The result is a strategic legal ambiguity that both expands the state’s power to regulate speech and muddies legal categories, creating confusion about the nature of the alleged harm.
Why rely on civil suits—a mechanism that requires wealth, access, and legal sophistication—to redress harms supposedly suffered by the most vulnerable? Civil litigation favours those with legal resources and institutional access, meaning this strategy is unlikely to serve the very women she claims to represent. It reflects a liberal legal approach dressed in radical rhetoric, and it undermines her critique of legal power as elitist, male-coded, and inaccessible.
This amounts to nothing short of ideological opportunism: the law is patriarchal when it impedes her views, and feminist when it can be bent to enforce them.
Perhaps the most revealing—and disturbing—expression of MacKinnon’s authoritarian feminism is her endorsement of jail time for sex workers. In interviews and writings, she has advocated for brief incarceration for prostituted women, ostensibly to “get them off the streets,” offer them “services,” or transition them out of the sex trade.
This position is appalling not just for its cruelty, but for its brazen contradiction of her own theoretical claims. MacKinnon insists that prostitution is a form of sexual violence—a system in which women are victimized, coerced, and commodified. Yet her solution is to subject those same victims to arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. She identifies the sex worker as the oppressed party, and then proposes to punish her for her oppression.
This is not feminist jurisprudence—it’s carceral paternalism, dressed up in radical language. Her “brief jail time” proposal treats state violence—arrest, detention, surveillance—as a form of social care. It criminalizes poverty and trauma while pretending to offer liberation. And it ignores the overwhelming body of evidence, including testimonies from sex workers themselves, that criminalization exacerbates harm, increases vulnerability, and makes exit from the industry more difficult—not less.
MacKinnon’s logic mirrors that of the punitive state: control women “for their own good.”
Her legal strategy is a paradox: she wants to dismantle a male-dominated legal system by giving it more power to regulate speech, sexuality, and women’s bodies.
What she ultimately offers is not liberation, but a new regime of control—one that rebrands domination as protection, censorship as justice, and paternalism as feminism.
External Links + Sources
Known Connections: