Re:America’s New Sex Bureaucracy
by claudiawerner on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @06:08AM
(#21069294)
This is a poor reading of MacKinnon; in this case, there's no need for anyone to read into the statement when you can read what else she's written. She's one of the most heavily cited feminists of all time in academic literature.
Agreed. I believe this is the context for the original quote: https://books.google.com/books?id=rxE8FQzjpYMC&pg=PA82&lpg=P...
MacKinnon writes right after that quote:
> I think it's fairly common, and is increasingly known to be common, for men to seek sexual access to women in ways that we find coercive and unwanted. On those occasions the amount and kind of force are only matters of degree. The problem is that rapes do not tend to be reported or prosecuted or sanctioned based on the force that was used; not based on how coercive it was and not based on how violated the woman feels; instead they are based on how intimate she is with the person who did it. This is why most women think we won't be believed in reporting the most common rapes, that is, rapes by people we know.
This is injecting your own message into what was written. MacKinnion wrote that, "Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated". Feelings of violation can manifest after sex, and it is an assumption on your part that this does not fall into scope of what MacKinnon considers sex. MacKinnon wrote that she considers it rape "whenever" women feel violated, so at face value this encompasses feelings of violation that manifest after the fact.