About the author
American legal scholar and activist (b. 1946), professor at the University of Michigan Law School. A pioneer of sexual-harassment law and a leading radical-feminist theorist, MacKinnon argued that sex inequality is a system of dominance enforced through law; her work transformed legal doctrine and provoked enduring debate over pornography and free speech.
Synopsis
MacKinnon argues that, just as Marxism takes labor as the thing most one's own yet most taken away, feminism takes sexuality as central to women's subordination. She contends that the liberal state, claiming neutrality, actually institutionalizes male dominance — defining objectivity, privacy, and consent from the male standpoint. She develops a 'dominance' rather than 'difference' theory of sex inequality and applies it to rape, abortion, and pornography law.
Core passage idea
Paraphrase · Modern copyrighted workMacKinnon argues that the liberal state is male: claiming neutrality and objectivity, its law in fact embodies the male point of view, so that male dominance is enforced as if it were simply the way things are.
By exposing the supposed neutrality of law as a male standpoint, MacKinnon reframes gender inequality as a structure of dominance built into the state itself. Her dominance theory reshaped sexual-harassment and equality law and remains a touchstone — and lightning rod — of feminist legal thought.
To avoid a bubble
Pair with liberal feminists who defend rights, privacy, and free speech against MacKinnon's critique (and her anti-pornography position), and with feminists who reject her 'dominance' framework as too totalizing or as denying women's agency.
Reading note
Demanding and combative; read it as the central work of radical-feminist legal theory, against liberal feminists on rights, privacy, and free speech. Her work pioneered the legal concept of sexual harassment.
Best paired with
Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract; Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family.