Word: mackinnons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Katie Roiphe's date rape polemic, The Morning After, she pulls that typical trick of grouping all of her opponents together. She assumes that every feminist on every campus in the world thinks like Catharine MacKinnon, who believes that all social contact between men and women is tantamount to rape. Roiphe's arguments sound reasonable, but only if you really are speaking against a world of Catharine MacKinnons...
...People claim I dehumanized her," Romano complains. "In fact, I did worse -- I took her seriously. The worst thing that can happen to a flamboyant claim is to be tested." To put it another way, MacKinnon's contention that depictions of sex can be equivalent to sexual assaults may come as news to women who have suffered the atrocity of an actual rape. When Romano charges that what he sees as her representation-equals-reality thesis threatens to trivialize what such women have endured, MacKinnon replies that Romano is merely pointing to their suffering as a diversion from...
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...