[In the following review, McCabe contends that, although there are some weaknesses in MacKinnon's reasoning in Only Words, the work is “on the whole quite persuasive in arguing that we need to rethink our approach to the pornography debate.”]

In case you haven't noticed, the old battle between pornography and community standards of decency is over; decency lost. While it is true that the Supreme Court has devised an elaborate (and largely irrelevant) test for obscenity, for the most part pornography seems to be here to stay. To no one is this fact more disturbing than University of Michigan law professor Catharine MacKinnon, the intellectual leader of what has come to be called the feminist critique of pornography. What distinguishes this critique from earlier “standards of decency” arguments is its insistence that pornography be banned because it contributes heavily to the continuing subordination and abuse of women. Through the work of writers like MacKinnon, this critique has largely succeeded in shifting the terms of the debate: no longer is it a question of liberated sexual mores confronting repressive puritanism; instead, the battle is now pitched between the pornographers' rights to free speech and the equality rights of women.

In her latest offering, Only Words, MacKinnon displays the passion, intelligence, and tinge of fanaticism that have made her such a potent force in the battle against pornography. While the book covers in some depth a broad range of issues, including racist speech and sexual harassment, the subject that dominates these pages is pornography, about which MacKinnon seems to know everything, from legal precedent to details of film production. The chief target of her attack here is the position that she calls First Amendment absolutism: the view that pornography is a form of speech between the producer and the consumer, and that the First Amendment prohibits any government interference with speech merely on grounds of content. This position also tends to be bolstered by vague warnings about starting down the slippery slope to government repression, the suggestion being that banning Co-Ed Prison Sluts leads inevitably to an Orwellian nightmare where we're all forced to do calisthenics in front of Big Brother and words like “dissent” and “criticism” have vanished from our dictionaries.

In the course of this book MacKinnon offers several arguments against this absolutist position, but her chief one appears to me utterly convincing. Even if pornography is a form of speech, says MacKinnon (which she doubts, suggesting instead that it communicates its ideas through a kind of “unconscious primitive conditioning”), this does not tout court mean that it cannot be regulated by the government. There are, in fact, several kinds of expression that the government has outlawed precisely because of the content they convey: for example, saying “We serve only whites here,” or “If you sleep with me I'll give you a promotion,” are speech acts which are clearly outlawed because they are recognized not as only words, but as acts of discrimination and harassment. Nobody claims that because speech is the medium for these acts, they therefore merit First Amendment protection, nor does anyone reasonably suggest that their prohibition brings us closer to the totalitarian nightmare. In these cases the right to free speech is simply outweighed by the clear social interest in eliminating racial discrimination and sexual harassment.

MacKinnon does a fine job of revealing the confusion and shallow thinking implicit in the reflexive appeals to free speech offered by many defenders of pornography. But notice: her argument has shown that pornography may, under certain conditions, be restricted. It has not yet shown that it should be restricted. In order to establish this further point, she must show that pornography in fact systematically harms women. Here I think she needlessly confuses her argument by stressing that some pornography is made from child abuse and some from actual rapes and tortures. That this goes on is obviously horrifying, but it is equally obvious that no one is arguing for the legality of these actions, and the polemical element introduced by these facts muddies the clarity of her overall case. MacKinnon is more persuasive, I think, when citing the recent court decisions in the U.S. and Canada, and the growing sociological literature, that acknowledge pornography's causal role in women's subordination and abuse, though here too the evidence is more ambiguous than she admits.

Two other weaknesses deserve mention, though they are primarily sins of omission. First, one wishes that MacKinnon had devoted more space to showing that her definition of pornography (explicit sexual material that subordinates women) is precise enough so that judges can apply it without making difficult aesthetic analyses about the real meaning of a work. A second problem involves the blurry distinction MacKinnon draws between “debating and expressing” obnoxious ideas (which she seems to want to tolerate) and “imposing” discrimination through “expressive” means. Each of these problems involves the difficulty of drawing clear boundaries, and while it is true that the cry “But where do you draw the line?” is frequently the refuge of idiots, in matters of free speech this difficulty merits special concern. It is useful to remember that we value free speech because of other things it secures—things like political accountability, artistic achievement, self-determination—and what is missing from this book, with its welcome emphasis on social equality, is any real acknowledgment of the importance of these other goods.

These failings aside, MacKinnon is on the whole quite persuasive in arguing that we need to rethink our approach to the pornography debate, and this important and thoughtful book should further that goal. Readers should be cautioned, however; though quite short, Only Words is not an easy read. Some of the challenges it presents are inevitable and arise from the complexity of the issues and the complicated legal precedents MacKinnon cites. But it must be said that MacKinnon's often inelegant prose presents challenges of its own. Many of her readers, I fear, simply will not finish sentences like the one that begins, “Sexual harassment, because it is sexual, and because of the place of words and images in sex, and the place of sex in life, manipulates the perpetrator's socialized body relatively primitively and directly,” and this will not help her cause.

Given the sheer brainpower on display here, however, stylistic criticisms are relatively small potatoes. In the end, the effort to make sense of this book more than pays off. Having struggled through complex arguments and occasionally torturous prose, one is finally rewarded with the understanding that results only from having engaged in dialogue with a serious thinker working to clarify the central issues of an often murky but highly relevant area of debate. This is something we are all in need of, and Only Words delivers the goods.