Overview

When is rape not a crime? When it's pornography--or so First Amendment law seems to say: in film, a rape becomes ""free speech."" Pornography, Catharine MacKinnon contends, is neither speech nor free. Pornography, racial and sexual harassment, and hate speech are acts of intimidation, subordination, terrorism, and discrimination, and should be legally treated as such. Only Words is a powerful indictment of a legal system at odds with itself, its First Amendment promoting the very inequalities its Fourteenth Amendment is supposed to end. In the bold and compelling style that has made her one of our most provocative legal critics, MacKinnon depicts a society caught in a vicious hypocrisy. Words that offer bribes or fix prices or segregate facilities are treated by law as acts, but words and pictures that victimize and target on the basis of race and sex are not. Pornography--an act of sexual domination reproduced in the viewing--is protected by law in the name of ""the free and open exchange of ideas."" But the proper concern of law, MacKinnon says, is not what speech says, but what it does. What the ""speech"" of pornography and of racial and sexual harassment and hate propaganda does is promote and enact the power of one social group over another. Cutting with surgical deftness through cases of harassment in the workplace and on college campuses, through First Amendment cases involving Nazis, Klansmen, and pornographers, MacKinnon shows that as long as discriminatory practices are protected as free speech, equality will be only a word.

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Reviews

In her most cogent and accessible book to date...MacKinnon lashes absolutists who maintain that all forms of expression including pornography and hate propaganda should be constitutionally protected. MacKinnon counters that pornography and hate messages do the same thing: enact the abuse. * Publishers Weekly * Professor MacKinnon offers a lucid and compelling account of how lawyers and judges have used the First Amendment to transform the terrorist acts of pornographers and racist vigilantes into political speech. Only Words should be required reading for every true civil libertarian. -- Charles R. Lawrence III, Georgetown University Only Words shows the keen power of Catharine MacKinnon's immensely challenging intellect. -- Patricia J. Williams, Columbia University Anyone inclined to dismiss anti-pornography legislation as zealotry, or as short-sighted interference with individual rights, should read Only Words. MacKinnon states her case in prose that is as distinctive and as trenchant as Orwell's. -- Richard Rorty, University of Virginia This little book might as well come with a fuse and matches, lighting a fire as it does under the complacent acceptance of pornography and inequality, racial and sexual, in this country. -- Susan Salter Reynolds * Los Angeles Times * Only Words is a deftly crafted indictment of an absolutist free-speech doctrine that is applied hypocritically and inconsistently to protect pornography and other acts of inequality. -- Amy Willard Cross * Toronto Globe & Mail * Only words, yet look at the responses, look at the rage directed toward the professor. These responses and the anger and fear that lurk within them have in a sense become part of the text of Only Words; to read them is to read a part of what MacKinnon aimed to show...MacKinnon's words have engendered real abuse, directed at her as a woman. In short, she has proved her point. -- David C. Dinielli * Michigan Law Review * MacKinnon's book is an eloquent plea to Americans to move beyond what she sees as the prejudiced limitations of current doctrine, in particular of current liberal doctrine. -- Bernard Williams * London Review of Books * [This book] will almost certainly reconfigure the national debate over pornography, harassment, free speech, and equality. It merits careful study by scholars in rhetoric, communication, free speech, women's studies, and law--in fact, by anyone wishing to participate in the political and legal process as an informed citizen. -- Lester Olson * Quarterly Journal of Speech * In Only Words, [MacKinnon] presents the most lucid and concise presentation of her argument that porn is more than just words...Her argument is making significant legal inroads and, to understand where she would like to take us, Only Words provides a clear road map. * San Francisco Chronicle * Three passionate, intellectually fascinating essays...[MacKinnon's] ideas are original and gripping, her references are wide-ranging, her legal logic is provocative--and her latest is must reading for anyone interested in either fairness or free speech. * Kirkus Reviews * In Only Words...Catharine MacKinnon makes a compelling, lucid and concise argument for reframing the debate [over limiting pornography]. -- Nina Schuyler * California Lawyer * In this thoroughly documented work, MacKinnon traces America's obsession with expressive freedom to the trauma of the McCarthy era...An entertaining read as well as a challenge to take another look at what constitutes freedom of expression. * American Bookman *

Three passionate, intellectually fascinating essays, each arguing an aspect of the case that sexual words and pictures may by their nature be bannable, even though they may also be Constitutionally protected speech - by University of Michigan law professor and noted feminist legal scholar MacKinnon (Feminism Unmodified, 1987, etc). In Defamation and Discrimination, MacKinnon argues that pornography is sex and that American law irrationally treats it as a possible cause of individual injury - that is, purely as a matter of true or false content - rather than as a sui generis act of sex discrimination based on conditions of sexual inequality ; and she holds that, like other kinds of action speech (saying You're fired, advertising for whites only ), pornography should be banned. In Racial and Sexual Harassment, MacKinnon declares that if ever words have been understood as acts, it has been when they are sexual harassment in the workplace, but she regrets that, recently, courts have weakened this confluence by overturning universities' restraints of racial and sexual speech on campus and by dismissing a sexual-harassment complaint made by a female shipyard worker because the harassment consisted in having been shown pornography, which is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. In Equality and Speech, MacKinnon makes explicit many of the contradictions she's been suggesting in the earlier essays; she argues that the law of equality and the law of freedom of speech are on a collision course in this country and must be meshed - for example, by considering group defamation as the verbal form inequality [or group discrimination] takes. Although MacKinnon's passionate conviction sometimes causes her ideas to elide and her logic to blur, the ideas are original and gripping, her references are wide-ranging, her legal logic is provocative - and her latest is must reading for anyone interested in either fairness or flee speech. (Kirkus Reviews)

In Only Words ...Catharine MacKinnon makes a compelling, lucid and concise argument for reframing the debate [over limiting pornography]. -- Nina Schuyler California Lawyer

Author Information

Catharine A. MacKinnon is Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law (Long-Term) at Harvard Law School.

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