Word: mackinnon
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...MacKinnon felt more than insulted. She felt . . . well, raped. "He had me where he wanted me," she told TIME last week. "He wants me as a violated woman with her legs spread. He needed me there before he could address my work." And the reviewer? "She's claiming a book review equals rape," says Romano. "That's quite a stretch...
...paragraphs were simply a gambit to make plain the distinction between representations of an act and the act itself. As his review continues, he decides against the rape -- "People simply won't understand" -- but goes on to posit an imaginary reviewer, named Dworkin Hentoff, who likewise decides to rape MacKinnon, with the difference that he follows through. Both Romano and Hentoff are arrested for rape. But wait, Romano protests in his cell, I didn't do it. I just imagined it. Isn't there a difference...
Even if that much is granted, Romano's rhetorical conceit has brought dozens of mostly angry letters to the Nation, demands for an apology from two men's antirape groups and an escalating campaign of bitter counterpunching from MacKinnon and her supporters. "Carlin Romano should be held accountable for what he did," MacKinnon threatened last week in the Washington Post. "There are a lot of people out there, and a lot of ways that can be done...
Further vengeful hints have come from MacKinnon's companion Jeffrey Masson, the critic of Freudian orthodoxy whose libel suit last year against New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm hinged in its own way on the importance of maintaining distinctions between what actually happens and what is merely imagined. (He charged that in her profile of him, Malcolm had invented scenes and quotes.) Masson assured Romano in a letter that "I am not threatening you." That was just before he added, "I want you to know, if there is ever anything I can do to hurt your career, I will...
...MacKinnon insists she recognizes that representations are not literally the same as realities. "The book does not say that to talk about a thing is the same as doing the thing," she says. But she doesn't always resist the opportunity to court confusion between the two. "Please disavow this rape of me in your name," she asked Nat Hentoff, the syndicated columnist and hard- line defender of the First Amendment, whose last name Romano had borrowed for his fictional reviewer. (The Dworkin part Romano lifted from another First Amendment stalwart, the legal scholar Ronald Dworkin.) Hentoff complied by publishing...