MacKinnon

Catharine A MacKinnon is an American legal expert. Together with Andrea Dworkin she had a big influence on feminism. They tried to stop pornography and prostitution. They had a big success when they were instrumental in persuading Swedish politicians to adopt the law that criminalizes men who pay for sex.

MacKinnon was influenced by Marxism. She saw feminism as similar to the class struggle. Women need to free themselves from dominance by men in a similar way to the way the working class need to free themselves from dominance by capitalists. She wrote a book called Towards a Feminist Theory of the State.

So it's curious that she would want to team up with the religious right. Yet she did. However, Communists have always been a bit weird about sex as I showed in my quotations about Communist China. Religion and ideology are similar. It's not the first time that communists have teamed up with the right wing, as history has shown: that's because they have many characteristics in common.

The man that MacKinnon and Dworkin teamed up with to try to counter pornography was the mayor of Indianapolis William H Hudnut the third. He was a Christian pastor.

What is also similar is the way they pretend they have the best interests of a particular group at heart. They act against the interests of that group and when people point out the hypocrisy and abuse they reply by questioning the motives of their critics and dismissing them - as pimps and their apologists on the one hand or capitalists/imperialists on the other. Then they falsify the evidence for the success of their policies so they can justify it in their own country and export it to other countries.

They pretend that they have the interests of prostitutes at heart. They continue to stop them from working safely. When people point out that in Sweden prostitutes are not decriminalized and continue to be arrested, evicted and deported - which is not what is supposed to happen - they are dismissed as being part of the 'pimp lobby'.

Then they will say there has been a drop in the proportion of men who pay for sex from 13% to 8%. Or they put this statistic another way by talking about a drop from one in 8 to one in 13. They don't tell you that this is the figure for men who have paid for sex at some time in their lives, a third of them declared they did it only once, and almost 80% of it occurred away from home (on business trips or on holiday). This figure went back up to over 10%.

This is what's called the 'prevalence' rate. There is also the 'incidence' rate, the proportion of men who are active sex buyers. The incidence rate should always be used in preference to the prevalence rate to track changes. The incidence rate showed an increase from 1.3% to 1.8% in the same period - the period when the law was introduced. All of these figures come from the Länsstyrelsen 2015 document which is the only one to contain all the data.

Swedish people think their law is liberal but it derives from Marxist ideology. MacKinnon tried to get pornography banned in America and was prepared to work with the religious right. Yet Sweden has very liberal laws on pornography. I have been unable to find out if MacKinnon tried to persuade Swedish politicians to ban pornography.

I have been unable to find out if MacKinnon campaigned to get prostitutes decriminalized in America. You would think that she would have done, if she's such a big supporter of the Nordic model which is supposed to do that. It seems to me that the Nordic model was a dishonest attempt to force something authoritarian on a liberal country. It's no different from the American model where both prostitutes and their clients are criminalized.

MacKinnon also developed the theory of objectification together with Andrea Dworkin which I have commented on at length here.

In Marxism the customer is not usually the oppressor. It is the employer. The pimp has the same role as the employer, but when you have restrictive laws the sex worker is often forced to work for a pimp. When you have two or more women working together for safety, making their own rules and keeping the profits for themselves, there is nothing a socialist should object to. They can make up any ideological claptrap, but it all comes down to the fear and disgust for human sexuality that is shared by Evangelical pastors, Roman Catholics nuns, Radical Feminists and Communists.

Marxists aren't interested in the rights of the individual. They aren't bothered that innocent people might be imprisoned: they don't think that a jury has to be certain of guilt beyond reasonable doubt. They think that the way to solve social problems is to give the police more powers.

The book Sex Wars by Lisa Duggan and Nan D Hunter go into great detail about MacKinnon's involvement with mayor William Hudnut. I have copied a couple of paragraphs below.

"Then Mayor William Hudnut III, a Republican and a Presbyterian minister, learned of Minneapolis law. Mayor Hudnut thought that Minneapolis's approach might be the solution to the Indianapolis problems. Beulah Coughenour, a conservative, Republican Stop ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] activist, was recruited to sponsor the legislation in the City-County Council.

Coughenour engaged MacKinnon as consultant to the city. MacKinnon worked on the legislation with the Indianapolis city prosecutor (a well-known antivice zealot), the city's legal department and Coughenour. The law received the support of neighbourhood groups, the Citizens for Decency and the Coalition for a Clean Community. There were no crowds of feminist supporters - in fact, there were no feminist supporters at all. The only feminists to make public statements opposed the legislation, which was nevertheless passed in a council meeting packed with three hundred religious fundamentalists. All twenty-four Republicans voted for its passage; all five Democrats opposed it, to no avail."