Words, amongst many things, are the vehicles through which meaning is conveyed. They convey thought, provide contexts for experiences, and enable the transmission of ideas from one individual to another. In many cases, words operate as a medium of communication from one society to another. In recognizing the profound and powerful impact that words can have in individual lives and society as a collective, it may seem surprising that people would attach the term “only” to words. The implication made with the phrase “only words” is that terms have limited power. The assessment is problematic for many reasons, including the fact that words have seemingly unlimited power, being the catalyst for wars, death, suicides, genocides, and numerous other atrocities.
The phrase “only words” can also be contextually problematic, such as when it is used to legitimize the production and proliferation of pornography. The individuals who make this assertion do so to ensure that pornography is not censored, made illegal, or subjected to other forms of monitoring which might limit its consumption and cultural normalcy. In her important book Only Words, Catharine MacKinnon draws attention to this issue, honing in on the false claim that pornography is only words in order to reveal that it much more than words. It is words that act hatefully or, to paraphrase MacKinnon, act as hate speech. MacKinnon opens her text with a direct reference to the torturous nature of sexual abuse that exists, with this reality grounding her work within a radical feminist context that refuses to downplay, minimize, or ignore the gravity of sexual assault. Specifically, MacKinnon writes
Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable-not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs. When you are older, your husband ties you to the bed and drips hot wax on your nipples and brings in other men to watch and makes you smile through it. Your doctor will not give you drugs he has addicted you to unless you suck his penis (3).
MacKinnon uses this descriptive reference as a precursor to explaining how the sexual abuse that is done to women does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, it exists within a pornographic framework in which the sexual abuse that transpires is oftentimes recorded in video or picture format. These recordings and/or photographs are then circulated amongst men who enjoy seeing women experience pain or, alternatively, enjoy pretending to think that women experience pleasure in being raped or subjected to violent forms of “sex.” In addition to drawing attention to the degradation that women experience through these sexual assaults and their recordings, MacKinnon brings the reader’s awareness to what I refer to as a triple dose of dehumanization–the process through which a subordinated individual is subjected to three forms of dehumanizing humiliation through one subjugating act. In this case, the triple dose of dehumanization transpires as, in the process of 1. being sexually assaulted and 2. being filmed throughout one’s subordination, and 3. being forced to smile throughout one’s subordination. Specifically, MacKinnon writes of men who find pornographic pictures thus:
fathers, husbands, and doctors saw the pictures, liked them, and did the same things to them, things they had never done or said they wanted before. As these other women were held down, or tied up, or examined on the table, pictures like the pictures of you were talked about or pointed to: do what she did, enjoy it the way she enjoyed it. The same acts that were forced on you are forced on them; the same smile you were forced to smile, they must smile. There is, you find, a whole industry in buying and selling captive smiling women to make such pictures, acting as if they like it (5).
Here, the multi-faceted dimensions of pornography’s degradation of women becomes plain. In addition to being subjected to pain, the production of pornography involves denying individuals the subjectivity involved in being able to authentically, accurately convey their real thoughts and emotions. Instead, women are reduced to robotic, vapid smiles. In her important essay “Oppression,” Marilyn Frye points out that women being constantly told to smile functions as an oppressive tool which reduces female people to the sphere of acquiescence. Specifically, she writes “it is often a requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we signal our docility and our acquiescence in our situation. We need not, then, be taken note of. We acquiesce in being made invisible, in our occupying no space. We participate in our own erasure” (2). The forced fake smile that women are forced to wear thus engenders two undesirable outcomes: slavishness and erasure. The smile functions as part of the process of bringing to life the paradoxical existence that women are forced to live out: appearing and not appearing, being physically present and somehow literally absent as their personhood is reduced to an identity prop which bolsters false notions of the omnipotent male to whom the weak and inferior female lovingly submits. When the forced fake smile patriarchal sequence surfaces in pornography, it speaks this same subordinating language over and over again, reminding consumers that women do not exist as real material sentient beings with thoughts and emotions; rather, they are mutable malleable non-subjects that men can shape and mold to any form they desire. And as made evident by pornography, that form is nonexistence insomuch as existence necessitates a being who thinks and feels above and apart from the orders of an other.
When one becomes aware that pornography is a form of speech which works to erase women through the process of depicting them in subordinating, slave-like positions, the reality of this mode of communication constituting hate speech should become glaringly evident. Yet, as MacKinnon points out, the proponents of pornography insist that it is not hate speech insomuch as hate speech is conceptualized as words that cause harm. According to MacKinnon, individuals who support pornography’s production and consumption and who argue against the notion that it is harmful suggest that “The pictures themselves do nothing. They are an expression of ideas, a discussion, a debate, a discourse. How repressed and repressive can you be? They are constitutionally protected speech” (5,6). Yet, as MacKinnon shows throughout her book, pornography cannot be accurately conceptualized within the frameworks of 1. harmlessness and 2. ideational expression that its proponents attempt to advance. Rather than agreeing that pornography is simply speech, MacKinnon, in consonance with Andrea Dworkin, argues that it is deleterious speech because of what it does. Specifically, MacKinnon and Dworkin define pornography as “graphic sexually explicit materials that subordinate women through pictures or words” (32) and go on to point out that it promotes sexual abuse. Within MacKinnon’s definitional framework, what pornography says and does becomes evident. As she states, her definition “includes the harm of what pornography says—its function as defamation or hate speech—but defines it and it alone in terms of what it does—its role as subordination, as sex discrimination, including what it does through what it says” (22). MacKinnon’s definition is consonant with reality and antithetical to the fallacious understanding of pornography purported by its proponents; indeed, pornography incorporates acts of harm which include but are not limited to the torture and murder of female victims.
As MacKinnon’s text progresses, her awareness of the role that racism plays in perpetuating hateful, sexist speech-based value systems becomes evident. For example, she notes that the “sexualization of racism” (23) is as an aspect of the hate speech that exists in pornography. MacKinnon goes on to discuss how words used within work spaces can and do constitute vitriolic expressions designed to harm black people. She also draws attention to how the court system has been effective in picking up on the presence of this hate speech and critiquing excuses made to legitimate its expression. For example, MacKinnon notes that “One court rejected the defendant’s argument that because racial slurs were common parlance, they did not have racial overtones” (48). Here, MacKinnon explains that the racist verbage articulated by the individual in question was followed by an excuse designed to prevent the racist nature of the words from being assessed; the excuse was that because the racial slurs were commonly accepted and integral to normative discourse, the words did not convey subtle racism. Clearly, the commonality or normalcy of racist verbal expressions does not function as proof that they are not meant to convey racism. For example, the “n” word can be repeatedly used such that individuals within any given ideological or cultural milieu are acclimated to its utterance, but their acclimation to its utterance does not negate or even diminish the racist import of the word. It simply means that it has become common to articulate racist sentiments aloud. This is the reality that the court apparently comprehended when rejecting the defendant’s attempt to have his racial slurs excused and interpreted as non-racist, harmful words.
In noting a court’s ability to accurately define hate speech as hate speech and juxtaposing it to the court’s resistance to construing pornography as detestable, harmful language, we can see a central idea which MacKinnon expresses and reiterates throughout her text: sexist pornography, like racist speech, is not just words which constitute creative expression or harmlessly reiterate social norms. Racist speech—such as racial slurs—is the expression of racism. Sexist pornography, contrary to what its proponents regularly assert when its existence and expression is challenged, is the expression of sexism. More specifically, it is hateful and hurtful speech in the contexts of both how the films and images are produced (a process which involves physically harming women) and how they are reused in other spaces, such as the work world, to sexually harass and intimidate women.
One of the many effective examples MacKinnon provides to illustrate this point reads thus:
In a case involving pornography as sexual harassment, the employer argued that pornography at work was protected expression, something the workers at Jacksonville Shipyards wanted to say to first-class welder Lois Robinson, their opinions about women and sex. Their “views” included naked women supposedly having sex with each other; a woman masturbating herself with a towel; a nude woman on a heater control box with fluid coming from her vaginal area; a woman with long blonde hair (like Lois) wearing only high heels and holding a whip (one welding tool is called a “whip”); and countless women in full labial display. When Lois Robinson protested, the men engaged in more of what the ACLU brief against her termed “speech” by posting a sign stating “Men Only.” Suddenly, because Lois Robinson’s sexual harassment complaint centered on pornography, her sexual harassment claim invoked the First Amendment, at least so far as relief was concerned (53).
Here, the hateful nature of what sexist men are “saying” to Lois Robinson becomes plain. They are saying that women exist for male sexual pleasure, and this construct of pleasure transpires within a dehumanizing framework in which female people are reduced to sexualized objects, rather than being viewed as sentient living entities with thoughts and feelings, by representation as their sexualized body parts. They are presented thus in order to convey the male preference that they simply exist as entities who titillate men by engaging in intercourse with one another or by displaying their genitals in a manner which conveys that they are ready and willing to have sex with the man or men observing them.
When Lois Robinson objects to these dehumanizing displays of female people, what the men “say” to her is that she will be punished with sex-based ostracization. Specifically, since she will not consent to being sexually harassed with dehumanizing images of women and therefore express agreement with their ideal image of a sexually objectified woman, they will excommunicate her from their social realm by stating that only men are allowed to engage and interact with one another. Both the men’s display of pornographic material and the posting of the “Men Only” sign constitute acts of hateful sexism; the first reinforces the notion that the ideal woman is a sexually submissive non-sentient entity who appears and acts in “sexual” ways that please men,[1] while the second reiterates the idea that women who refuse to express approval of these images and the ideologies they represent will be subjected to exclusion from interaction with other members of society. Clearly, the speech submitted by the men is not a collection of harmless signs and symbols which constitute debate and discussion. They are, rather, discriminatory acts. That they are acts and not mere speech is perhaps most effectively elucidated when we consider how the posting of the “Men Only” sign constitutes the process of segregating men from women; here, the act is physically separating males and females so that they do not occupy the same space based on a member of the latter group’s refusal to accept and adopt the sexually subordinating logic of the former group. To paraphrase, the separation is a form of segregation and it is a punitive act.
As MacKinnon’s text draws near to its conclusion, she reemphasizes the way the legal system ensures the ongoing violation and degradation of women through assent to the idea that pornography is protected speech. To do so, she references the principle of First Amendment absolutism, the legal philosophy which indicates that there are no exceptions to the prohibition of the government limiting freedoms of speech, press, religion, etc. Specifically, MacKinnon asserts that “it was the prospect of losing access to pornography that impelled the social and legal development of absolutism as a bottom line for the First Amendment …” (97). To paraphrase, insistence that the First Amendment can and only should be interpreted as allowing all types of speech to exist without government prohibition was rooted in the proponents of pornography wanting to ensure that they would maintain continual access to it. MacKinnon goes on to point out that interest in promoting equality functions as an argument which delegitimates assent to interpreting the First Amendment through the lens of absolutism. In making this concept plain, MacKinnon states that “Wherever equality is mandated, racial and sexual epithets, vilification, and abuse should be able to be prohibited, unprotected by the First Amendment” (108). To paraphrase, in regions of the country where equality is legally required (rather than only culturally or ideologically approved), speech that constitutes the expression of racist and sexist sentiment should be deemed impermissible, and, in these cases, the First Amendment should not be interpreted to legitimate their expression. MacKinnon’s conclusions, amongst other things, reveal that the First Amendment can be used to bolster or discredit hate speech, meaning that its value in context of creating argumentation against pornography is rooted in its interpretation. To paraphrase, the First Amendment can be made to say whatever people within any given ideological realm want it to, and those who support equality should be cognizant of this when they challenge the production and proliferation of racist, sexist speech.
When considered as a composite whole, Catharine Mackinnon’s Only Words is a radical feminist masterpiece which, through the use of logic and sustained analysis, reveals the role that male supremacy continues to play in shaping law, public discourse, the ongoing degradation of women, and the valuation of male prurient proclivities over the humanity of female people. Individuals who choose to read this text will attain the expansive awareness of how patriarchy operates, an awareness that is necessary to continue addressing its harms and devising tenable solutions which will contribute to the development of a world that is safer for non-whites and non-males.
[1] To further understand why the patriarchal reconstruction of woman into a nonthinking sexualized object constitutes hatred, consider how it represents resistance to the idea of a thinking female being who, through the act of thought, could actively resist her identity being muted or mutated to fit within a sexually subordinating framework she views as demeaning or otherwise inappropriate. This is what woman-hating is truly about: hating the aspect of female humanity-cognition-which could resist and reject the male attempt to diminish womanhood to the realm of objectification. What is being hated about a woman therefore is 1. Her capacity to think and 2. Her capacity to think outside of the objectifying ideologically framework devised by men.
